WPDesigner

Hi, I’m the new owner…

Pawel — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 05:19:49 +0000

Thanks for the warm welcome!

I’m Pawel Ciszewski the new owner. I’ll keep this post short and to the point and answer some questions the community has been asking.

Who are you and what are your plans with WPDesigner?

My names Pawel Ciszewski, the names Polish but I’ve was born and raised in Milwaukee, WI and currently reside in Miami Beach, FL.

I’m an online entrepreneur who actively pursues many differenet internet ventures and actively acquire sites that I feel are valuable resources to the Internet and will be profitable long term.

What are your plans for wpdesigner?

I will try to keep the blog posts and blog designs as good as they where by SP but that will be a challenge and nobody will replace SP.

Expanding the themes club will be my main objective. I myself won’t be actively posting or building themes, not by expertise and leave that to those who are.

Currently in talks with some well know WP theme designers to take over the building of monthly new themes and blog posting but have not yet determined who will take over that responsibility.

Thanks,

Pawel

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Wpdesigner Change of Ownership

Small Potato — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 07:30:16 +0000

The new owner is Pawel Ciszewski. If you haven’t been following the auction, I recently sold Wpdesigner.com here.

Other than introducing Pawel, below are some news and review:

The themes club will be continued.
I will stick around and blog on Wpdesigner.com from time to time while traveling. To get in touch with me, my personal site is at Braintied.com.
If you have any question about the sale of Wpdesigner, I will be a part of a one-hour interview at Jeffro2pt0.com on Saturday March 22nd, 9PM EST.

To the small potatoes, thank you for your support and understanding.

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Wpdesigner.com Is For Sale

Small Potato — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 06:22:19 +0000

Although April Fools is less than a month away, this is not a joke. I’m selling Wpdesigner.com.

Why Sell?

Before I give you my reason, I want to thank you for reading this blog and thank you for all of the support you’ve given Wpdesigner.com in general and me in particular. With everything that has been going on with Wpdesigner and the fact that it finally ranks #1 on the Top 40 WordPress blogs list, I know it seems like a weird time to be selling.

Of course, it wasn’t easy for me to come to this, but I’m selling for personal reasons. If it wasn’t for changes in my personal life, it wouldn’t make sense to sell this site at all. Wpdesigner.com has been my livelihood, personal project, and baby for the last 2 years.

If you’ve been reading this blog and my personal blog, you know the first and main reason is I’ll be traveling abroad for the rest of this year. Initially, I was hoping I could juggle traveling, maintaining this blog, and continue creating WordPress themes, but that’s more than likely not the case. Because of that, I’d rather hand Wpdesigner.com to a solid team of developers with enough man hours and better management skills to do this site justice.

Second reason is I’m at a crossroad in life. In the last two months, I changed my love and family lives. Now, it’s time to make career choices; I don’t have to, but I want to make a change. Although I still have the desire to compete with fellow WordPress theme authors, I would love to have the time and opportunities to explore and actually get away from the computer (my lower back acts like it’s 90 years old, but it’s actually 21). Letting go of Wpdesigner, sadly, will leave room for me to do that. (I’ll probably become a fisherman at one of the Thailand islands. I kid. I kid.)

Third reason is I don’t like giving theme support. Hahaha.

The alternative to selling this blog is hiring a team or outsource all of the tasks while I’m traveling, but I don’t have the money to hire anyone and I’m not interested in managing anyone. I’ve always been a one-man team and I’m not ready to play nice. And having me as a boss would definitely suck!

What Does This Mean for You?

I’ll try to get the right buyer so you’ll continue to get high quality WordPress themes and tutorials. More than likely, my absence will be the only change. If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been preparing this blog for my absence by inviting guest bloggers to write for Wpdesigner.com.

Update: Many of you asked me what would happen to the themes club. I don’t plan on cutting the themes club short and will try my best to keep it going. If the new owner absolutely will not continue the club (unlikely), the worst case scenario is everyone would get a refund.

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March 06 WordPress Links Round-Up

Small Potato — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:00:10 +0000

Reduce Comment Spam to Zero Without Akismet
After my trouble with Akismet, I tried Arpit’s suggestion on reducing spam. It worked! I used to get hundreds of spam comments and trackbacks per day, which makes it hard for me to find ones that were accidentally marked as spam. Now, I get less than a handful of spam comments every couple of days. Although I am still using Akismet as a back up, I have other plugins acting as the first line of defense.

48 Unique Ways to Use WordPress
Bothered by the complexity of installing magazine themes, about ten days ago, I told everyone that WordPress is a blog platform first and foremost so stop trying to do too much with it. This link basically proves that I was wrong. Hey, when you’re wrong, you’re wrong. And ten days ago, I was wrong! However, that doesn’t mean some WordPress theme authors aren’t trying to do too much. Like I said before, if I don’t need to read a lengthy manual to install WordPress then don’t make me read one to install a WordPress theme.

The Future of WordPress Themes
Warning: This is a very long post made up of opinions by notable theme authors and bloggers blogging about WordPress.

Migrating to WordPress 2.5
A guide for plugin authors to prepare their plugins for WordPress 2.5.

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Market WordPress Theme

Small Potato — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 09:00:51 +0000

“Market” is a new premium theme from Andrew of Astereostudio.com, which allows you to use your blog as an online store or marketplace. View the live demo here.

Via custom fields, you can enter a description, 1 large image with 3 smaller images, a price, and other information for each product or item. It also allows people to pay you through PayPal.

Installation

Market is actually very easy to install. I have a copy of it installed offline (on my computer). It took me less than five minutes to add the first product to the offline test blog. If you haven’t had any experience with using custom fields, which is easy, it might take you ten minutes to read the instructions and to add the first product.

Structure

I’m impressed by how close Market’s layout is to the 17 New Rules for Successful E-commerce Websites. Thanks to the function over form approach, Market is also easy for customers to use. Everything is clearly laid out and you’re not overwhelmed by all of the information for each product.

Function

Andrew integrated the phpThumb thumbnail generator for converting large images for each product, which saves a lot of time for the administrator or store manager by automatically converting the images to the right size without distorting them. Also, one of the product display features that I like is the ability to zoom in on the smaller images. Here’s an example of the zoom feature:

Minor Improvements

This is the first version of Market so of course there’s room for improvement, but the following suggestions are more like bonuses.

An optional space for a store banner right above the products listing on the front page would be nice.)
The single product page doesn’t have a direct page edit link for administrators.
Although this theme is easy to install, I’d like to see extended instructions on how to upload images and how to grab the image locations added to the read-me file.
And if possible, don’t make the this theme duplicate the smaller thumbnails in case the administrator uploaded only one small image.

Pricing

Market costs only $40 and you can use it on multiple websites.

Conclusion

Besides my suggestions above, I’m thoroughly impressed by Market. It’s compact, easy to install, and easy to use. I think it’s safe to say that premium is not just a marketing term for this theme.

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How to Get Help for WordPress Problems

Small Potato — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:32:54 +0000

The following tips will help you get help for WordPress problems. If you don’t follow my tips, your question will get ignored, no matter who or where you’re trying to get help from.

Search Before You Ask

WordPress.org, Google.com, within the site you’re trying to get help from, etc.

Double Check the Read-Me File

Themes, plugins, and even WordPress have installation and usage instructions. They’re usually in the readme.html or readme.txt file.

Find the Right Place to Ask

Do not email or post codes in the comments if the site or author specifically told you not to. Email is probably the worse tool to get and give support by. Even if you have a unique problem, avoid email.

Skip the Introduction and Just Get to the Question

Don’t say “I’m a total newbie.” It’s one of the most annoying signs of possible laziness. Ask for a solution, what you need to know, and what you need to search for.

Link to the Problem

Even if your description of the problem is understandable and thorough, it’s best to link to your blog or a specific page and point out the problem.

No Customization Questions

Unless it’s obviously very technical and requires a great deal of knowledge and experience, do not ask “How Do I Customize ______” questions. WordPress volunteers and individual theme and plugin authors do not have the time to help you tweak your blog and then re-tweak it because maybe you don’t like the color. Show that you respect their time and they’ll try to get your problem solved ASAP. Avoid asking the following quesitons:

How do I change the header image?
How do I change link colors?

Those are general XHTML and CSS questions. They don’t have anything to do with WordPress. Your best guide for those questions is W3schools.com or one of those “how do I make a website” sites.

Don’t Be Lazy

If it looks or even sounds like you’re not willing to do the work in order to fix the problem, good luck because you’re on your own. NEVER ask for copy and paste. Also, if it sounds like you haven’t done any searching, then good luck because you’re on your own again.

Actually Follow the Instructions

If the answer or instruction is too technical, it’s understandable and someone will clear it up for you if you point out the parts where you don’t understand, but make sure what you don’t understand is more than just a term, which you can look up on Google.

On the flip side, it is NOT understandable and people will ignore you if you don’t follow the instructions while you keep saying that it doesn’t work.

What Your Question Should Look Like:

Here’s my problem and where/what it is.
How do I solve it and what do I need to do or know?
Which file should work with?
Thank you (this would be nice)

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How to Use Wordpress as a Membership Directory

Chris Cagle — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 17:06:59 +0000

This article was written by Chris Cagle.

Do you want to create a moderated membership directory that showcases your member’s information? Do you want it to be flexible, be very little work after initial setup, and use a world-class open source platform that you are already familiar with?

Your first thought might not be to use Wordpress for such a project, but since it already has an extremely easy way to accept, moderate and update registrations â€“ it’s a perfect candidate.

In this tutorial I will show you how I built a successful membership directory using nothing more than a standard Wordpress 2.3+ install and 2 very powerful plugins.

The Plugin Installs

The heart of the site is powered by two plugins.

First, use the WP User Manager plugin from Dealsway to add new fields to the user profiles. The install and setup is pretty straight forward - just activate the plugin and add any new fields you want via it’s own admin section. The information entered in these fields will become the information that will create the member’s “homepage.”

Secondly, we use the famous Role Manager plugin which restricts what your members can do once they are logged into your site. This is important because in order for a member to be granted their own author page, he or she needs to have made at least one post.

In my case, I didn’t want my members to have the ability to post anything, just to only fill out their profile information. To get around this, I used the Role Manager plugin as-is, but changed the Author role to only have the rights Publish Posts and Read. (The Hide Dashboard capability you see in the screen shot is a function of the IWG Hide Dashboard plugin. It was an easy way to clean up the admin panel for my members.)

Setting Wordpress Options

After you have installed all the plugins, we need to get Wordpress ready for your new registrations.

In your Admin panel, under options, set your New User Default Role to Subscriber. This ensures that a member won’t be given an author page until you “approve” and manually move them to the Author role. (A Subscriber can’t make posts, an Author can.)

Once a member has registered and filled out all the appropriate profile information, we need to “approve” that member. We do this by simply moving that member into the Author role and making a post on his or her behalf. I want each approved member to have made a post in order to create the New Member Feed [example]. To post on behalf of that member, choose that member’s name out of the dropdown list in the Post Author section in the sidebar before publishing their post.

This post doesn’t need to be anything spectacular. On Pittsburgh Designers, I simply write “This business has been added as a member. Please visit their Design Profile.”

There are other ways of doing this to make it slightly simpler, but I do it this way because I want to use Wordpress’s default feed as a New Member Feed.

Your membership management duties are now done.

Creating the Author Page

All that’s left now is the need to create the author.php template to display all this new member profile information that the WP User Manager plugin allowed us to accept.

For the sake of this tutorial, we only added 2 new fields to the member profile page: business_name and business_owner.

At the top of the author.php template we will add this code. Hint: Each new field you add will need to be declared here.

/*
Template Name: Author Template
*/

global $wp_query;
$curauth = $wp_query->get_queried_object();

$key="wpum_"."business_name";
$business_name = get_usermeta($curauth->ID, $key);

$key="wpum_"."business_owner";
$business_owner = get_usermeta($curauth->ID, $key);

Now right below that, in the body section of your template, we are going to add this data and markup to display it in a structured way:

The owner of this business is

The next step is to also show some of the default fields that the member entered within their profile. I only want to show the member’s website address and About the user section, so we modify our template to look like this:

The owner of this business is

Website: user_url;
?>

About the Business: description; ?>

Hint: A full list of $curauth-> calls can be viewed in the Wordpress Codex.

Lastly, we want to do some basic error checking.

What would happen if the member didn’t put anything in the business_owner field? In this case, we can just wrap that line in an if statement (…or any variable we want to protect against being blank):

The owner of this business is
".$business_owner."

"; }; ?>

Listing your Members

So how do you list all of your approved members? It is as simple as adding the wp_list_authors to any template file. This is the customized version of that function I use:

Tutorial Wrapup

This tutorial was based on my experiences in building the Pittsburgh Designers community into a thriving, local membership directory for creative types. Mosey on over to the site and take a peek for yourself how what a finished project like this can look like.

You can download the complete finished author.php template here.

About the Author

Chris Cagle is a freelance web designer from Pittsburgh, PA, whose projects include Pittsburgh Designers and AdClustr.

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Inspiration or Lack of Creativity

Jeffro2pt0 — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 01:40:48 +0000

Article’s written by Jeff Chandler.

As I browsed the WordPress themes released for February 25th 2008, on WeblogToolsCollection.com, I came across a theme that had everybody raving. It was called Options and was created by Justin Tadlock, the same theme author who created Structure. As I browsed the theme, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities in terms of the icons that were being used, the navigational text/layout, the way the content was displayed, ect. It looked eerily similar to Brian Gardner’s Revolution Pro Media theme. Not only did I call Justin out on his release page, but I also sent an email to Brian asking him if he knew what was going on.

As it turns out, Options is a theme that was INSPIRED by many of the design elements found within the Revolution theme. It wasn’t a blatant copy, but it was close enough to stir up trouble. According to Brian Gardner, he contacted Justin off the record and asked him to make some changes to his theme and Justin has apparently gone ahead with the changes. Brian explains what happened:

I just want to briefly address this situation - when Options was originally released, the layout was MUCH different than it is now. It was quite obvious that at the time, the similarities were too obvious, which is why people notified me, and why I pursued conversation with Justin. He did have an â€œinspiredâ€ by note on his page, but at the time, I believe it was more than â€œinspiredâ€ by, which is why I got in touch with him. Since then, he has gracefully changed the design of his theme, which is why some of you think itâ€™s not a replica of my site, as it originally â€œappearedâ€ to be. I do appreciate all of those who contacted me regarding this, and understand that itâ€™s easy to find inspiration in design elements.

Furthermore, I just want to point out that although the internet world is massive, it doesnâ€™t take long for me (or other theme designers) to find out questionable things that other people do with our themes. Iâ€™m all for competition, themes â€œinspired byâ€, and so on, but there really wasnâ€™t an issue on my side with Justinâ€™s theme, since he took ownership of the situation and reacted by changing his look.

The bottom line is that whether people use free or premium themes on their site, Wordpress is ultimately promoted. I know there have been a lot of â€œhot topicsâ€ related to premium themes, but we are all in the same community, and shouldnâ€™t be throwing stones at each other. The only time I am bothered by what happens is when people blatantly or maliciously affect me and my business - something that Justin did not do.

The situation between the two appears to be resolved. But this Options theme raises a couple points that I would like to address.

Right now, the magazine style of WordPress themes is still in full swing. However, Small Potato made some excellent points within the conversation that took place on WLTC. The first point is:

Options = Revolution = Premium News = Options = Revolutionâ€¦

This clearly indicates the magazine style trend in one sentence. I believe it has gotten to the point where one magazine/newspaper theme looks like another with some minor differences. I realize that these types of themes appear to be what people want, but theme designers, try to think outside of the box instead of rehashing ideas.

Another point that Small Potato makes:

As for adding more features to these magazine themes, thereâ€™s only so much you can add until youâ€™re the only one who knows how to fully use it.

There is a whole lot of truth within that statement. In my travels across the internet, looking for a new WordPress theme, I noticed plenty of them that utilized things such as custom fields. I also noticed many themes that utilized custom coded plugins and some themes even came with a manual that explained how to use them. Why is it like this? Why are theme authors releasing themes that require a Masters Degree to use? Let’s get back to making things simple. Sure, most of those fancy features require more skill and more advanced coding, but after checking out themes such as Shifter, I believe these challenges can be overcome.

If you are a theme designer, please do me a favor. Do your research, then take a top-down look at the current state of WordPress themes. Then, do us all a favor and create something that has yet to be done before. I know that most ideas are rehashed, most ideas have already been worn out, but try to do something that doesn’t make us think about something else that has already accomplished the effect. For example, please end this stupid trend of having two dynamic sidebars smashed together on one side of the blog. Why not place widgetized areas in more places within the theme, giving the end user more freedom and flexibility without the need of having to touch the code. Another example is to build flexibility into the theme that can be accessed via the admin panel. Instead of giving the user instructions in the read me file that tells them how to change the number of pixels in the CSS file to change the overall width of the blog, make it a user configurable option in the themes admin panel. Do you see where I’m going with this?

Now here is where I ask you questions that I have no answers for. For instance, at what point does inspiration turn into ripping? If there is a theme that closely resembles a paid theme, at what point does that become unacceptable? The reason I raised hell about the Options theme is that, it closely resembled Brian Gardner’s theme so much that I thought it would end up taking money out of his pocket. Because we all know, if there is a free version of a theme that requires money, we are going to go for the free version first.

What do you think will be the next WordPress theme trend? Personally, I believe the next trend will focus around Widgets. I think the poster child for the future of WordPress themes revolves around the Shifter Theme system. Widgets give power back to the end user. As a theme author, you no longer have to provide detailed instructions on how to hard code a plugin or widget into the theme. Just make it a widget area, and the user can drag and drop the content element into an area that seems appropriate. I also believe there will be a trend towards themes offering an admin page which contains settings that control various aspects of the theme. This is a welcomed change if you ask me, since this doesn’t require editing the CSS file or any of the core theme files to make the changes.

Finally, what are your thoughts as to everything I’ve just stated? Does it have any merit, or is this just a bunch of hodge podge?

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Wpdesigner 20,000 Accounts Giveaway

Small Potato — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:43:03 +0000

The $5 WordPress themes club is giving away 20,000 accounts to your readers. Wpdesigner.com will sponsor your blog contests and giveaways by using the themes club memberships as prizes. To be a part of this giveaway, sign up your blog by leaving a comment or contact Wpdesigner.com between February 23 and March 8.

Rules

Your blog must have at least 1,000 unique visitors per month.
Sign up any time between February 23 and March 8.
You must announce the contest, giveaway, or promotion on your blog to get the free membership coupons for your readers. Rules of your blog’s contest, giveaway, or promotion are up to you.
Depending on the size of your audience, Wpdesigner will sponsor 50 to 1000 accounts.
You may award or give out the accounts all at once or spread them throughout the year for multiple contests/giveaways.
The free coupons expire at the end of 2008.
SiCarii.net

Participating Sites

Themes Users

If you’ve been thinking about joining the club, but haven’t for some reason, this is your way to get it for free. Ask your favorite blogger to sign up for this giveaway so you can get one of the accounts through his/her blog.

On the other hand, here’s the order page if you can’t wait. It’s $5 to sign up for a year.

About the Club

Each club member gets all previously released themes and at least twelve new ones, one per month, throughout the span of one year. Club members also get guaranteed private support and community support. Click here for the full club details.

The following are some of the released club themes: Personal, Music, and Gossip.

For Paying Members

As for current and future paying members, you’re not left out. You will get a chance to enter a drawing for a custom WordPress theme from Wpdesigner. More information will be posted about that drawing at a later date.

Happy $5 Year!

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Simple vs Complex Designs

Small Potato — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 07:39:25 +0000

Designs with complex structures are typically more fun to look at, but they’re also typically more cluttered and harder to use. I find it interesting that WordPress users haven’t gotten over the “premium” news and magazine themes craze because they’re mostly designs with complex structures (and not exactly done right either).

First, I admit it. This wave of WordPress themes imitating the structures of complex print magazines and online entertainment portals featuring multimedia content was a refreshing change of pace for the WordPress themes community. However, when it comes down to it, they look good, but aren’t really useful. And of course, I’m not an exception. Yours truly is also guilty of jumping on the news portal slash magazine design bandwagon here.

Second, I have to point out that in a battle between simple versus complex for magazine sites, simple beats the heck out of complex.

(Milo brought the magazine designs ranking to my attention a while ago, but I didn’t think too much of it until now. The rankings are based on one-on-one battles between magazine designs on a site called Command Shift 3. It’s basically Hot or Not for web design instead of people.)

The number one design is from A List Apart, which uses a simple three column layout. Also, the closer to the top of the rankings the simpler the structure. Interesting?

Granted, typical “premium” news or magazine themes (at the moment) are designed around multimedia content, but that doesn’t mean you can’t simplify the layout structure. My point here is you don’t need a featured post, a gallery, a top articles listing, and etc., each with its own unique template structure; all sitting on one page.

Design around your content and make your site look unique, but at the same time you should simplify where you can and go with what works. For example, blog readers expect to find the RSS subscribe button at the top right hand corner or at the top of the right sidebar. Why is that? No one said that’s the best spot, but it’s “what-works” because many popular blogs place the subscribe button there.

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