AppThemes

If someone has ever submitted an ad on your site without any images attached, you’ll notice it uses the “No Image Available” placeholder image. For most people that’s fine but if you didn’t like the wording, color, or wanted to change it to a different language you needed to use image editing software.

Not anymore. Here’s a simple tutorial on how to easily change the default placeholder image without using any editing software. Continue reading »

With the roll-out of ClassiPress 3.0.3 behind us, we can now focus some of our resources on our next theme slated for release, JobRoller. This new premium theme will address the need for those looking to have their very own job board.

We decided to keep the design simplistic since many customers will want to style their job board to match their existing website. For those of you who don’t, it’s elegant enough to run as a standalone website so you can charge people to list their job reqs on your site.

Some of the features will include:

• Charge visitors to list jobs
• Custom job listing post type
• Separate write panel for job creation and editing
• Customer dashboard with ability to edit, delete, and renew job listings
• Integration with PayPal using their IPN functionality
• Multi-step new job posting wizard
• JQuery job application form with upload resume/cover letter
• JQuery auto complete for certain fields
• Search filtering based on job type (part-time, full-time, etc)
• Support for other languages
• and much more!

Here are a few screen shots to wet your lips:

Here's the multi-step wizard which includes an auto-complete field for the country.

Here's the final step in the wizard that gives you a summary of your job listing. This one is free so there's no price displayed.

Here's what the back-end custom write panel looks like. Notice it's totally separate from the "Posts" section. Custom post types in action.

We’re still on target to finish this next month. We would love to get your feedback on what you think thus far. That’s one thing we enjoy about working on new themes is the collaboration process. Some ideas are credited to the community and end up benefiting everyone.

The latest and greatest version of your favorite Classified Ads Theme has just been released. You can download it immediately from your customer account dashboard.

This patch included over 60 tickets ranging from bug fixes and a few minor enhancements. The most noteworthy change has to do with child themes. 3.0.3 takes full advantage of child theme capability including pluggable ClassiPress functions. No need to modify the core functions and risk losing your changes when it’s time to upgrade. You can override certain functions with your own modified version instead. Seth will be writing a tutorial on how to do this soon.

In addition, this sets the stage for an aftermarket of ClassiPress child themes built and contributed by our community. The door is now open for all you developers and we look forward to seeing your child-themes. An official AppThemes Marketplace will be announced later this year.

To see all the changes and which files were affected, take a look at the changelog.txt which is included in the 3.0.3 download. Make sure to read the 3.0.3 upgrade instructions if you are upgrading from 3.0.2. For a high-level of fixes, check out our previous blog post. Continue reading »

Some of you have been asking us how to make it easier to distinguish parent categories from sub-categories in your drop-down lists. It’s a great question and pretty easy to do.

Here’s what your drop-down lists should look like currently before the change we are about to make:

Drop-down menu before css change

Here’s what your drop-down lists should look like after we make the change: Continue reading »

A new version of ClassiPress is scheduled to be released next week. It is a general patch release that will address a handful of bugs along with a couple of new enhancements. Not all fixes are listed below but rather just the higher priority issues.

This release was actually delayed a few weeks because two important things had to happen first. The release of WordPress 3.0 (to make sure we didn’t have any compatibility issues) and the launch of AppThemes (so you can login to your account and download 3.0.3 instead of searching for your original e-junkie email).

Now that both of those milestones have been reached, it’s time to push out 3.0.3. Continue reading »

It’s certainly been one heck of a busy year for the ClassiPress team and now after months of hard work, we are pleased to announce our new website, AppThemes.

As you could probably tell, AppThemes is not your typical WordPress premium themes business. Our goal is to fit a much needed niche of providing business software easy enough to use without requiring a technical person to setup. What better system to build these apps on top off than WordPress.

Not only that but we also take pride in the quality of our code so developers can easily understand what’s going on. How many of you have ever downloaded or purchased a premium theme before only to discover the code is a mess or doesn’t even work properly? I’ve been there before and it’s frustrating especially after you already spent the money.

I call this the Great Oz effect. You have this powerful-looking character that looks great on the outside only to discover that behind the green curtain is a tiny little old man. I regress. Continue reading »

Over the last few months it’s appeared rather quiet here at ClassiPress HQ. In actuality, we’ve been quite busy behind the scenes working on a new update (v3.0.3) and a brand new company web site. We plan on launching the new site early next month (which we’ll announce in a separate post and email to all customers) and then the 3.0.3 update will be released soon thereafter. It’s a bug fix and feature enhancement release so nothing major.

Anyhow, the reason for this post was to provide a handy bit of mySQL code when migrating your ClassiPress site to another domain.

While going through the demo site migration process, we had to change a bunch of legacy meta_values which have the image urls hardcoded in them so the thumbnail and ad images weren’t showing up. Instead of manually having to go through hundreds of records, it made more sense to write a custom sql query to handle the same change in a matter of seconds. Continue reading »

It’s time for some spring cleaning and the customer showcase page needs an overhaul. Are you an existing customer currently using 3.0 and want to show off your work? Heavily modded or straight out of the box ClassiPress sites are both welcome.

If your site is selected for inclusion, you will be featured in our ClassiPress Customer Showcase  which is one of our most popular pages. This will put you front and center and includes such benefits as a free link from an authoritative WordPress Premium Themes site (great for SEO), additional free traffic, and bragging rights. Interested?

To enter, please submit a comment below with a link to your site and a brief description. All entries will be reviewed and then selected by the end of May. Good luck and we’re looking forward to seeing a few of the thousands of ClassiPress sites being used all around the world today!

This past weekend was the annual SF WordCamp which I had the pleasure to attend. It’s always a great event and the energy was especially high this year with the upcoming release of 3.0. The first day consisted of general sessions and a “State of the Word” keynote from Matt Mullenweg (WordPress founder). There was a nice bbq outdoor lunch and even live Jazz.

I also had the pleasure to meet Matt Mullenweg and Brian Gardner (who are both great guys, btw) to discuss WordPress 3.0 and Premium WordPress Themes. Lots of good stuff which has helped me strategize and better plan the direction of ClassiPress and the upcoming launch of our new theme business. It’s a very competitive environment and the sad part is lots of theme developers just aren’t doing a good job. It’s still the wild west when it comes to theming standards and guidelines. Hopefully that’s something WordPress will change in the future.

What I was surprised to see was the number of people who had iPads. It’s apparent that a majority of the attendees are early adopters and big fans of Apple. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised and in fact, I am one of those people as well sporting my new 3G iPad.

Overall this year was a great conference and if you’ve never been to a WordCamp before, I highly recommend going. Look for a WordCamp coming to a city near you.

Here are a couple pictures I took during day two at the “Unconference” for developers.

It’s a great experience so if you are able to ever attend a WordCamp, I highly recommend it!

How many of you have already started to take advantage of the child-theme feature within ClassiPress 3.0? I’ve started to see some forum threads on how to hack it a bit. All this is wonderful and the more I can get the community involved the better results for everyone.

So if you’ve started a child-theme, finished one, or just need someone to help you, please start the discussion below. I’m excited to see what the community has done thus far. Once everyone starts to get the hang of this, I’d like to hold a challenge. There’s nothing like good old fashion competition, right? This time it’s on a global scale and the winner will receive a prize (not yet disclosed). Who knows….we might soon be offering a theme aftermarket place where you can sell your stuff on our site.

So what are you waiting for and start those engines. For those who are still new and need some help, I recommend starting with these two articles.