Chris Wallace » WordPress

WordPress Default CSS Styles

Chris — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:13:03 +0000

MightyDeals: 13 Premium Themes and 2 Plugins for just $49

Chris — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 05:50:06 +0000

If you haven’t heard already, UpThemes is offering one of the most insane WordPress bundles ever sold through awesome design discount site MightyDeals. At 90% off regular price, this once-in-a-lifetime bundle includes some of the coolest themes out there, including the Garage Band theme for bands, the Charity theme for non-profits, the Evo theme for photo galleries, and the Conversate theme for group microblogging.

We’ve dropped in the new Twitter Search Plugin ($9 value) by Rogie King and the popular ($30 value) Events Calendar Pro plugin from Brandon Jones and you’ve got one sick package of WordPress goodies.

Buy it now from MightyDeals

10 Awesome Themes from the ThemeForest Redesign

Chris — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:15:18 +0000

You may not have noticed, but the rest of the world has. Collis Ta’eed and Envato have just completely revamped the Envato Marketplace, including ThemeForest.net. With the latest redesign, I wanted to share some awesome themes that I think really deserve a look when purchasing a new theme for your blog or a client project. These are hot, yo!

Atlantica – $30

One of the most popular authors and a guy I look up to, epicera, really hit a home run with the Atlantica theme, offering one of the most beautiful and unique themes available on ThemeForest to date. Buy this theme

Pacifica – $30

Another theme by epicera, he doesn’t miss the mark with his latest, Pacifica, which is another beautiful and highly functional theme based off the Atlantica series. Buy this theme

Noctis – $25

This is probably the most undervalued theme on ThemeForest. This theme is one of my personal favorites and really offers a high-end look for any video game or design blog. The background is beautiful and the abundance of beautiful images throughout really makes this one a gem. Buy this theme

WordFolio – $35

WordFolio is one of the more popular themes on ThemeForest, and for good reason. It is a gorgeous theme with a really unique jQuery slider to showcase your portfolio items. Buy this theme

Twicet – $35

From one of the most popular authors, Kriesi, Twicet is a very clean, easy-to-customize theme with a very minimalist look and feel. Buy this theme

Stylemix Folio – $25

This theme is actually a very nice one, coming in with a strong color palette and a good set of features like a jQuery homepage slider. Buy this theme

Smart Portfolio – $25

A great theme for sharing your portfolio, contact info, and social media sites you use, Smart Portfolio is clean and simple, just the way I like it. Buy this theme

Post It – $20

Post It is a neat theme, with 4 illustrated characters and color schemes to choose from. This is a unique theme and easy to customize. Buy this theme

Parade Theme – $20

This is a hidden gem on ThemeForest. This is a very beautiful theme that includes some really nice functionality and a beautiful, elegant look. Buy this theme

Imperial – $30

Imperial is a Matt Brett theme, and it is another great video game blog theme, offering some pretty wicked features and an abundance of activity on the homepage. Buy this theme

10 Greatest WordPress Themes Ever

Chris — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 05:05:04 +0000

I love WordPress. That’s why I put together my list of the 10 greatest WordPress themes ever. I tried to avoid having too many “frameworks” and obviously excluded my own themes, Gallery, DesignFolio+, and Absynthe, which could possibly have made the list (in my dreams). Please enjoy and as always, add your own suggestions and omissions in the comments.

Agregado – A beautiful and feature-robust theme from Darren Hoyt and Matt Dawson released with Smashing Magazine which includes a lifestreaming component.

Grid Focus – One of the most well-known and most-used themes out there, you’ll find quite a few design pros using this theme, like David Airey and Ryan Carson of Carsonified.

Thematic – awesome foundation for developers to build child themes off of. I built the Gallery theme as a child theme of Thematic.

Cutline – One of the first themes claiming to be more than just a theme but instead “a platform on which developers and designers can easily build on, and which users can easily modify and manipulate to their needs.”

Typebased – Very well-designed and flexible theme from Woothemes designed by Magnus Jepson.

F8 – awesome for showcasing beautiful photography and portfolio elements.

The Unstandard – An atypical WordPress theme where content defines the design.

Grid-a-Licious – A unique approach to a WordPress theme, it uses jQuery to add or subtract columns as the window width is modified.

Hybrid – One of the most popular “frameworks,” Hybrid is another great foundation to develop child themes on top of, which prevents you from making changes that keep you from upgrading your parent theme in the future.

Modern Clix – Another grid-based theme, this one has a clean appearance and beautiful layout.

Gallery 1.2 Released

Chris — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 06:05:59 +0000

This post is outdated. The Gallery theme is now available from my theme company, UpThemes. You can download it here. Also, be sure to check out Gallery Pro, the professional version of the popular free Gallery theme.

Widescreen Video Embedding with Simple Video Embedder Plugin

Thanks to Jason Schuller’s easy-to-implement video embedding plugin, Gallery now supports video embedding from popular video sites like YouTube and Vimeo, even allowing you to add your own custom code if not supported. This is an awesome addition to Gallery and I even created a new icon for posts with video so you can differentiate between regular posts and video posts. You will want to download Simple Video Embedder from Press75.com to take advantage of this beautiful plugin. I believe it is also available from WordPress.org, so you can install this via the WordPress admin, just search for the title and off you go.

Added Single-Level Drop-Down Styles

This may seem pretty basic and very 1.0, but it was overlooked in previous versions and now you may add sub-categories with great joy and zeal. Enjoy.

Updated CSS & Image Sizes

A lot of people had issues either with thumbnails not being styled properly after changing their homepage to a single page or something similar and also with the size of the “Full Image” being set at 500×375. With this update, you no longer are required to use a fixed 500×375 image. As long as it is LESS THAN 500px wide, it will show up properly, anything larger and it will jack up the page. You asked for it, I gave it to you, don’t be a fool. Stay in school. Or something. In addition, the guys from Thematic added a “not-singular” class to their list of class names for pages in order to satisfy one of my needs with Gallery, the need to display thumbnail grids without having to specify 5 different page layout classes that could possibly change or be broken at any time. This basically fixes a bug in Gallery which was caused by an inflexibility in Thematic, which was fixed in the latest Thematic release.

Removed all Page Templates from Theme Folder

Basically, with the latest version of Thematic, Gallery does not need ANY page templates to function properly, instead utilizing ‘functions.php’ to insert, modify, and remove stuff from Thematic as necessary. This means you can upgrade Thematic or Gallery independently, without worrying about breaking either of them (hopefully).

NOTE: When upgrading Gallery, you will need to COMPLETELY REMOVE THE OLD GALLERY THEME FOLDER.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it, an updated version of Gallery. I’d like to thank Ian Stewart and Chris Gossman for their support of this theme and for providing the rock-solid Thematic Framework, which basically kicks all other frameworks’ butts, especially Thesis, which blows (actually, I’ve never used it, I’m just trying to start a fight .

Comments? Rock them out below and I will try to answer them, though I will admit due to a high level of comments and emails I may never respond to you. However, I do read all comments, which is good.

Small Potato Out of Hiding: An Interview with Tung Do

Chris — Mon, 25 May 2009 20:46:38 +0000

If you’ve been involved with WordPress the past few years, odds are you know Tung Do (a.k.a. Small Potato), who ran WPDesigner.com until it was sold last year to deadbeat owner Pawel Ciszewski for $66,000. SP made the decision to leave the WordPress community while frustrated WordPressers watched WPDesigner sit for months with no trace of Pawel or SP to be found. It has been a year since all this went down and I thought it might be nice to catch up with SP and chat about how everything went down and what he’s been up to since last year. If you have any questions you’d like to ask, leave them in the comments and he may just stop by and answer them at some point.

1. Known in the WordPress community as “small potato,” you built up wpdesigner.com with great tips, tutorials, the first viable theme club, and a really tight community of WP-ers, what sparked the decision to sell wpdesigner.com?

i sold it because of personal reasons. i posted those reasons on my other blog (braintied.com), which is no longer online. basically, life didn’t turn out right. i was getting tired. i knew i had to change it so i did. although i could’ve kept partial ownership of wpdesigner.com, leaving it all behind was best.

2. Do you have any regrets after selling it with the way it’s been reduced to what amounts to an affiliate landing page?

No regrets, just disappointed.

3. After selling wpdesigner, you pretty much only use the internet for email these days. What have you been up to in “real life” since then?

After selling the site, I wanted to travel to find whatever I was looking for. I guess you could say it’s soul searching… sort of. And following some long, long vacations (hehehe), I decided to go back to my roots, which is Viet Nam. Prior to moving there, visiting Viet Nam felt like coming home and I wanted to hold on to that feeling. Besides traveling, moving to Viet Nam, learning how to pick-up girls (with some success hehe) and learning how to play the guitar, I gather experience here and there like the time I tried out teaching english to Vietnamese kids. Also, for some time, I was working on a new WordPress site. Unfortunately, it never went online. More than anything, it was wrong timing.

Right now, I’m designing again.

4. You had a pretty public falling out with theme designer and entrepreneur Adii as a result of a critique of one of his themes for Unique Blog Designs. Have you followed any of his work since then? In addition, what do you think of WooThemes?

I’d rather not comment on Adii and WooThemes. Whatever I say will simply continue the back and forth betwen me and Adii. It’s pointless.

Rusty Grunge Closing in on 9,000 Downloads from WordPress.org

Chris — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:09:11 +0000

My very first public WordPress theme (released in November ’08) is closing in on 9,000 downloads from WordPress.org, thanks mostly to it being on the front page the whole time. If you’ve downloaded and/or used Rusty Grunge on your WordPress-powered site, I’d like to say thank you for the props and for letting me know about any and all bugs in the theme. I am currently working on adding support for WP 2.7′s threaded comments and addressing some issues with search and category display.

You can download Rusty Grunge here or take a test drive to see what it’s all about.

As always, there will be more free themes in the future, so continue to check back regularly. I also plan on releasing themes for Elgg, an open-source social networking platform and Drupal in the near future in addition to my usual WordPress themes.

Top 10 Designer Blogs on the Web in 2008

Chris — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 13:33:47 +0000

If you love to check out fancy blogs, then you will love this list of 10 top blog designs from designers! These are the cream of the crop, the creme de la creme, so take notes and enjoy.