By Ryan Imel on June 8, 2011
DevPress launched last September, as a collaborative work between four WordPress professionals: Justin Tadlock, Patrick Daly, Ptah Dunbar, and Tung Do. They created a good deal of buzz with the launch of their free News theme, and a few blog posts to get things rolling.
That buzz might just continue this week, with the news that they have relaunched their site with a new commercial theme called Visual designed for social and photo blogging. We have redesign comparison screenshots just after the jump, as we usually do, as well as the stylish video they made promoting their new theme.
In addition to the relaunch of their site, now using BuddyPress and the newly beta’d bbPress plugin, their new Visual theme costs $30. It looks like DevPress is entering the commercial theme space with this entry.
The screenshot below has the old DevPress design on the left, and the new one on the right. Click for the full size version.
In case a relaunched site with fresh activity, a new vision, and a redesign screenshot comparison aren’t enough for you (if so, what’s wrong with you?) they also put together a spiffy video for their latest theme.
Click here to view the embedded video.
What do you think of DevPress’ chance in the commercial theme market? Are you excited to see what this group’s collaborative efforts will create?
Posted in News | Tagged Themes |
By Ryan Imel on June 8, 2011
Last week on Twitter Brian Gardner of StudioPress pinged two designers/developers who pretty regularly work with StudioPress’ Genesis theme framework. He said basically the same thing to each of them:
@BillErickson Hey – are you around on Skype right now? Want to talk about something *really* interesting.
Normally this wouldn’t raise a collective eyebrow at WPCandy. But on the same day (May 27th) Gardner commented on this very blog in response to a member of our community named Donnacha:
Donnacha, I just want to thank you for this comment. You’ll know why at some point in the relatively near future, but in the meantime wanted to say how much I appreciate you leaving this.
You can read Donnacha’s in full to put Gardner’s comment in perspective, but the part we believe is most relevant here is when Donnacha said:
There was a stage, last year, when the Genesis framework by StudioPress seemed to be well-ahead of the pack but I think they dropped the ball when they cancelled plans to launch a Genesis-based marketplace for third-party designers – obviously, StudioPress had a lot of other things going on, other projects that needed those resources, but I suspect, in the longterm, that establishing their framework as the standard is an opportunity they will regret not grabbing when they had the chance.
It seems StudioPress has something up their sleeve, and coming relatively soon. If we’re correct in pulling out this piece of Donnacha’s comment, it would seem Gardner was speaking about a future Genesis child theme marketplace.
What do you think? Does StudioPress have something like this up their sleeve or around the corner (depending on the metaphor you prefer)? Are we picking up the right thread here, or do they have something else planned? Drop your predictions in the comments below.
Posted in News | Tagged Themes |
By Ryan Imel on June 8, 2011
VaultPress customers will now be notified if their site is down (or can’t be reached by VaultPress) for five consecutive hours, due to an update that was just enabled yesterday.
John Ford shared the news on the VaultPress blog, along with the list of problems that could trigger an email from VaultPress. Along with standard issues like internal server errors and connection timeouts, VaultPress will also notify you if the plugin seems to be deactivated from your site, to make sure your site stays backed up and safe.
It’s possible that some self-hosted users with not-quite-hero-worthy hosting could be receiving heads-up emails from VaultPress fairly often. Do you think this gentle prodding from VaultPress could encourage users to beef up their host a bit?
Posted in News | Tagged Plugins |
By Ryan Imel on June 7, 2011
Scott Berkun announced today that WordPress.com blogs now allow the validation of comments via Facebook and Twitter accounts. Users can be signed in to multiple accounts and choose which one they would like identified with their comment.
What does this mean for dot org, self hosted users? Today it doesn’t mean much, but according to Automattic’s Michael Adams, the features will “likely” be added to a future version of the Jetpack plugin. Jetpack was released by Automattic a few months ago and brings WordPress.com features to self hosted WordPress users.
By the way, the WordPress.com team gets extra points for their Fight Club reference in their post image (seen above). His name is Robert Paulsen…
How do you choose to let your users comment on your blogs? Are you interested in easily letting your visitors comment using Twitter and Facebook accounts?
Posted in News | Tagged Plugins |
By Ryan Imel on June 7, 2011
wpMail.me is a new project started by Cristian Antohe that describes itself as “a concise, once-weekly free roundup of WordPress news and articles.” The email list sends out an email each week with a curated list of what’s new in the world of WordPress.
If you want more WordPress in your inbox, check out their example issues and join the list yourself.
What’s your favorite way of catching up on the WordPress community? RSS, Twitter, or email lists like this? What do you rely on the most?
Posted in News, Wordpress |
