Blog - page 7

A lot has happened in my life in the last year – so much that I’ve probably missed some things. In an effort to remember what’s happened I thought I’d break the blogging silence with a post summarising how and...

The Zelda series has been with me for a long time. I first played it on the original gameboy with The Legend of Zelda: Links Awakening. The sense of adventure and exploration in that game is fantastic. I never played...

I recently submitted my first free theme to WordPress.org.Kent is a theme I made for wordpress.com. It’s been code reviewed by the team there and is in use on a few hundred sites. I was considering selling it on Creative...

Recently I showed the research I did into other WordPress theme shops and their theme clubs – and now I’ve released the Pro Theme Design Theme Club.The club is an easy way for people to purchase all of our themes,...

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Jetpack. All the themes we sell on Pro Theme Design support features in Jetpack so I found the slides from this talk about Jetpack for Theme Developers (from WordCamp Montreal 2015) really...

I’m working on adding a Theme Club to Pro Theme Design. I’ve been asked about it before but have always been put off because of the amount of effort involved in setting one up – however I have now found...

Late last year we switched Pro Theme Design over to a static html powered site – but that meant we couldn’t do anything clever with it – like have a contact form. Initially we relied on Twitter and Facebook, but...

A couple of months ago I was given a Huawei Honor 6 Android phone in return for blogging about the Honor 6 Design competition. Today is the last day to enter the competition so, as a final post, I thought...

The other day I was updating my WordPress plugin, BM Custom Login, and I need some simple colour manipulation functions. In the plugin you can pick colours for different elements of the WordPress login interface, and I wanted to colour...

In WordPress there’s an option to add custom descriptions to Menu links – but by default there’s no way to display these descriptions. I’m currently redesigning Binary Moon and wanted to add descriptions to the menu – so I thought...

These days a lot of spammers submit spam comments that are perfectly legitimate apart from the fact that they link somewhere. So I thought I would disable the website url field in the comments so that comments can focus on...

I recently spoke on a panel at WordCamp London 2015e. Lance – who used to be the Theme Team lead at WordPress.com – asked me if I wanted to speak on a panel with him at WordCamp London 2015. I’ve...

I’m a bit of a gamer – I used to write a gaming blog, and I like to make games as a hobby. These days I mostly play iPhone games but I do still like to sit down and have...

WordPress 4.1 is bringing with it a couple of cool new additions for theme developers. They’re things that are currently a bit messy to implement in themes. For me they are things that I do the same way in all...

I did quite a lot of maths at school. I wasn’t amazing at it but because I knew I wanted to work in computers I thought it would be handy. Fast forward 16 years and I now realise that I’ve...

At work we use Git for versioning our code. We also use the suite of Atlassian products for managing tasks, code, and deployment. As such I use SourceTree a lot to manage my code. We’re also security conscious and so...

Back in 1998, enthusiastic about the launch of my first proper website, I spent a lot of time thinking about the content, the design and the marketing tools to use to make it the next big thing. Overwhelmed by the...

I’ve managed to move entirely away from using Adobe software but this recent video from Adobe looks incredibly enticing. It’s basically a great big bunch of ideas for things that could be possible in the future. They’ve focused on Microsoft...

In 2007 Darren and I started one of the first WordPress Premium theme stores – Pro Theme Design. In that time the WordPress ecosystem has changed considerably.Over the years Pro Theme Design has done well for us as a part...

A long time ago – when making our first premium WordPress theme, Darren and I made TimThumb. TimThumb has been amazing – but it’s also not been without it’s share of problems.In particular in 2010 there was a major security...

So a few people have been writing about my estimated reading time function recently. In particular – it got mentioned on WPTavern in a post all about adding an Estimated Reading Time to your theme.Then I got this tweet: Hey...