Opti is a theme designed for bloggers who want to present a professional image to their reading audience. It has some subtle magazine styling to make it that little bit special, but at it’s heart it’s a blog for bloggers.

Opti is fully responsive, meaning it looks just as good on mobile as it does on the desktop.

It has a series of flexible widget spaces. If you don’t want to use them then leave them empty and the space will be filled up with the rest of the site content keeping your website looking it’s best at all times.

Opti also makes use of the WordPress custom menus, and post thumbnails (and a few other WordPress default functions) – meaning you can control everything through the WordPress admin.

The jewel in the crown is the theme customizer support – letting you edit the colours of the site to match your branding and/ or preference. It only takes 5 minutes to make Opti look unique and to get your blog underway.

To celebrate the release of Opti I am offering the first 20 customers a 20% discount off the price of the theme. Just use the coupon code: opti_intro during the checkout process and 20% will be knocked off your total. Keep in mind that we don’t offer coupons very often so this offer is strictly limited

The post Opti Released appeared first on Pro Theme Design.

So – I think future enhancements will come in the shape of improvements to the core code and, more importantly, the user experience. This was started in WordPress 3.5 with the major overhaul of the media uploader interface – and looks set to continue in WordPress 3.6.

Below is a quick look at what we can expect to see in the WordPress 3.6 which is currently scheduled to be published on the 22nd of April 2013.

Distraction-Free Writing improvements

The distraction free writing screen was introduced in WordPress 3.2 – but to be honest I haven’t really used it (in fact – this post will be the first one I have written entirely in the environment).

There is clearly a demand for something like this though – there’s loads of distraction free writing apps available and so the WordPress team are going to work hard to improve the experience in the hope that more people will be able to learn the joys of the distraction free writing.

In this case it’s all about polish and making the experience as wonderful as possible.

Custom Menus

As someone who creates WordPress themes, I think improvements to the custom menu interface will be very welcome. I get a decent amount of support requests from people who don’t know how to edit their website menus.

This area of WordPress will be getting a lot of user testing time, so hopefully the process will be smoothed out considerably.

Revisions

Revisions are a feature that I’ve never really used. In fact I tend to turn them off on all my sites. However for sites that have multiple authors contributing I can see the need for good management of content revisions.

However the interface currently is very technical – for those of us who are used to code diffs its fine, but many users don’t know what’s going on and want something nice and easy. And to be honest, if they can improve the process then perhaps code comparison tools will borrow a few ideas and make diffs nicer as well .

Editorial Flow

Editorial flow is all about improving the management and scheduling of content. This time a lot of the changes being proposed are technical improvements to the underlying API. So whilst this won’t have an immediate effect on the usage of WordPress, it will make things much nicer for plugin authors who want to enhance the WordPress editing process for multi author blogs.

Daniel Bachhuber has been asked to lead this area of development – and this is partly because he has a really nice plugin for managing the editorial flow on your WordPress site. Including things like editorial calendars, editors comments, more complex post statuses, and even cost management – the plugin is great for people who want to properly plan their websites content (in fact I am planning to try it out here on Pro Theme Design).

Autosave and Post Locking

Improvement to the Autosave process for your WordPress posts will be a welcome addition. I am sure many bloggers have experienced the pain of losing an internet connection, or a browser crashing, in the middle of writing a blog post. WordPress have tried to address this in the past with the autosave feature – but it’s still not perfect, and so in WordPress 3.6 they hope to address it even further.

Post Formats UI Features

Post formats is one of my favorite untapped features in WordPress. Much like the WordPress team I think it has a lot of potential but the current implementation falls short. There’s no standard for implementing the different post format types and so each theme treats them in a different way making requirements for different post types awkward to standardize. I am hoping they will implement something like the interface used on Tumblr whereby the required meta data is stored per post type. If it was done in a standard way with functions to pull out the requested info then I think the takeup in themes would be much quicker.

Getting WordPress 3.6 Updates…

If you want to keep up to date with the progress of WordPress 3.6 then you can check out the WordPress Core Development blog.

So what feature are you most looking forward to? Is there anything you’d like to see improved in 3.7 and beyond? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

The post What’s Coming Up In WordPress 3.6 appeared first on Pro Theme Design.

This version brings with it a lot of changes, but before explaining the improvements I wanted to explain a change in our philosophy as well.

When Darren and I first created Mimbo Pro and Pro Theme Design we wanted to build something amazing. We were one of the first theme shops and we were forging a new path – everything we did was new to WordPress – and so we wanted to impress people as much as possible. Because of this we built things like contact forms as part of the templates, TimThumb for resizing images, child themes for changing colours, custom widgets to add extra stuff to your blog. All sorts of things – and we thought this was great.

At the time it was, but over time we have come to realise that actually – the part people are paying for is the theme itself. These extras can be introduced through plugins and extensions. And these plugins often work better than our custom code does. And so, recently, we have been deleting stuff.

It’s liberating.

Removing old stuff feels great. It improves the theme no end, making it slick and streamlined once more. What’s more it allows us to concentrate on perfecting what is available in the core theme – without having to worry about all the extra fluff.

If a you want one of the features we have removed, then you can download one of the hundreds of free plugins from WordPress.org. Sure – it’s a bit more work – but with WordPress built in auto updater and plugin searcher it just makes sense to make use of the massive community around the product and not try to reinvent the wheel.

Again – doing this allows us to focus on improving the things that plugins can’t change, and allows us to focus on the core theme making that as awesome as possible.

And so on to Mimbo Pro 4.

You can see many of the new features and improvements in the video below.

The functionality I am most proud of is the flexibility of the theme. Despite removing loads of old elements – and slimming the theme control panel down to just 4 different options – I would say it’s more flexible than it’s even been.

Combining the new colour scheme editor and the flexible sidebar options – you can get exactly the layout you want with Mimbo Pro 4.

The post Mimbo Pro 4 Released – and a Change in Philosophy appeared first on Pro Theme Design.

Currently Opti is not available here on ProThemeDesign.com – we wanted to see what sort of reception we would get on wp.com first and fix any major bugs.

Thankfully it seems to have been really well received and so I will be preparing it for release here – likely early in the new year.

By default, Opti features:

• A colour selector allowing you to edit colours on your site without needing to edit any code.
• A flexible homepage that can look like either a magazine or a blog
• Support for all major WordPress functionality – WordPress widgets, custom navigation (2 menus), custom header, custom background etc etc
• A unique category archive style
• And plenty more…

You can check out all the Pro Theme Design themes that are available on WordPress.com here.

The post Opti – A New Theme for WordPress.com appeared first on Pro Theme Design.

The post The Pro Theme Design Rap appeared first on Pro Theme Design.

I didn’t have any idea how this would be received or if anybody would donate anything – so I am really pleased to say that people DID donate – and we have now broken the $100 mark ($110 to be precise). Ok – it’s not ground breaking – but I think it’s fantastic that people have given anything – so want to say a really big …

… to everybody who gave that little bit extra. Combined with gift aid that means Pro Theme Design customers have given $137.50 to Alzheimers research – so thank you once more.

Here’s hoping people keep buying our themes and helping us to help others.

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This is something I have wanted to do for ages – so it’s with a lot of thanks to the team at WordPress.com (Lance, and Ian in particular) that we now have Mimbo Pro available as a premium theme on WordPress.com.

The process took a while. First Darren and I rebuilt the theme – releasing Mimbo Pro 3.0 in the process. We then went through a review process with WordPress.com themselves. They gave us loads of awesome feedback to improve the theme further, and this in turn has been added into Mimbo Pro for our Pro Theme Design customers to make use of.

What does this mean then?

Really it doesn’t change anything. Users here on Pro Theme Design still get awesome themes – and now they are reaching a wider audience we will get more feedback and so be able to update the themes to be even better still.

If you’re on WordPress.com and want a new theme then I’d love to offer Mimbo Pro as an option.

The post Mimbo Pro on WordPress.com appeared first on Pro Theme Design.

In that time, web design standards have also changed. Instead of retiring the theme, we wanted to give it a makeover and help keep its popularity going—

Improvements include:

• Responsive design for mobile devices
• Web fonts via Font Squirrel
• CSS3 enhancements for navigation, colors, gradients
• Semantic HTML 5 markup
• Inclusion of sub- and sub-sub categories in breadcrumb nav
• Improvements to Custom WP Menus
• “Related Posts” widget uses WP categories, instead of tags

Important to note: Mimbo 3.0 is a standalone product. Significant changes have been made to the core code so it should not be used to overwrite older versions of Mimbo Pro without some breakage. Existing Mimbo Pro users will have access to both versions in the accounts system.

The post Introducing Mimbo Pro 3.0 appeared first on Pro Theme Design.

TimThumb is actually an invention of our own – something we originally developed for Mimbo Pro. As soon as the flaw was discovered I set to work fixing as many issues as I could. In the following week I committed at least half a dozen security improvements. The person who announced the issues went so far as to rewrite TimThumb introducing even more new security features.

To ensure that TimThumb is up to date on your website you should either:

1. Update your theme from the accounts control panel
2. Update TimThumb from the Google Code site

The version of TimThumb used on Pro Theme Design themes is always up to date. For releasing theme updates I created a build script. A file that zips up the theme files, updates the translation files, creates the right to left css file for rtl languages, and then updates TimThumb from the latest Google Code source file.

Security has always been a concern with TimThumb and now that there is an extra pair of eyes helping with the code it will be an even higher priority and kept as strong as possible.

The post TimThumb Security appeared first on Pro Theme Design.

Ever since Mimbo Pro, all those years ago, I have wanted to create another magazine theme, but I wanted to try something a bit different.

So, I decided to partner with a friend of mine, Jack, and he came up with the seed that became Byline. To make the theme more unique we designed a clean layout that could be personalized easily. We also introduced the unique concept of coloured categories, not seen before in a WordPress theme. Match that with a flexible homepage design and easy to digest content pages and you have the perfect recipe for a magazine style website.

A Screenshot of the Byline WordPress Magazine Theme

Byline is powered by Elemental and, as with all Elemental themes, it has a wide variety of options and customisations such as advanced font controls, powerful SEO out of the box, and a whole heap of custom page templates.

If you’re running a magazine website and fancy a new look then you check out the Byline info page, the Byline demo, and you can even preview the Byline admin for yourself.

The post Byline – A Real Magazine Theme appeared first on Pro Theme Design.

Exhibitor is an Elemental child theme, and makes use of the latest WordPress technologies – such as custom post types – to make managing the website content as easy as possible.

Gallery and Portfolio WordPress Theme

Exhibitor uses TimThumb to intelligently resize your artwork so that they are consistently sized and viewable on as many screen sizes as possible.

Keeping bloggers in mind I also added a blog area to the homepage so that you can post news and updates about anything you like.

Since Exhibitor uses Elemental as it’s parent theme, it automatically inherits all of the benefits of that theme. In particular there are more than 15 custom page templates, and a comprehensive SEO optimisation to give your website the best chance it can have.

One of the coolest features about Exhibitor is the custom colour scheme. Inside the theme admin there is a colour wheel, that you can use to pick the colour scheme to use on your site, giving you a nice easy way to personalise the site. This is on top of the standard font options that are always available in Elemental themes.

If you are in the market for a new gallery theme then you can test it before you buy, on the theme preview site available here.

The post New Gallery and Portfolio theme – Exhibitor appeared first on Pro Theme Design.

I just want to let you know that I recently “changed” theme to Pagelines.com’s PlatformPro. I didn’t really have any reasons except the fact that it seemed to bring additional possibilities for setting up the site “differently” (my website). Things went quite alright, but I quickly found the lack of structure in their files (specifically CSS files). This and the fact that I just felt/feel at home with Elemental, made me go back to Elemental rather quickly.

I once again learned that, one really have to know what one wants to show and focus at. The structure of Elemental and its associated child themes simply stand out, and feels good to work with.

So, I’m back to “normal” and still see the number of visitors increase. In tandem, the administration in Elemental is a lot more intuitive and doesn’t require additional tools like Firebug in order to personalize the website.

Reinar uses a heavily modified version of the Elemental child theme Meteora – and I must say, his site looks great.

This time the testimonial is specifically about Elemental and how Reinar finds it easy to use. 2 things I love to hear. It’s great to get this sort of feedback. If anyone else has any feedback, positive or negative, then I would love to hear it.

The post Another Recent Elemental Testimonial appeared first on Pro Theme Design.