We have a couple of useful tips for Vantage owners in today’s post. And another tip from Dave that will help you avoid the default WordPress error page. Let’s dive in.

How to Create a Child Theme for Vantage

Vantage child theme tutorialWant to take control of your Vantage site? How about giving it a good ol’ remodeling with new backgrounds, colors, fonts – the whole deal? Well, if you have enough HTML/CSS knowledge, giving Vantage a completely new look is well within your hands.

In our first tutorial about creating child themes for Vantage, we will show you how to make a basic child theme. We’ll also show you how to make some simple CSS changes with your new child theme. These tools alone will be enough to totally overhaul the look and feel of Vantage. Make it your very own. Change it to fit your branding. The choice is yours.

Hey, it’s me again, Tyler Carter, part of the product development team on AppThemes. I’m here to discuss Vantage, and the awesomeness that we are so excited to share with you. That’s right, I’m talking about Vantage 1.1.

Offer multiple payment plans

We’ve packed so many features into this release and we can’t wait to get it out. It’s even more solid, usable, and reliable than ever. Here’s just a few of the 6,000 code changes that were made so far:

Pricing Plans

With our new payments API, you can set up your own pricing plans to allow your customers to pick any combination of price and duration they’d like. Every pricing plan can also include either one of the site’s featured options, and can be assigned on a per-category basis.

This Tuesday, we have some important information that affects users and developers of child themes. So let’s get right to it.

Introducing Wrappers

Click to read tutorialThe new AppThemes framework uses a file called wrapper.php. Wrapper provides a nice tidy place where the html, head, and body tags live. Since these tags are no longer in header.php or footer.php, it reduces the need to make repeated calls for get_header() and get_footer().

While it is more efficient, we need to warn you that the new wrapper file can break existing child themes. The good news is that you don’t have to do a lot to fix it. Dave Cowgill has created a tutorial introducing the AppThemes wrapper.php file. The more technically inclined might want to read Scribu’s post on wrappers.

I’m sure you all have been waiting with bated breath, and your patience has been rewarded. I’m here to announce that the first update to Vantage is here.

Vantage 1.0.1 has a bunch of stuff that you’ve been asking for:

Themed Logins
You asked, we listened. Login, Registration, and the rest of the user experience is themed for an immersive experience for your users.

Bundled Child Theme
We’ve bundled a child theme right along with Vantage. The child theme is the absolute basics but it’s a head start to creating child themes the best way possible. All you have to do is move it from the Vantage directory to the Themes folder, and start modifying.

We would first like to announce that the response to Vantage has been phenomenal. We are really encouraged by how much people like the theme and have posted some very supportive comments. Thank you everyone. We look forward to adding even more features to Vantage as soon as possible.

Quite a few people have asked us about the checkout process after an end-user creates a listing in Vantage. It’s not possible to see this with the demo, so we thought it would helpful to create a video.

Here ye! Here ye! AppThemes is proud to announce our latest creation, Vantage!

Vantage is a powerful and robust business directory theme for WordPress that’s easy to use and even easier to setup. It’s fast, got lots of horsepower under the hood, and uses our new drag and drop form builder which will help transform your site into an interactive, money-making, community-building machine.

It’s been a very hectic couple of weeks, AppThemers. But we promised a Vantage release date this week, so this post will be brief. We will have more news on Monday.

Vantage 1.0 will be available on April 27.

JobRoller 1.6 will be available by the end of April.

Clipper 1.3 will be available on April 9.

Many more announcements and exciting developments coming soon. Stay tuned.

Ladies and gentlemen, Vantage beta is now available to all AppThemes Club members and beta testers. We are truly happy that we can finally pull the curtain back to give everyone a peek at this long-awaited and much anticipated theme. Here it is folks…Vantage, the business directory theme for WordPress.

So let’s get to it and see what this theme is all about.

The end of the year is upon us and it looks like I’ll be eating banana slug stew. Vantage will not be ready by December 31.

Our development team has been burning the Vantage candle from both ends the last several months. We’re close – we just need a little more time. It’s important to us that we get it right before releasing it into the wild.

We understand that everyone has waited a long time for Vantage. As we come closer to completion, we are prepared to offer up a mea culpa. So here it goes:

With the release of ClassiPress 3.1 now behind us, we have dug back into Vantage to see where we are and what still needs to be done.

Dave, Pete and myself spent all of yesterday reviewing where things stand with Vantage and tried to gauge how long it will take to complete. At this time, though, we just do not have a reliable timetable for its release.

While I write that, it feels like I can hear a thousand groans reverberate across the land. We definitely know how much everyone wants to see Vantage in the marketplace. Trust me, we want to make it available to you just as much as you want it – really.

Why is It Taking So Long?

When I joined AppThemes back in March, development on Vantage had slowed to a crawl. There were just not enough resources to work on Vantage, complete ClassiPress 3.1, address support issues and take care of all the other issues that come with managing a business.

Dave and I sat down and spent a lot of time discussing and reshuffling our priorities. At that time, I strongly suggested that all resources be applied to finishing