We’re looking to add a community manager to the team! We’ve grown this year and the number of emails and support questions has increased quite a bit. Up until this point, Andy, Scott, Jennifer, and I have been sharing the load. It’s time for someone special (maybe you!) to take our support to the next level.
Support is great source of pride at The Theme Foundry. You should be a proficient communicator with excellent writing skills and naturally enjoy helping people solve problems. You should also know WordPress inside and out and have lots of experience using and customizing WordPress themes. You don’t need to be a developer, but you should be capable of writing CSS, HTML, and basic PHP.
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We’re proud to announce that our latest release Avid is now available for sites hosted on WordPress.com! Avid can be purchased from your WordPress.com dashboard or from the Avid theme showcase page.
When you buy a theme on WordPress.com you get the same quality support, but your theme and website are hosted in the WordPress.com environment. It is easier to get up and running and your theme is automatically kept up to date.
Read more about the differences between WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress and browse all our themes available on WordPress.com.
I was listening to the latest Please Advise podcast, with guest Jason Schuller of Press75. The show’s hosts Mike McAlister, Jake Caputo and Chris Molitor cover various topics related to WordPress and WordPress theme development.
About midway through the show, the subject of theme options and the new WordPress theme customizer (built primarily by Daryl Koopersmith and Dominik Schilling) came up. I was really surprised to hear the guys on the show say the following about the customizer:
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Over the past two months, we’ve been working hard with the extremely talented Dave Ruiz of Foundation Six to build our latest WordPress theme. The team was given the task of translating Dave’s original and visually rich design to the browser. After many long hours of tweaking and polishing, we’re happy to announce the release of the absolutely stunning Avid photography theme.
Every detail of Avid is optimized and carefully crafted with photographers in mind. The theme gives you the power to quickly and easily showcase your images, galleries, videos, and blog posts in a beautiful and responsive layout. Take a spin through the live demo of Avid to see it in action.
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Working on the new default WordPress theme, Twenty Twelve, has been a very special, exciting, and humbling experience. We got off to a slow start earlier this year, but the pace has picked up significantly since then, and we’re now preparing to move the codebase back into WordPress core.
Live demo
We have a live demo of Twenty Twelve hosted over on WordPress.com!
Twenty Twelve isn’t finished yet, but all the major styling is complete. The goal was to design a clean, minimal, and responsive theme, with a focus on typography and readability. I think we met that goal and I’m really happy with where we are right now. Take it for a spin and let us know what you think.
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If you’ve picked up one of our themes and are ready to upload a logo, a banner, or perhaps a set of photographs to your site, then this is the post for you. We’ll discuss why you should be cropping and optimising your images before uploading them to WordPress, and the importance of saving your photos in a suitable file format.
Why should I crop and optimise my images?
Perhaps your images don’t look very good, or your photos are slow to load. Cropping, resizing, and optimising your images properly will fix both of these problems. Mastering — or, at least, learning — these techniques is an important step in building a successful WordPress site. You’ll create better visual content; speed-up the uploading process; reduce bandwidth usage, and shed inessential bytes from your graphic files. Not only that, your webpage will load more quickly — and readers love speedy sites.
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For anybody who doesn’t follow WordPress development updates, you’ll be happy to learn that the next version of WordPress (version 3.4) is now available!
WordPress 3.4 features a number of improvements and updates, but the most exciting feature for us is the introduction of the real-time “theme customizer”, which allows you to preview changes to your theme options as you make them, eliminating the need to save/refresh your site to see what has changed.
We’ve been keeping an eye on WordPress 3.4, and now that it is released we’re proud to announce that our 4 most recent themes (Portfolio, Chalk, Duet, and Anthem) support the theme customizer for all theme options.
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Our very own Portfolio theme is now available for WordPress.com sites and blogs. You may purchase the theme directly from your WordPress.com dashboard or from the Portfolio theme showcase page.
When you buy a theme on WordPress.com you get the same quality support, but your theme and website are hosted in the WordPress.com environment. It’s easy to use and you don’t have to worry about updating WordPress or your theme.
Read more about the differences between WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress and browse all our themes available on WordPress.com.
As you may have read earlier, I’m currently working on the the new WordPress default theme, Twenty Twelve. One of the early Twenty Twelve discussions was about typography. I felt it was important we use a web font. Not only would a web font look great, it would also show WordPress is pushing forward to adopt new web development technologies. The font would obviously be open source, so we had 2 options:
Use the free open-source Google Web Fonts directory to load the font directly through Google’s external API.
Package it with the theme and use CSS to load the font. We would have to ensure a GPLv2 compatible license in this case (more on this later).
In the end, it was important to choose a great looking font with extensive language support. Whether we included it in the theme or not was a secondary concern.
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Over the years we’ve had questions and feedback from customers about our theme pricing. Recently this prompted some thinking about what a premium WordPress theme is worth and why our themes cost what they do.
What is value
Merriam-Webster defines value as “a fair return or equivalent in goods, services, or money for something exchanged.” The modern world most of us live in is predicated on value and exchange of goods. For example, I buy some food supplies from my local grocery store — the grocery delivers value, and I provide money in exchange for that value. This allows the grocery to deliver value to other customers, pay their employees, pay their vendors, and sometimes realize a profit for the business itself. The circular nature of this system allows everyone to provide value in their own way, and receive a widely accepted currency in return for this value. It’s truly a beautiful thing.
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