E.Share

First of all, thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes to Theme Lab’s third birthday. The response was way bigger than any of the previous birthday posts, most likely because of the massive giveaway contest.

The Winners

As announced on Twitter yesterday, the winners are @momma_money, @WPminme, @ronaldb.

I have already gotten in touch with all of them and in the process of organizing the prize distribution. Big congrats to them.

The Prizes

As a refresher, here were the prizes again:

• A copy of the Genesis Theme Framework from StudioPress – $59.95 value
• A copy of the Genesis Buddy child theme from PremiumBPThemes.com – $24.95 value
• A personal license of the BackupBuddy plugin from PluginBuddy – $45 value
• A single site support license to Gravity Forms – $39 value*
• A PDF copy of the Digging into WordPress book – $27 value

Thanks to all the generous sponsors, couldn’t have done it without them! Well, actually I could have but it would have cost me $587.70, so it’s probably better that they donated the prizes.

Conclusion

I plan on writing up a review of the service I used to draw the winners, Tweetaways on my personal blog soon. There were a couple of minor glitches but overall it worked as advertised.

And now back to your regularly scheduled content. WordPress 3.0-friendly themes anyone?

Related posts:

1. Theme Lab Is 3 Years Old Today – Massive Three-For-All Giveaway
2. We Have Four Contest Winners
3. BackupBuddy Contest Winners Announced

Update: The contest is now over, and the winners have been chosen.

I left a little hint at the end of my last post, and to some this may not be a surprise to you, but to any Theme Lab is three years old today! It’s exactly three years after the first post here.

In the past year, lots was accomplished. Most notably, a new design, along with several new free theme releases and various coding tutorials and tips.

I wanted to celebrate the third birthday with a giveaway, so I contacted a select few of the leaders in the commercial WordPress product arena to donate three of each of their respective flagship product.

Giveaway Inspiration

My inspiration for this giveaway is pretty much all thanks to a tweet from @bradleypotter.

Note: Genesis 1.2.1 was released yesterday. Contest winners will receive the latest version.

So I thought, those prizes would be perfect for a giveaway. And there should be three of each, since it’s Theme Lab’s third birthday, it would only be fitting. But I didn’t stop there.

The Prizes

Three lucky winners will win each of the following:

• A copy of the Genesis Theme Framework from StudioPress – $59.95 value
• A copy of the Genesis Buddy child theme from PremiumBPThemes.com – $24.95 value
• A personal license of the BackupBuddy plugin from PluginBuddy – $45 value
• A single site support license to Gravity Forms – $39 value*
• A PDF copy of the Digging into WordPress book – $27 value

*This is actually a $39 coupon which could be used towards a Gravity Forms multi-site or dev license as well.

Check out the screencast below for a more in-depth overview of the various prizes.

And as promised, here’s my BackupBuddy WordPress plugin review.

How To Enter

I said in the video the giveaway would be like the previous giveaways here. I have since decided to use Tweetaways so you don’t have to leave a comment here to enter the contest.

• Make a tweet with the phrase “Rocking for 3 years” and “@themelab”
• More happy birthday wishes are welcomed, but not required.

Note: You have to use the exact phrase “Rocking for 3 years” because it’s how Tweetaways keeps track of the entries. And also make sure to put “@themelab” somewhere in your message. This is the bare minimum of an acceptable entry.

On Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 12:00 PM EST this content will be closed to new entries, and I’ll pick three winners (besides me) at random.

It would help if you followed me (@themelab) so we can communicate via direct message if you’re one of the three winners.

Conclusion

Time has really flown by. I’m using Tweetaways for the contest so in the comments, feel free to sound off with feedback of Theme Lab over the past few years. What do you think of the content? What do you think could be improved? I’d love to hear about it.

Related posts:

1. Three-For-All Giveaway Winners Chosen
2. BackupBuddy Contest Winners Announced
3. Theme Lab is 2 Years Old – Another Year In Review

Page.ly is a WordPress hosting service which describes itself as simply the fastest & easiest way to set-up a WordPress website. Some of its highlight features include automatic core updates and automatic nightly backups in a secure web hosting environment.

To get an idea of how simple it is to set up a WordPress site, take a look at the following “2 minute set up” video:

Joshua and Sally Strebel, the people behind the Page.ly service, have offered a giveaway of a free site for life for one lucky Theme Lab reader.

It’s really simple to sign up, just a simple comment + retweet. Read on for details.

Features

First, I want to go over some other features included in every Page.ly plan.

• Managed WordPress Hosting – As mentioned above, automatic core upgrades and nightly backups are taken care of for you.
• Premium WordPress Themes – Page.ly has partnered with commercial theme vendors like WooThemes and StudioPress to provide easy set up of their themes for an additional fee.
• 5 Gigabytes of Storage – Which is plenty of space, 20 email boxes, unlimited email forwards, and 8-Core Xeon Servers

How to Enter

The rules are pretty much identical to our previous giveaways.

Keep in mind Page.ly hosting normally costs $14.98/month, and the winner will be getting a free lifetime account. Of course, their terms of service still apply.

• Tweet a link back to this post saying you just entered the contest to win a free site from Page.ly, along with @themelab (my Twitter username) and @pagely (their Twitter account). If you need a short URL, use this: http://www.themelab.com/2024. For example: I just entered a contest at @themelab to win a free WordPress site from @pagely – http://www.themelab.com/2024
• Post a comment here with the permalink of the tweet you just made. It should be in a similar format to this: http://twitter.com/themelab/status/10079435298
• That’s it!

Please, only one entry per person. If I catch you trying to cheat, you’ll be disqualified.

On Friday, May 21, 2010 at 12:00 PM EST this content will be closed to new entries, and I’ll pick one winner at random.

You’ll be contacted through the e-mail address you leave in your comment, so please leave a valid email address, otherwise I’ll have to bother you on Twitter.

Conclusion

With all the hacks going around infecting WordPress sites with malware on certain hosts, it is very important you choose a host that takes security seriously. With Page.ly signing a deal with Firehost to maintain a secure server infrastructure, I’d say they do take security seriously.

So let’s start seeing those tweets + comments. Best of luck in the contest!

Related posts:

1. Page.ly Contest Winner Announced + Coupon
2. We Have Four Contest Winners
3. BackupBuddy WordPress Plugin – Video Review + Giveaway!

Some of you may have noticed the new ladder image labeled “Underground” in the top right corner of the site. I’ve been working on this behind the scenes for a while, basically it’ll be a new section of the site with primarily paid content/access.

What is the “Underground”?

Inside I’m planning on having a few things:

• Private forums where you can ask for WP/HTML/CSS help directly from me.
• Exclusive WordPress themes and tutorials coded and written by me, respectively.

Best of all, you’ll be able to buy individual themes and tutorials a la carte, or get an all access pass for the whole kit and kaboodle. Forum memberships will probably be a low monthly fee.

When will it launch? Aiming within a couple months, but an official launch date has yet to be determined.

New Newsletter / Mailing List

In other news, I’ve been meaning to start a mailing list for a while (that’s not directly tied to my RSS feed). I finally started one with MailChimp and it was actually way easier than I thought. I’m still learning more about it but the basic set up was pretty painless.

In the newsletter I’ll announce any news regarding Theme Lab, share any cool WordPress tips I come across, and other stuff. You can sign up using the form below.

Just the e-mail is required. You can enter your name too if you want the emails to say “Dear Your Name” at the top, but not necessary. Don’t worry, I won’t spam.

After confirming your e-mail address you’ll get the download link to the free WordPress theme below.

Free Theme

This theme is called Bright Spot, I’ve been using it as a “framework” for semi-custom themes. By framework I mean I customized the base theme with custom colors and a header, not to be confused with the likes of Thematic. I’ll go over this in the following screencast.

I went over all these in the video, but here are the basic features:

• Three color schemes: blue, green, red
• Integrates with WP125 for 125×125 ad management
• Integrates with WP-PageNavi plugin for numbered pagination
• Social networking links below each post

To download it, just sign up to the mailing list, confirm your e-mail, and the download link will be in the welcome email. You can check out the live demo too.

It might be a paid theme in the future, but for now I’ll leave it as a bribe to get people to sign up to the newsletter. If all you care about is the theme, feel free to unsubscribe right after you confirm your email address and download it. You’ll be missing out on some other newsletter goodies though.

Conclusion

Some of you may have seen this coming. I’ve had so many requests for detailed tutorials on coding/porting WordPress themes, but I felt that a high-quality detailed tutorial like that could (and should) be paid.

With the new forum, I’m hoping it can become a bustling community where people can get answers to their CSS and WP problems, fast. It will also be the home to all the free theme support, which means the current (sparingly used) support forums will be closed.

Oh by the way, the ladder graphic, Underground landing page were designed by James McDonald, the same guy who designed this site.

I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on this, any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Related posts:

1. Announcing Themelets
2. Icey Blue WordPress Theme Review
3. New WordPress Tutorials Page

If you know me, you might have heard about my addiction to domain names. If I see one I want, I’ll buy it. I have a lot of them, and most of them are unused because I’d like to focus most of my time to Theme Lab and not developing new sites. So, I’ve created a new page to list my domains for sale.

The Domains

On the page I’ve broken up the domains into three categories, the “WP” domains, the “theme” domains, and everything else in the miscellaneous section. There’s a bucketload of names there, chances are you’ll find at least a couple you’ll like.

At the moment I don’t have any fixed prices, this may change in the future. If you inadvertently lowball me, don’t worry, I won’t send my internet hounds after you.

Relevance

At first I was against this idea because I questioned myself how it would be relevant to this blog. Then I started thinking, if you’re reading this, you’re probably interested in web development, blogging, design, stuff like that.

Chances are, by extension, some of you are probably into domains too, and I might have something that interests you, so why not offer it up for sale?

Inspiration

I first got the idea for this when I saw a similar page over at Cats Who Blog where my good friend Jean-Baptiste Jung lists some of his domains for sale.

Also, pretty much all of my recent domain sales have come through people who know me through this blog in one way or another, I just think it makes sense.

Conclusion

So head on over to my brand spanking new domain sales page and make me an offer if you’re interested in any.

If you have a surplus of domains, would you consider doing something like this on your own site/blog? See any names you like on my list? Have I gone completely insane?

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Wpdesigner for sale
2. Premium Mod is For Sale on Flippa
3. Free Domain + Web Hosting + Premium Themes = ?

A number of you have asked me what happened to my “WordPress Weekend Resources” series since I haven’t posted one of those since September 2009. Basically what I would do is roundup some of the top WordPress-related links I found during the past week, and posted them on the blog with my take on it.

I stopped doing it, because I was posting most of these links on my Twitter account already. Although, for those of you who don’t use Twitter, or follow so many people you might miss one of my tweets, I created a new community links page.

This page is an automatically updated list of tweets from my @themelab account with either a #WordPress hashtag and/or a #tlcom hashtag. The “tlcom” stands for Theme Lab Community, by the way. Also, remember it only posts tweets with my Twitter account, so don’t try to spam the hashtags thinking it’s going to show up on that page, because it’s not.

It’s powered by Juitter, a jQuery plugin, which uses the Twitter Search API to pull my latest tweets with that criteria. Being powered by the Twitter Search API, I believe it only goes back seven days, so make sure you check it at least once a week.

With that said, I have a couple questions for you:

• Would you still be interested in WordPress Weekend Resources returning? Although you can get more real-time information through Twitter, it has a temporariness attached with it, as you can only go back 7 days or so with the search API. Blog posts would be more permanent, plus there would be more room for information in the descriptions.
• Would you be interested in a tutorial on how to make your own “Community Links” page template in WordPress? Although it wouldn’t have to be community links, pretty much anything that you can search on Twitter could be put on an automatically-updated page on your site.

Let me know in the comemnts, thanks!

Related posts:

1. GaMerZ Plugins Now Compatible With WordPress 2.5
2. WordPress Weekend Resources – June 6, 2008
3. Elegant Themes Releases New Theme Options Page

It’s been a great year for Theme Lab, the community, and WordPress in general. We’ve seen a number of innovations, such as the Builder theme by iThemes. We’ve seen some cool new WordPress-related sites like WP Questions and WP Chat.

Being the end of the year, I thought I’d take this opportunity to highlight some of the best content here at Theme Lab this past year. Without further ado…

Add a Widgetized Footer to Your WordPress Theme – A step-by-step tutorial on how to add a widgetized footer to (almost) any theme. Includes HTML, CSS, and WordPress code examples.

Gallery WordPress Theme Review – Gallery is a free Thematic child theme designed by Chris Wallace. It was no doubt one of the most stunning free theme releases of the year. In my theme review I went over the features and how to use them.

Are Free WordPress Themes Dead? – This post of mine was a response to a post at WPShout entitled Free WordPress Themes? Forget it. It’s Over. Basically, I disagreed that all free WordPress themes were dead, but rather lame, boring themes were (as they should be).

Jungleland – Free WordPress Theme – Speaking of lame and boring themes, Jungleland certainly is not one of those. Designed by Styleshout, I took the template and ported it to WordPress with custom thumbnail support and a whole lot of widgetized areas. It was featured on one of Smashing Magazine’s recent free theme roundups.

Newsworthy – Free WordPress Theme – This is a free news/magazine theme designed by DemusDesign. I took the template and ported it to WordPress, again with custom thumbnail support and even more widgetized areas than Jungleland.

Interview with the Owner of Premium Mod – Of course, how could I not mention this now “infamous” interview with the owner of Premium Mod? What started out as a relatively straightforward interview with someone who re-released modified commercial themes for free, erupted into a gigantic GPL fight in the comments.

Stop Downloading WordPress Themes from Shady Sites – In this enlightening post, I go over the issue with encrypted/malicious code in distributed WordPress themes. There’s also a video which shows how the sites with top rankings in Google for keywords like “free wordpress themes” tend to have encrypted code in their themes.

Conclusion

Although this isn’t really “content” per se, I thought the new Theme Lab design was also worth mentioning, which was introduced earlier this December.

Hope you all had a good 2009. For the upcoming year, I’d like to hear what you’d like to see on Theme Lab in 2010. More free theme releases, WordPress tips/tutorials, theme reviews, videos/screencasts?

Sound off in the comments. And of course, happy new year!

Related posts:

1. Are Free WordPress Themes Dead?
2. 10+ Most Creative Free WordPress Themes in 2009
3. Theme Lab is 2 Years Old – Another Year In Review

May 14th, 2008. That was the day of Theme Lab’s last redesign and over one and a half years later, I thought it was time for a change. Just for posterity, here’s a screenshot of the old design.

In this post I’ll go over a few of the changes in the new design, there’s also a video.

Featured Area

At the top of nearly every page of the blog is a new featured area. Here there will be a list of handpicked articles showcasing some of the best content here on Theme Lab. To the right is a theme slider, which lists the 11 latest theme downloads. Hover over each theme to see the name and description.

Tag Pages

With this redesign are also completely redone tag pages. They will list a maximum of 6 themes per page on all the tags with more prominent demo and download links. Click around in the tag cloud in the footer to check those out.

Shout out to Eric Sizemore for the code that separates the theme name and the text after the hyphen in the title.

Threaded Comments

In the old design I used a plugin called Brian’s Threaded Comments to handle the comment threading. This was before 2.7 was released so the comments in the new theme make use of WordPress’ built-in comment threading with room for 3 levels deep of comments.

Also take note of the small green reply link on the bottom right of each comment available for reply.

Other Miscellaneous Changes

• Related post listings on single posts by YARPP
• New social bookmarking icons on each single post page
• A Twitter feed of my three latest tweets in the lower right footer area
• Text display of FeedBurner subscriber count thanks to this code
• Only three posts per page (instead of ten)
• No more trackback or pingback display in the comment area

Video Tour

Also go over a bunch of these in the following video.

The Old Theme

Ever since I launched the old theme (pictured above) over a year ago, I’ve received many compliments and requests for the theme to use on their own blogs. I have decided I will be releasing it in some form or another very soon, although it likely will not be free. Keep your eyes peeled for that.

Conclusion

Like I mentioned in the post title, the design was by James McDonald. You can check out his portfolio at Enthusiastik.

I think he did a great job with it and really captured the grungy and dark look I was going for. Hopefully you like it to, let me know what you think in the brand new comment form.

Also, if you notice any issues or bugs with the new theme, please let me know in the comments. I coded it myself and think I tested it pretty thoroughly, although I could always do with an extra set of eyes.

Related posts:

1. Brand New Design on Theme Lab
2. The Ultimate Guide to the WordPress Loop
3. Make a Sitemap Page For Your WordPress Blog

Custom Theme is a project I’ve been working on for about a month now. Basically, I’m going to offer an affordable custom WordPress theme development service.

I’ve received a number of inquiries through Theme Lab asking if I offered custom theme design services. I’ve had to turn down these requests because, to put it simply, I don’t design.

I do code though, so when I came across the opportunity to acquire this perfect domain name, I decided to partner with a designer and offer a service like this.

The designer is Peter Mark of Hive Designs. You may know him as the designer of the Theme Lab theme (the one I’m currently using) as well as a few free themes here.

So, at these prices I’m expecting to get a lot of orders. If you want a custom WordPress theme, be sure to check out the site and make your order soon.

Some of you picked up the hint at the bottom of my last post, but today is Theme Lab’s second birthday! It is exactly two years after the first post, and exactly one year after Theme Lab’s first birthday.

Like last year, I’d like to take this opportunity to review the past year and let you know what’s in the plans for the future of this site. Also like last year, this will be a long and gushy post. If you don’t like long and gushy posts, you should probably stop reading now.

History

The past year had a number of highs and lows. Some very popular themes were released here, including Miniml which was featured on sites such as Smashing Magazine, among other sites.

A large chunk of the year, however, the blog was left dormant due to personal reasons. I later revived it, and luckily a lot of you stuck around.

On last year’s “History” section, I had a part where I showed the past designs of this site. Well, looking back, it seems I’ve stuck with this one for over a year!

I was planning on unveiling a new design today, but unfortunately I couldn’t get it ready in time. More on that below.

Thank You

This blog wouldn’t really be much if it wasn’t for you, the readers. The feedback and comments I receive from this site daily are what keeps me motivated to release more and more themes and WordPress-related content.

Top Commentators

Thanks to the following commentors. These people have commented on a number of posts in the past year.

• Anto
• Keith
• Calítoe.:.
• ThemeLib.com
• cuteegirlee

Blogs

Thank you to the following blogs. These blogs have helped out Theme Lab in one way or another.

• WP Tavern
• WordPress Hacks
• Fun with WordPress
• WPMU Tutorials
• Mashable
• WPZOOM
• ThemeShaper
• Lorelle on WP
• Blog Herald

WordPress

Of course, none of this would be possible without WordPress and it’s lead developers.

• WordPress.org
• Matt Mullenweg

I apologize if I missed anyone.

The Future

I’m not going to go into too much detail on this part, because I believe this may be true. I have a few other WordPress-related sites I’m planning on launching in the near future. I’ve already launched Themelets, but will be launching at least a couple more.

As usual, I will be releasing more free themes as well as tutorials and other WordPress news from around the community.

And no, I’m not selling this blog, which is a question I get asked a lot. Blogging on at Theme Lab is fun for me, and unless someone wants to offer me some ridiculous amount of money, I doubt I’ll sell any time soon.

Conclusion

I’ll be honest, I didn’t even remember my own blog’s birthday until exactly three days ago when this CWC birthday post jogged my memory.

Like I said above, I was planning on unveiling a new site design today, but three days really isn’t enough time to get everything ready. Look out for that soon though.

In the comments, I’d love to hear your feedback on what should be focused on most in the next year. More themes, tutorials, articles? Sound off.