10,000 Registered Users, Site Redesigned & 2 New Themes

Phew, busy week!

I always intended on theming Choice Themes from the beginning, but you know how it goes as a designer — you never make time for your own stuff. Well, I finally made time. I did 3 themes this week: WP CALENDAR, Choice Themes and the soon-to-be-released-for-Smashing-Magazine WP SMASHING. At the time of writing there are still a few things that need to be done: The article pages have no formatting, the comments have not been put back, the footer is empty and there is no feature list for the theme pages yet. The index page and theme gallery turned out nicely though, and I expect to have the site complete this weekend.

The WP CALENDAR theme is a practice in functionality similar to the NEWS CMS theme. I wanted to see if I could make a plugin that would allow me to place posts and pages into calendar format and the result was excellent. As with the CODA series themes and pretty much ever theme I release after this, WP CALENDAR has a companion plugin required for it to function. The foundation of WP CALENDAR lends itself to any number of sites: Bands, Organizations, Churches, the list goes on and on. If you use WP CALENDAR or any of our other themes, let me know! I love seeing how they’re being used.

WP SMASHING has one of the more gorgeous designs I’ve made. It was commissioned for the ever popular Smashing Magazine and is based on WP CALENDAR for its functionality — although there are theme options to either utilize that functionality or not. I would like to release it today or tomorrow, but we’ll see. Redesigning Choice Themes wasn’t in the cards when I set out to do WP SMASHING.

I generally round these posts up with What’s Next? Well, for themes: WP SLIDER is. I’ve made a lot of progress with the WP CODA platform and the plugin to customize the theme is coming along very nicely. WP SLIDER will be released on March 1st and will mark the beginning of a once-a-month release schedule with an additional theme being released in the middle of the month every other month. I’ll also be adding a forum to the site soon as well. All in due time.

Choice Themes has grown faster than my expectations and it’s wonderful to see the site gaining popularity. I focus on pushing the limits of what WordPress was meant to do and I’ve already got a few more themes up my sleeve that I haven’t seen done before so stay tuned and check back often!