NEW! iThemes Developer's Package -- Get all 10 Theme Series for One Low Price -- Details Here

Using iThemes to Create Client Websites

Just saw this post on Using WordPress to Build Websites and Not Just Blogs by Tom Johnson, one of our customers, who purchased our Essence Theme Series.

I’m excited to see our customers finding our themes solutions to their problems — creating great looking websites with WordPress.

We have designed our themes to act and feel more like websites than blogs. In fact, right now, we don’t currently have a blog-only theme. (Although, we’ve released 9 free WordPress blog themes.)

And as Tom says, WordPress is a great, simple content management system.

Filed Under General 

Join iThemes on Facebook

I’ve had a fan page on Facebook for quite some time … but just realized that I haven’t done a good job telling people about it.

Join us on Facebook …. and also here’s my personal profile. If you’re adding me as a friend, please note that you know me from iThemes, ESPECIALLY if you’re a customer.

Filed Under General 

iThemes’ New Free WordPress Themes 8-Pack

iThemes and 1800blogger have partnered to release 8 brand-new free WordPress themes to the WP community. These themes are widget-ready, search engine optimized and ready for download now!

[DOWNLOAD ALL 8 FREE WORDPRESS THEMES HERE]

The 8 themes included are:

[DOWNLOAD ALL 8 FREE WORDPRESS THEMES HERE]

This is in addition to the free Web 2.0 WordPress themes we’ve released previously.

Filed Under General 

The 5 Best Upgrades to WordPress 2.5

This is a guest post by Ryan Imel of Theme Playground.

WordPress 2.5 brings with it a very impressive and inspiring new visual administrative interface. While the overall upgrade is very noticeable, it may be the case that some have overlooked a few of the changes that lend for a better overall blogging experience. Hopefully this article will highlight some of these, bring them to your attention, and show how they might best be used in your blogging work flow.

1. Scrolling on the new post/page screen is no longer necessary.

Previously, in order to finalize and publish your work, it was necessary to scroll down to the bottom of the screen. This is because both the Publish and Cancel buttons were located at the bottom of the edit box, as most contribution forms like this are structured (think a comment section on a blog).

However, this upgrade takes away the need to scroll and gives you all you need right on the first screen you see. Now, scrolling is still necessary for adding any additional descriptions to the post (categories, tags, etc.) but the core functionality of writing and publishing can all take place with little to no scrolling at all.

2. Managing your photos on your blog just became a viable option.

WordPress has, the past, hardly been impressive when it came to file managing. It worked, but not in a way that was very exciting. Now, with the upgrade, managing photos, specifically, is a lot more fun. In fact, the new options and interface has been so inspiring that I’m actually moving away from the paid system Flickr to manage my photos in the open source environment that is my blog.

First of all, the editor now supports multiple file uploads. This is an absolute necessity when it comes to photo managing. Uploading one at a time is just not an option. Secondly, the ability to group photos into galleries and post them as complete sets is lots of fun. Honestly, more fun that posting images to Flickr.

In the end, we’re all going to be moving toward what we truly own and out of the silos. Flickr, for all of its great social networking capabilities, is still a silo network and bound to falter. The sooner we all prepare ourselves for managing our social networks in the most forward compatible way we can, the better.

All of this to say: start storing your photos using WordPress 2.5. It’s fun.

3. The XFN pushed forward in a real way in blogroll links.

The WordPress blogroll has for some time now given the ability to add in a rel to the outgoing link. Two point five goes one step further, giving every solid XFN rel option available, from friendship to geographical to romantic.

The XFN (or XHTML Friends Network) is, despite the terribly corny acronym, a very interesting and exciting way to communicate valuable information via the rel tag of outgoing links. For instance, adding rel=”met” to a link communicates that the page you are pointing at is representative of a person you have met. This information is then machine readable and can be used in all sorts of interesting ways. After all, once it is machine readable it means we can manipulate and play with it.

Anyone interested in learning more can follow this link to read about the XFN straight form the horse’s mouth.

4. Dashboard navigation is cleaner and leaner.

One of the easiest way to speed up the navigation of a page is to limit options. The old WordPress Dashboard sported a good number of main navigation links, each with at least a few sub navigation options underneath. With the upgrade the number of main navigation links shrinks to four: Write, Manage, Design, and Comments.

Anyone who is drawn to simplicity will love this. Screens like Settings and Plugins are still available from any screen of the Dashboard, but they are relegated to smaller links on the right side of the screen, a move that signifies the relative frequency of their being clicked versus the four main items.

Fewer options means fewer things you have to think about when you are dashing in to jot out a post. And that’s a good thing.

5. The improved visual editor makes writing more fun.

One of my biggest frustrations with WordPress used to be the visual editor, on by default when WordPress is installed. Before 2.5 I had every WordPress site I manage set so as I would use the HTML editor when writing posts, simply to avoid any sort of problems with the automatic formatting of posts.

With WordPress 2.5 comes an upgraded TinyMCE for the visual editor, and the changes are very noticeable. I have yet to have any additional code added in anywhere (like extra line breaks or empty paragraphs) and that makes for a very clean blogging experience. Especially when you are a code purist, like I am.

Closing Comments

WordPress isn’t perfect, but since it doesn’t claim to be this is just fine. There are a few things I’ve discovered while observing 2.5 where I believe WordPress could be improved upon. But that’s for my next post, where I cover the top five most important upgrades for WordPress as we look to the future.

Filed Under General 

An Ecommerce Template for Your Online Store

In case you haven’t subscribed to the New Themes Feed or our email newsletter, we just released Ecommerce Theme, a web theme designed to help you create and manage an online store to sell your products.

You can get more details in the announcement post, but we’ve also created a new division at iThemes called EcommerceThemes.com, where we will be launching more ecommerce-specific themes in the future. Stay tuned!

ecommerce theme

Filed Under General 

Adding Rotating Photos To Your Theme

We get asked this question a lot: How do I add rotating photos to my WordPress theme?

So I decided to do a quick video tutorial walking you through Chris Pearson’s simple random images tutorial.

Click here to view the How to Add Rotating Photos Video Tutorial, or the image below:

Also, you can download the script in RTF format here, or go straight to Chris Pearson’s tutorial post.

Filed Under WordPress Tutorials 

How to Optimize WordPress in 7 Steps

I’ve collected my 7 best tips for optimizing WordPress based on over a year and half of using WordPress and building dozens of sites for clients …. and put them all in a series of free video tutorials.

If you’d like to see each video individually, click on the titles below:

  1. Change your permalinks structure
  2. Install these plugins
  3. Include your main keywords in your title bar
  4. Put in your meta tags
  5. Paste your email newsletter form code here
  6. Write good headlines for search engines
  7. Study your traffic stats to refine your strategy

Filed Under WordPress Tutorials 

How to Upgrade WordPress Easily

We’ve just added two new sections to our Support Forums called WordPress Plugins and WordPress Tips, where we’ll start posting more of these type tips and hope you’ll do the same for others.

If you’ve never upgraded your version of WordPress, it can be a tad scary the first time …. but with the new Automatic WordPress Upgrade Plugin, it’s super easy and fast.

All you have to do is download the plugin, extract it, then upload it to your plugins folder on your WordPress installation. Then activate the plugin and follow the instructions.

If you haven’t already upgraded to WordPress 2.5, it’s well worth the upgrade for the incredible new Dashboard interface alone!

Filed Under WordPress Tips 

iThemes at Dallas WordCamp 2008

WordCamp DallasThere will be a number of people associated with iThemes at the Dallas WordCamp this weekend. If you’re going, we’d love to know so we can meet you in person.

As far as I know it’s not too late to register (just $20 a person, so it’s a bargain). My wife and I will be there celebrating our 5-year wedding anniversary. It’s pretty special when your wife says it’s OK to go to a conference on a big date like that (Thanks, honey!).

Matt M. will be there to talk about WordPress 2.5 and beyond, something we’re excited to see released based on some screenshots we’ve seen showing what the new Dashboard will be like. It’ll be a great time! See you there.

Filed Under General 

Our First Premium Theme Giveaway Contest

We’re sponsoring a contest by Ian Stewart of Theme Shaper to design the next default WordPress theme.

Ian’s idea is a great one …. try to encourage people to design the next WordPress theme that is installed with WordPress (there are two by default).

Although, as Ian says, the themes are great (particularly Kubrick), I hope this encourages some great participation in and enthusiasm for the WordPress community.

If you need some help with the development, check out our tutorial for WordPress developers!
See contest details here.

Filed Under General