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Meet Linen, the newest member of our theme collection. Linen is a clean and flexible magazine style theme with some creative customization options. One of the coolest features is the option to completely control your typography. Linen uses select fonts from the Google Font Directory and gives you the choice to mix and match seven different accent fonts and eight different body fonts. Combine this feature with a custom background color or image and you have a truly unique and beautiful site.
I am excited to announce a huge collaboration that has been brewing for quite some time. Our very own Shelf theme just launched as one of the first premium themes on WordPress.com! WordPress.com users may now purchase Shelf directly from their dashboard or by clicking through the link on the new Shelf Showcase page.
Needless to say, we are honored and humbled to be chosen to help launch this service. Shelf, along with Headlines from WooThemes, are the first two premium themes available on WordPress.com.
I would like to say thanks to the awesome folks at Automattic for helping make this a reality. Especially the amazing theme team of Lance Willett, Ian Stewart, and Matias Ventura. It has been a pleasure working side by side with you guys to get this project launched.
Today we released some exciting new updates for all of our themes. Head over to the downloads page to grab the new theme packages. Be sure to read the upgrade instructions and the update notes below!
Focused on improving our themes
Routinely improving and updating our themes is very important to us. This doesn’t mean just keeping up with WordPress standards, but also adding new features and improvements from time to time. For example, Vigilance now features a drop down navigation menu and Traction includes a full-width page template. We also hired WordPress expert and core contributor Austin Matzko (aka filosofo) to help us with this recent update. Austin did an awesome job of auditing, refactoring, and streamlining a ton of theme code.
We have received quite a few emails and inquiries regarding the release date of Shelf, our upcoming tumblog style theme designed by Jon Hicks. I want to give you an update on where we are in the development process and share some exciting news about the theme.
Today I am excited to introduce our new theme, Photography! This is the first niche theme we have developed here at The Theme Foundry and I am extremely happy with how it turned out. This theme is geared towards professional photographers. The goal was to make it super easy for anyone to quickly setup a beautiful WordPress powered website, complete with a blog and a gallery/portfolio.
When I started this journey into WordPress themes in September of 2008 I had no idea it would end up being a full-time gig. It is truly a dream come true. A pet project turned into a successful business I love working on each and every day. Before I talk more about the future lets
turn back the clock…
It’s September of 2007. I am released from the St. Louis Rams after a short-lived professional football career (drafted in 2004 by the NY Giants). The writing is on the wall, football is over for me.
It was a great ride, I lived in four cities (New York, Philadelphia, Tampa, St. Louis) and bounced around to five different teams (Giants, Eagles, Bucs, Jets, and Rams). I also watched Super Bowl XXXIX from the sidelines and met some amazing friends along the way.
Contrary to popular belief, journeyman football players like myself don’t make millions of dollars, so I certainly wasn’t walking away with any significant savings. I should also mention it wasn’t easy to give up a game that had defined who I was for such a long time. I truly missed football, it felt like a piece of me was suddenly gone, and it still does feel that way from time to time.
I presented a theme customization workshop at WordCamp Orange County earlier this year. The workshop covered 6 theme customization “best practices”. Unfortunately, the video is a bit stretched and not completely clear at times, but it still should be helpful if you are new to theme customization.
A few weeks ago I received an email from Joe Pemberton at Punchcut, an interface design company based in San Francisco. The email was friendly and non-confrontational, Joe believed we were infringing on his company’s registered trademark of the name “Punchcut”. He was also concerned about the impact our theme name might be having on his long established brand. Joe and I discussed these concerns on the phone and I completely understood where he was coming from. I was happy to change the name of the theme.
Paperpunch
So today I am announcing that our Punchcut WordPress theme is now officially named Paperpunch. As you can see, most of the site has been updated to reflect this new change. Tomorrow I will be releasing a new version of Paperpunch, along with some upgrade instructions. I have done my best to ensure everything is re-directing and working properly, if you run into any broken links please drop me a note in the comments. I will be changing the category name on this blog as well, so be sure to update your RSS reader tomorrow if you are currently subscribed to the Punchcut category feed.
Lessons learned
When researching a name for a new theme I usually perform a quick Google search to ensure nobody else is using the name for an existing WordPress theme. In this case I searched for the term “punchcut wordpress theme” and didn’t see any meaningful results. I quickly assumed everything was good to go, which turned out to be a bit naive on my part. Next time around I will be sure to perform an extensive Google search of the potential theme name along with a basic trademark search.
Today I am excited to announce Yan Sarazin has officially joined The Theme Foundry team as a part-time support specialist and theme developer. He will be providing fast and friendly support in our forums, developing new theme features, improving existing features, and working with me on our theme codebase.
Yan started developing for the web over 13 years ago and is proficient in HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, jQuery, and Ruby on Rails. He founded Statik Pulse in 2005 where he mostly consults for the Canadian government (he isn’t allowed to share any government secrets in the support forums, so don’t ask) and works as a freelance web developer. Yan is the genius behind Podium, an awesome Ruby on Rails web app (still in private beta) that helps you manage every aspect of your sports team. He is also the author of Posterize, a fantastic WordPress plugin that helps integrate WordPress and Posterous.
Yan lives in beautiful (but cold) Ottawa, Canada where you can find him playing or watching hockey (Go Sens!), on a photowalk, tinkering with cars, or drooling over the latest Apple product. You can also catch him on Tumblr, follow him on Twitter, or check out his photos on Flickr.
Welcome to the team Yan!
I am super excited to announce the release of our newest WordPress theme, Traction! Traction is a dark and clean magazine style theme with a robust options menu and built in support for WordPress post thumbnails. This is the theme I meant to design when I started Punchcut late last year, it just wasn’t ready yet. Traction comes with a boatload of features, including three colors schemes (red, blue, green), built in Twitter support, and much more. I encourage you to browse through all the features and take it for a test drive. Be sure to let me know what you think in the comments.
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