Archive for April, 2008

Is it time to ignore 800 by 600 Resolution yet?

Filed under Design Thoughts by Sadish

When I started designing WordPress Themes for the first time, my machine was set to 1024 x 868. FastTrack WordPress Theme If you look at my designs like “FastTrack“, “GreenFlower” etc, you would see that they are designed for people using 800 x 600 resolution.

Recently I saw a post titled Blog Re-themeing on some website. The owner of that website moved away from FastTrack as he felt it is “too narrow”.GreenFlower WordPress Theme

I would like to ask you people for your opinions. Are we at a point where we can safely ignore the 800 x 600 and start designing for 1024 x 768 resolution?
Please pour in your thoughts.
Thanks.

15 responses so far

How to use an Internationalized theme for WordPress?

Filed under WordPress Tips by Sadish

As you know, the latest version of MistyLook Theme for WordPress is fully internationalized. It means people can use it for their own sites in their language, without editing the theme files.

Right now, I have 3 people submitting their translations [.mo files] for the MistyLook theme.
1.German Translation File by Ulli.
2. Dutch Translation File Jozef Schildermans.
3. Russian Translation File by Elf.

You can download these files from the theme page, but how do you use them?

1. Set your language in WordPress Configuration.
To do this, you have to open wp-config.php file in your WordPress installation’s root folder.
Here you will be looking for a setting called wp_lang.
define ('WPLANG', '');
and to change the settings to German for example, change it to
define ('WPLANG', 'de_DE');

2. Download the respective language file from our theme page, and put that file [de_DE.mo for german for example] in the theme folder.

You think there are more steps? no. thats it. Go ahead and view your site.

4 responses so far

My ideas about a theme club

Filed under Themes Club by Sadish

I am just putting down my thoughts about the “theme club” that I am going to start pretty soon.
Nothing is written on the stone, so feel free to contradict with me if you want.

All Themes at the Launch Date
I am planning to release 10 themes for the club members. All 10 themes available at the time of launch.
Nobody knows what will happen in the future and so I do not want to charge you for a theme that I am yet to release.
I have seen many people feeling dejected after joining the SP’s theme club. Even though it was just 5 dollars and he already gave 4 premium themes, people still feel dejected because they expected to get 12 themes for the 5 dollars. I do not want this to happen to my club members.

No Need for License Removal Fees
Club members can use the theme as they like and they do not have to pay any fee to remove the link in the footer. If you are a web designer, you can use it for your clients too without paying a penny to us.

Theme Customization Support
If you have been to our support forums before, you would know how many different theme customization requests we do solve every day.
Club members will get the same kind of support.

Support for Future versions of WordPress
Within an year, there will be 3 to 4 new versions of WordPress released. We will make sure we update our Club Themes to work with the different versions.

Quality of the Themes
I have been building the WordPress Themes since the day WordPress started supporting Themes [from WordPress 1.5]. I have released a whole lot of free WordPress Themes and Premium WordPress Themes. You can also see a demo of them here and there.
So, I do not need to explain what you can expect.

OK…what will be the yearly fee and when can we join?
I am finalizing the fee amount for the club, and if you would like to be the first to know,
Subscribe to our Feed or Subscribe by Email.

Your Opinions
I welcome your Opinions on this club. Please post it as a comment to this post.

9 responses so far

How to have a stylish blockquote as in Magazines?

Filed under WordPress Tips by Sadish

Recently Francesco asked me How to have a stylish blockquote as in Magazines? in our support forums.
He actually provided a site where he saw a blockquote style that he liked and I looked into it.
Continue Reading »

12 responses so far

MistyLook 3.6 for WordPress 2.5

Filed under Free WordPress Themes by Sadish

MistyLook Screenshot
MistyLook 3.5 works perfectly fine with the latest WordPress 2.5, of course all of my other themes work fine as well.
Today I am releasing the 3.6 version of the MistyLook for all of you with the following changes.

Fully Internationalized for easy translation
Well, as I was telling you about “What it takes to internationalize a theme?“, I mentioned about Henrik’s work on the version 3.5 of the MistyLook theme. I took his work as a basis for the new version and so 3.6 of MistyLook is fully internationalized for easy translation to any language.

Support for Gravatar
As WordPress 2.5 supports Gravatar by default, I took the time to add the necessary code to the comments.php and the style.css file to natively support Gravatar when used with WordPress 2.5.
The theme would still work fine in previous versions of WordPress as well.

Footer Links
This theme is no longer a sponsored theme, but it has two links in the footer.
One for the theme link at wpthemes.info and the other link pointed to wprocks.com [the website you are reading right now]. The License Info for the theme remains the same.

Support for other Languages
Danish Translation file, done by Henrik, is ready as of now. I still need volunteers for creating language specific .MO files for other languages. Please get in touch with us, if you can help us in this endeavor.

Download
Go ahead and download it right from the
theme page at wpthemes.info

22 responses so far

What it takes to internationalize a theme?

Filed under WordPress Tips by Sadish

Quite often, I do get emails from people who wants a version of my theme, ported to their language. I always thought it is a cumbersome job to make the theme internationalized.
but recently my opinion got changed by a Danish guy.

Henrik from http://henrik.schack.dk/ recently contacted me asking me if it is OK to release the Danish version of MistyLook that he worked on.

I had a little chat with him over the email and this is what I learned.
Continue Reading »

13 responses so far