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.

In the next two hours I added two new bits of functionality to the Accumulo theme.

1. I extracted photos from RSS feeds in the RSS widget. These photos display in the tooltips that pop-up when you mouse over the feed items
2. I added a brand new RSS feed widget. This widget displays the feed item titles as before, along with a short snippet of the item content and a photo if available.

Advertising

At the weekend I also got a support query asking about advertising options in Accumulo – so I decided to add that in as well. The advertising options allow you to add adsense banners to the website above and below the page content. You can also optionally (and individually) turn them on and off, and you can override the adsense code with your own code should you wish.

These new additions continue to make Accumulo a powerful feed aggregation theme and you can see the functionality in action on the Accumulo demo site, or test it yourself on the Pro Theme Design preview site.

As normal all Accumulo customers can download updates from the accounts control panel.

The problem with this is you then have no control over what happens to their content in the future. If they delete a post, close the website, change the url structure, or generally change things around, then your website will end up linking to broken content – and that’s not good.

I experienced this same problem on WPVote.com – so I decided to come up with an automated method for fixing it.

So, I created a function that would check 10 articles at a time, in a never ending loop (it runs twice a day for as long as the theme is active). I decided to limit the number of articles scanned to ensure that the server does not get overloaded as the check can be a slow process. Technically the system uses curl to check the external articles header response. Based upon the response it does a variety of actions.

• 200 – all safe, you can carry on as normal
• 404 – the article has been deleted. There’s no redirect so the submitted article on your site is moved to the trash (you can always move it back if you wish)
• 301 – the article has been moved. The article link gets updated and things carry on as normal
• 501 – server error. The article gets moved into your post drafts so that you can check it and republish or trash it as you wish
• 0 – no response… nothing happens.

Each time a scan is done you will receive an email explaining any changes that are made so that you can double check/ modify things as required. If you have a reasonable amount of articles submitted then I would guess you will get a lot of emails to start with while old posts are scanned, and then it will even out over time.

As I mentioned in the status list above, sometimes no response is received. In this case you will be told about it in the email. In my tests on WPVote.com I have had a response of 0 in all sorts of instances – often for what should be 301 or 404 errors – and so I go in and edit things manually.

The goal of this update is to make it easier to manage your Nominate powered websites content, and to keep your site relevant and up to date.

To update just grab the theme from the accounts control panel and reupload it to your site. Everything else will happen automatically.

If you make use of it then please do let me know how you get on in the comments below.

Localisation is the art of making something suitable for different regions. In terms of WordPress themes it is making sure that all of the text in the theme can be easily translated.

Localisation

WordPress has a system for localising themes which involves placing the text (strings) into a special command so that it can be translated when required. Our themes have used the localisation strings commands almost from the start, however we haven’t always supplied the files required to do the translations.

These files are now included in the theme directories. There is more information on how to translate our themes on the localisation support page.

Where possible I have automated the system for generating the translation templates. What this means is:

• Future themes will be localised as soon as they are released
• Changes to existing themes will be mirrored as soon as the themes are updated

In both cases this means the themes will always be ready for translations and you won’t have the wrong language on your site for too long.

RTL languages

Many languages are written RTL (Right to Left) and these need special changes to their themes. WordPress gets around this by including a file called RTL.css when a right to left language is being used. However, what many developers fail to understand, is that the RTL languages generally need more customisation than just aligning text to the right. The entire website changes sides. Sidebars move from right to left (and vise versa), navigation swaps to the other side, everything moves around, essentially creating a mirrored version of the website.

Our themes now come included with this RTL.css file. This is another system that has been automated which means that when new themes are designed, or when changes are made to existing themes, they will still look correct when you update your files.

The RTL.css functionality is still quite new so may not work in all situations. If you find any problems please show me your website and I will look into them for you.

Ready Now

These changes have been applied to all themes and they are ready to download from the accounts control panel now.

There has been lots of work put into making sure your content is suitable for your local audience. This is just one more thing that makes Pro Theme Designs themes that little bit more professional.

Nominate was originally conceived as a Digg style theme. It was designed for people to submit and vote upon websites. However as people have purchased it and started giving feedback it has become more and more flexible. With this release the type of site you can make is entirely up to you.

There are now options to enable or disable nearly all elements of the article submission process – you can even disable public submissions entirely.

With the new options you can set up a website where people can submit news/ reviews on a certain topic, or you could just let people vote on the content you have written yourself. With the latest release you can also let people upload an image when they submit an article, and with new options in the back end you can specify whether to show the website screenshots, or the images in the post thumbnails.

Another cool feature is the new homepage layout. You can now see the most popular article from the last month, and the last year with the click of a tab. This makes it really easy to see what is currently popular on your Nominate powered website.

Next up is some additional changes in the post edit screen. To be honest this should have been available in version 1 but it was simply something I had never considered. You can now edit the submitted url, and the number of votes manually when editing a post. Some might called this vote rigging or immoral – but it’s your website so you can do what you like!

Finally there have been some changes to the login form. These mean that you can now use Facebook login plugins (and probably other login plugins) so that people can login and vote without signing up for a new account. I am using The WP Facebook Connect plugin on WPVote and it seems to be working great!

The features have mostly been designed based upon customers feedback. When I first made Nominate it was built purely for my own requirements and, whilst it was perfect for me, it didn’t do everything that people expected. With this first update, I think it gets much closer to the requirements of most users.

Besides bug fixes the major new features added are:

• Added list of users, with avatars, who have voted for each article
• Added Most Popular template (required WordPress 3.0)
• Added Option to publish posts straight/ always moderate/ use spam checking
• Added ability to use Facebook Connect plugins on the login overlay.
• Added new black and orange colour scheme
• Added option to change button text on “submit article” button widget. Now you can allow people to submit anything you like.
• Added Option to disable URL submission in submit content form (hides website thumbnails as well)
• Added ability to adjust number of votes required for a featured post.
• Added option to disable categories in article submissions
• Added option to disable tags in article submissions
• Added option to show & hide website thumbnails
• Added target=_blank on website preview link in admin
• Added a link in new post notification emails so that you can moderate newly submitted posts more easily

Elemental and Child Themes

To show off the new Elemental functionality I have created my first ever screencast. You’ll have to forgive the slightly funky editing and sound work. Also remember that all new functionality added to the theme will automatically copy over to the The Local and any other child themes.

A few notes on the video above:

• Custom Menus: New in WP 3.0, I’ve added it to nearly all of our themes. This feature alone will make the update worth it.
• SEO: I’m not an SEO expert, but I have been using the new features on my own website for a month or two now and with have seen an increase in my search engine traffic.
• Custom Widget Templates: This was created from a desire to create a flexible page layout system that would let people create any layout they like without editing any code.
• Thumbnail Options: TimThumb is quite an enjoyable hobby for me. There are some more updates coming soon. I will be writing about the changes and new features on Binary Moon soon.
• Admin Customisation: This isn’t an essential feature, but I do think it’s a nice feature to have – in particular for sites where people other than you will be viewing the admin pages.

The list above showcases some of the features, but not all of them. There have been hundreds of tweaks and improvements, some more of which will be explained later.

Mimbo Pro 2

In all the excitement Mimbo Pro hasn’t been forgotten about. There have been a handful of small fixes and improvements along with the more exciting addition of custom menu integration.

Accumulo

Accumulo has had quite a lot of love sent it’s way. There have been a handful of bug fixes, and a lot of work on improving the caching and page load speeds, including a WordPress cron job that updates the feeds once a day to make sure you are always up to date.

Note that this updates ticks off 2 of the 3 ‘coming soons’ on our latest post.

Most of our themes seem to be working perfectly (at least as far as I can see), however unfortunately the release broke the carousel in Mimbo Pro. The error is actually to do with the version of jQuery bundled with the latest version of WordPress. I haven’t had a chance to update the files in the download area but if you have upgraded then to fix the error you should:

1. Copy the new (fixed) version of jCarousel from the jCarousel download page and add paste it in to ‘js/jquery.jcarousel.pack.js’
2. Edit ‘css/carousel.css’ to reposition the carousel. The change is to replace

   .jcarousel-skin-tango .jcarousel-clip-horizontal {
       width:  820px;
   }

   with

   .jcarousel-skin-tango .jcarousel-clip-horizontal {
       width:  820px;
   	position:absolute;
   	top:15px;
   	left:70px;
   }

If you haven’t yet updated to WordPress 3.0 then I would suggest holding off until Mimbo Pro has been updated. I will get the official release updated this weekend.

]]> http://prothemedesign.com/updates/wordpress-3-0-and-mimbo-pro/feed/ 13 http://prothemedesign.com/updates/new-features-added-to-accumulo/ http://prothemedesign.com/updates/new-features-added-to-accumulo/#comments Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:53:30 +0000 darren http://prothemedesign.com/?p=306 launched the Accumulo theme last week — thanks to everyone who offered comments and suggestions. We've started to incorporate some of those feature requests into the next version.]]> We got a lot of great feedback when we launched the Accumulo theme last week — thanks to everyone who offered comments and suggestions.

It’s not a conventional WordPress theme for blogging, but it does come with its own custom Blog page template (live example). The problem is that some users wanted to merge the blog with the homepage feeds so that it wasn’t obscured.

Blog option for the homepage

So what Ben did was to add an option that lets you assign which tab will display the blog on the homepage:



New homepage blog option

In the same Options panel, you can then name that tab whatever you want (ex: “Blog”):



Assign a tab to your blog

As you can see on the live homepage, you can now display the blog in whatever tab you choose:



Optional blog tab on the homepage

Caching

By nature Accumulo is intended for aggregating outside content which means there must be some restrictions on caching or else the page-load would get very slow as it struggled to collect all those feeds. To give the user more flexibility, Ben added some caching options that can be adjusted depending on your preference:



New caching options

]]> http://prothemedesign.com/updates/new-features-added-to-accumulo/feed/ 3 http://prothemedesign.com/news/massive-upgrades-to-elemental/ http://prothemedesign.com/news/massive-upgrades-to-elemental/#comments Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:48:46 +0000 darren http://prothemedesign.com/?p=305 Elemental framework for WordPress continues to be a hot-selling theme. According to the changelog, it received 396 code changes this month! Some were bug fixes and some were feature additions, but overall it continues to grow simultaneously more powerful and more clean, code-wise.]]> The Elemental framework for WordPress continues to be a hot-selling theme. According to the changelog, it received 396 code changes this month! Some were bug fixes and some were feature additions, but overall it continues to grow simultaneously more powerful and more clean, code-wise.

Noteworthy changes:

• Widget area descriptions, per WordPress 2.9
• Google Analytics code changed to Asynchronous method
• New header-image upload method. Reduces reliance on problem-causing legacy code. Note: if you use the old header image method, it will be reset and you’ll need to re-upload the image. This is a one time deal, and won’t be required again. Apologies for any problems it may cause
• New favicon upload method
• New admin panel branding abilities. You can now add your own header image and footer text. Perfect for designing sites for clients, or for websites that require public accounts logins
• Calendar added to Archives page to enable easier traversal of historical content
• TimThumb updates to latest version which featured stack of bug fixes and improvements
• Improved custom post options which allow for filtering via plugins or child themes
• Fixed Google maps widget (they changed the API which broke the widget positioning – doh!)
• Major improvements and code clean-up added to Sitemap page template
• New page numbers layout for paged content
• Option to hide the home link
• Subtle improvements to caching system
• TimThumb shortcode (more) can now dynamically resize images in posts. Example: [thumb width="" height=""]http://image/path[/thumb]
• New option for “Post Details”s widget so author details can be displayed on pages OR posts OR pages and posts – it’s your website so your choice
• Improved admin bar for logged-in users which includes gravatar and link to user account. Allows for good integration for community sites (such as the upcoming WPVote.com redesign)

In general if you’re looking for information about updates, you can log into your accounts panel and view changelog records there. We are also working to sync up the custom Elemental dashboard widget with the Pro Theme blog. Stay tuned.

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