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.

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.

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.

Some customers who were translating ClassiPress into their own language were getting frustrated because of a bug. Essentially some of the admin pages weren’t translating even after the correct text was being added to the .po file.

For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why only one certain includes file wasn’t getting translated correctly. I must say this was a sneaky little bug which actually turns out to be an easy fix.

The problem was the WordPress function that handles the translation, load_theme_textdomain was loading after one of the admin pages was being included.

I’ve written up a fix for this in the forum which will also be included in 3.0.3 next month.

On another note, I’ve also created a .po file that excludes the admin pages. This gives you the option to only translate the customer-facing web site pages which is much faster to do. This was a request by one of our existing customers, Magnus (thanks) and it makes a lot of sense.

You can download this file from our ClassiPress Resources page. It’s the Version 3.0.2 download link.

The latest version of ClassiPress has just been released today. It is a general patch release that fixes 10+ bugs and includes 15 or so enhancements. It is recommended that you upgrade to this release so you can benefit from the changes. Existing customers can login to their account and download the latest version.

Below you will find a list of all fixes and changes in this release. For specific files affected, please see the changelog.txt file accompanied with the 3.0.2 download.

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

Key Bug Fixes

• Issue where translated CP prevents widget sidebars and footer from working
• Admin page text is not included in the .pot translation file
• HTML TinyMCE editor requires submit button to be pressed twice
• Google maps get directions functionality gives a 404 error
• Home page pagination incorrect by counting blog posts

Today I have released a general bug fix release which patches up 25+ bugs found in the original 3.0 product. It is highly recommended that you upgrade immediately to this release to benefit from the fixes. Existing customers should use their original e-junkie email download link to get it.

You will need to replace your existing /themes/classipress/ folder with this new version. Deactivate the theme first before doing this. Then reactivate 3.0.1 because there are some items that need to be updated in your database.

Below you will find a list of all fixes and changes in this release. For specific files affected, please see the changelog.txt file accompanied with the 3.0.1 download.