We’re proud to announce our latest production: Anthem, a beautiful responsive tumblog-style theme that features a stunning display of various types of media and a clean, minimal design. Anthem is designed to look great on all devices including phones, tablets, and regular displays.

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I had the pleasure of joining Adam Stacoviak last week for Episode #22 of Founder’s Talk over on the 5by5 internet broadcasting network. We chatted about life, growing a business, selling themes and products around WordPress, why we built Forge, and designing the 5by5 logo.

I am excited to introduce Forge, a free command-line toolkit for bootstrapping and developing WordPress themes in a tidy environment using front-end languages like Sass and CoffeeScript. As part of Forge, we’re also releasing Struts, a simple theme options framework for WordPress.

How does it work?

Forge creates a neatly organized source folder with clean and simple scaffolding (base template files, SCSS files, and theme options). The source folder is automatically compiled to your local WordPress install(s) as you save changes and work on your theme. When you are ready to distribute your theme Forge will build it to a folder of your choice or bundle the theme up into an easy to install zip package.

Why use Forge?

Developing themes with Forge is more fun! Forge accelerates development by giving you access to higher-level languages like Sass and CoffeeScript. These languages are much quicker and cleaner to code, but still compile to normal CSS and JavaScript. Forge also makes it easy to quickly bootstrap into and work from a clean and modular development environment, while still compiling “by the book” WordPress theme code.

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We recently started work on a brand new tumblog style theme with the wonderful and talented Ryan Essmaker. The design is still very much in the rough planning stages, but we know the theme will be responsive (automatically adjusts to the width of your browser or device) and geared towards artists, creatives, and photographers. It will also utilize WordPress Post Formats (of course!).

Ryan was awesome enough to share this early concept sketch with us. We’ll be sure to post links to any additional screenshots or teasers on Twitter and Facebook, so be sure to follow us there.

Watch the video on WordPress.tv

I had the opportunity to chat with Lance Willett, Brian Gardner, and David Cowgill on the business of selling WordPress themes at WordCamp San Francisco. A few of the topics we touched on include the GPL, marketing your business, customer support, and mistakes we’ve made.

Say hello to React! React is a simple and elegant WordPress theme for business featuring a fluid and responsive grid that allows for easy viewing from an iPhone, iPad, or other mobile device. The theme is packed with some other great features: custom typography, custom background (hides automatically on small screens), support for projects, and more.

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Hey there! My name is Andy Adams, and I’m the newest employee of The Theme Foundry. Yes, I’m the one that has been causing all the delays – sorry about that!

Drew wanted me to tell you a little bit about myself. You’ll probably start seeing me more often in the months to come – working on theme updates, the support forums, the blog, and more.

I have a beautiful wife (Natalie) and daughter (Marie), who are my pride and joy.

I’ve been a professional web developer for a little over 2 years. I started my career at Experts-Exchange doing Java development, and spent a year at Chief Architect in Coeur d’Alene, ID doing PHP work before starting with The Theme Foundry. I’m relatively new to WordPress development, but I have used WordPress off and on for the last several years.

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Early last week I ordered a copy of the much anticipated Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte. While reading through the book over the weekend I was pleasantly surprised and proud to see Shelf featured on page 105 as an example of a fluid layout with fixed-width elements.

The book itself is an excellent primer on implementing fluid grids and media queries into your web projects. In fact, I plan on using some of the techniques in our upcoming business theme. If you’re a web designer or developer it would certainly make a great addition to your library.

Earlier this year we decided the time was right to hire at least one full-time employee to help take the Foundry (and our parent company Jestro) to the next level. We underestimated the enormous amount of time this whole process takes, hence why their hasn’t been much excitement around here over the past couple months.

We are a small bootstrapped company and it is very important we carefully and diligently navigate through the entire process. Building the right team now will help us grow and continue to deliver a high level of service and support for our products over the long haul.

Excitement on the way

The good news is once we complete this process everything will start to pick up again, and at a much faster pace. Here’s what you can look forward to this summer:

• New business theme released in June July (instead of May).
• Announcement of a new theme project with Veerle Pieters.
• Introduction to our first full-time employee.
• An overhaul of our theme documentation and members area.
• Increased development on our existing theme collection.
• More premium themes available for purchase on WordPress.com.
• More news about our upcoming Memberful product.

Last week I started sketching out a some ideas for a new business theme. It’s still early in the design process, but I plan on ramping up development over the next few weeks. If all goes according to plan, it should be available for purchase sometime in May June July. The theme doesn’t have a name just yet, but that usually happens near the end of the process—after it’s personality has started to unfold.