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If you’ve visited this site before, you might notice that I’m running a new theme, which I’ve named Formattd. And if you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen me hint about it in tweets and screen shots. Now, you’re looking at it. Well, technically, you’re looking at a child theme (named dougalizr) with extra bits specific to my site, but still. This is my first attempt to create a theme completely from scratch.

In the past, I’ve generally started with an existing theme, then just created a child theme to do subtle alterations specific to my site. But I got tired of wrestling with doing things the way that somebody else envisioned it, or having to work around extra layers of “framework” functionality in order to change something simple. I wanted my own theme that I would know inside and out. And let me tell you, I now have a new respect for theme authors. Building a theme is a lot of work, because there are a zillion little pieces and details to account for. If you are a developer, and you’ve never built a WordPress theme from scratch before, I highly recommend it as an exercise.

Let me start by saying that this new theme is not revolutionary. It’s not a “theme framework”. I haven’t put in any customizable options (yet, I might in the future). It’s not a “portfolio”, “news”, or “magazine” theme. It’s just a plain blogging theme. And at the time of this writing, it’s still not even complete (see the To Do section, below). But it has some features that I think are interesting and useful, and I finally got it far enough along that it was at the dogfood stage. So I’m launching it here to help expose the warts that still remain, and force me to deal with them.

Features

• All 10 post formats accounted for.
• You can have different format templates for archives views.
• When using the ‘link’ post format, the first link in the post becomes the ‘post link’. This will be used as the link for the post title, instead of the regular post permalink.
• Allows setting post format when posting via XML-RPC (such as from the WordPress apps for iPhone or BlackBerry). Just start your post with ‘:aside:’, ‘:link:’, etc. Example: :aside: It’s always fun until somebody loses an eye. But then it’s more fun, because you get to play with the eyeball.
• If a mobile post starts out with just an image before any text (as when you post an image from WordPress for iOS), it will automatically set the post format to ‘image’.
• Any mobile post that contains a gallery shortcode automatically gets the ‘gallery’ post format.
• ‘Chat’ formatted posts can automatically bold speakers’ names, if you use a pattern like this (name, colon, text):

  Costello: Who’s on first?
  Abbott: That’s right.
  Costello: What?
  Abbott: Second base.

• Featured image support. Currently the HTML for this is hardcoded, but I plan to allow this to be overridden.
• Custom excerpt support. If a post has a custom excerpt, it will be displayed on the front page instead of the full post.
• The basic layout holds together all the way down into older versions of Internet Explorer.
• Basic iPhone layout adaptability (still needs some adjustments).

I’m pretty excited about the post format support for mobile blogging. I got tired of waiting for the WordPress for iOS app to support post formats, so I just made a way to go ahead and do it now. I think that being able to easily post images, statuses, and asides from my iPhone will encourage me to post more to my blog, whereas before I might have put much of that on Twitter. I still love Twitter, but I also love owning, controlling, and centralizing my content.

To Do

There is still a lot left to do: The orange that you currently see is temporary. I want to add some nice typography. The sidebar and footer are still ugly as sin and need styling. I need to put the hAtom microformat classes in. It still needs mobile-specific styles. There are still areas that need better HTML5 semantics. I still need to create several standard templates, such as search, page, and 404.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

When I say I built this theme “from scratch”, that doesn’t mean that every byte of HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript sprung forth fully formed from my mind to my keyboard, as Athena from the forehead of Zeus. Far from it — I stand on the shoulders of giants, borrowing liberally from the work of others. Some of what you see here was inspired by:

• HTML5 Boilerplate and Initializr
• Matthew James Taylor’s Perfect ‘Right-Menu’ 2-Column Liquid Layout
• The TwentyTen theme
• Nicolas Gallagher’s CSS Drop Shadow demo
• Chris Coyer’s Simple jQuery Dropdown menus
• Design Festival’s Typography of Quotations & Citations
• …and probably many others that I can’t think of right now…

I want to spend a few days working out some of the kinks here, but then I plan to make the source available. I’ve put it up on GitHub  (Formattd on GitHub) for now, to give anyone interested a chance to offer feedback and patches. Once it’s cleaned up enough, I’ll submit it for inclusion in the official WordPress.org theme repository.

With that said — feedback welcome!

Related posts:

1. Theme Preview Plugin
2. New theme, same as the old theme
3. WordPress theme licensing

I’m quite looking forward to returning to my hometown for WordCamp Seattle on April 16th. I am honored to have been asked to participate along with a great list of speakers.

I’m going to be interviewed by Nick Ohrn and look forward to sharing my experiences with WordPress, creating Crowd Favorite and running a business with a focus on an Open Source platform. If there is something in particular you’d like to hear about, drop me a note.

It looks like there are still a few tickets available; go get one now if you’ve been waiting.

Having helped put on WordCamp Denver (2009) and WordCamp Boulder (2010) and attending a few others, I know how much work goes into planning and coordinating this type of event. Kudos to the organizers for doing a great job so far and thanks to the sponsors – it looks like it’s going to be a great event!

Open source CMS projects like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla! provide web publishing tools that give users the freedom to modify the system and own their data in ways that proprietary systems don’t offer. BC Gurus, a consultancy specializing in Adobe’s Business Catalyst (a hosted turnkey web publishing product), “took aim” at Open Source CMS’s, kicking off a proposed series of articles with a video which upset many within the communities for those projects.

The original article, titled Business Catalyst Partners Take Aim at Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress, includes a video which shows two BC Gurus partners at a firing range, shooting guns at targets with Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress logos on them. It seems pretty obvious that they intended the video to be controversial, an attempt to create virality. They knew that “something that you might believe to be entirely ridiculous” would be passed around and drive up page views. And that worked — sort of. Apparently the response was strongly negative enough that BC Gurus have taken down the original video and replaced it with a message which states:

The right people, called the right people, who called the right people and told us to take the video down.

We respect ALL of those people, so this video is indefinitely offline.

I am currently out of the office on vacation, but will respond to all complaints next week.

Well, then! When you whack the hornet’s nest with a stick, sometimes you get stung. Not only did the link get passed around, but they garnered some really good responses, particularly from people at  Acquia, which is  a commercial arm for Drupal, much as Automattic is for WordPress. They made a blog post and response video which speaks for all three communities. Speaking for myself, I approve of this message:

It would have been really easy to respond in-kind with a video of somebody using a BC Gurus logo for target practice. But instead,  horncologne (who posted the YouTube video) took the high road, and show groups of people at conferences, supporting their projects, and using them to build solutions for clients. Very classy. I hope that clients looking for web site solutions will see this. Lots and lots of clients.

{photo CC licensed by-nc-sa Neo}

Related posts:

1. WordPress and Drupal
2. Drupal shop gives props to WordPress
3. WordPress and Jabber, sitting in a tree…

The audio is now online from the WordPress business panel I participated in at SxSW 2011.¹

I talk quite a bit about Crowd Favorite and running a WordPress development business in the first 15 minutes or so, then chime in here and there throughout the rest of the hour.

My thanks to Shane for putting together a great panel and doing a fantastic job as the moderator, and to my fellow panelists Brandon and Sonia for their great contributions to the panel and making it a fun experience (and hopefully interesting to the audience).

1. The direct MP3 download is also available. [back]

I’m very pleased to announce that we have released version 1.1 of Carrington Build and our Carrington Business theme for WordPress. Carrington Build is our drag and drop layout tool for WordPress themes, it is included in our Carrington Business theme.

Carrington Build has been a great product for us. We’re building bigger and bigger sites with it, and we’ve seen it work just like we anticipated: we’ve given our clients the power to manage their own sites, including sophisticated design and layout changes.

We have made a bunch of improvements in Carrington Build since our 1.0 release. Here is a short list of some of the changes and enhancements in the new release:

• Added a carousel module.
• Created an extension framework to the WordPress revision system and implemented it in Build so that Build pages have all of their custom layout data saved within the WordPress revision system. This framework will actually be released as a public plugin soon on wordpress.org.
• Enhance the Loop module to support custom post types, taxonomies, etc. and add feature to allow it to be used in order to create multi-column lists of items.
• WordPress 3.1 compatibility.
• Lost of misc. changes and bug fixes.
• We’ve posted our QA checklist for Build in our news release, in case you’re interested in seeing what we run through on every release candidate.

This is just a sampling, the full changelog (included in the download) is about 75 items long. And we’ve got a bunch more stuff we’re excited about for the next version.

Check it out, I hope you like it.

At SxSWi this year I’ll be joining Shane Pearlman, Brandon Jones and Sonia Simone on a panel entitled Making Money with WordPress (Without Working at Automattic).¹

We’ll be on stage bright and early at 9:30am on Sunday. Get coffee on the way.

I think it will be a pretty interesting discussion. We’ve got the major WordPress revenue streams (products, services, content) well covered, and each of us has a unique viewpoint on the WordPress community, ecosystem and marketplace.

I expect to be talking primarily about my experience working with large engagements and building the team and complimentary services (BackupMoxie, CloudMoxie) at Crowd Favorite along with some lessons learned from my WordPress HelpCenter experiment. But it’s a panel, so really the discussion could go anywhere. And that’s why it’s fun!

If you’d like to meet up at SxSW, please get in touch.

1. My thanks to Shane for doing all the hard work and inviting me to participate. [back]

I am excited to announce that WordPress HelpCenter is coming back! Look for it to reopen on March 14th under new management.

Nathan Garza, who has been with me at both Crowd Favorite and WordPress HelpCenter is acquiring the business. He is someone I trust, has experience running a business, is intimately familiar with the HelpCenter and is an experienced WordPress developer – a great fit all around.

I’m pleased on two fronts that the HelpCenter will continue. First because it’s a great resource for the WordPress community and I was very sad to be taking that away, and second because I’ll still have a quality resource to refer folks to when Crowd Favorite isn’t a good fit for their needs.

I am keeping an affiliation with the company by joining their board of advisors (I hope my experience will be useful), however I will not have any day-to-day responsibilities.

Based on my conversations with Nathan, I believe the business will structured a little differently once it reopens, but with the same focus on providing great service to the WordPress community. Watch the website for additional details.

It was the right move for me to exit from the HelpCenter; with my other obligations I just couldn’t focus on it enough. At the same time it’s the right move for Nathan to take it over. He can invest the time needed to make it a great WordPress success story. I look forward to watching that happen.

My Internal Link Shortcode plugin has been updated to version 1.0.1, addressing a bug where text left in the search field could accidentally overwrite the post or page title on save.

The Internal Link Shortcode plugin allows you to insert links that are references to posts and pages within your WordPress powered site. These links will be automatically updated to new titles (optional) and URL locations if you reorganize your site (as opposed to standard, hard-coded links).

Note: to keep these links up to date there is some additional processing overhead as they are retrieved from the database. The use of a caching plugin is recommended.

The download and more information are available on the Crowd Favorite WordPress Plugins page.

Unfortunately we are not currently in position to provide support for our free plugins; they are all offered on an “as-is” basis in the hopes they will be useful. If you have questions or need help you can try our community support forums or the official WP Support Forums.

My company, Crowd Favorite is hiring.

We’re hiring 3-5 developers, right now. We’ve listed the available positions as: Web Developer, Experienced Web Developer, Developer Intership and Designer/Front-end Developer Internship. We list specific positions because it helps people identify positions they think they can fill, but in reality our hiring approach is really simple: we hire smart people who love to build great things for the web.

We’ll hire 3-5 people over the next little bit and it’s likely their skill sets will intersect somewhat with the positions we’ve got listed on the website, but we’re not looking to fit people into boxes. The strengths and abilities of the people we bring on will define their roles with us. We like to put people in position to succeed.

I think Crowd Favorite is a pretty unique place to work. We’ve got a small team (~12-15 people) with a strong technical focus, little “overhead” and no internal politics. It’s a true developer-centric environment.

We get the privilege of working with wonderful clients on interesting and challenging projects. By the nature of our consulting and custom development business, we have the opportunity to work in a wide variety of technical areas. We do a lot of really interesting things with WordPress, and we also get to play with a lot of web services, create web-based applications, etc., etc. We tackle problems ranging from scaling back-end services to optimizing front-end delivery and user experience.

Our basic criteria for taking on projects is: “will this be fun and/or interesting and/or challenging?” Trust me, you won’t get bored.

We also create our own products – some internal and some that we make commercially available (expect a few more product releases as soon as we can package them up). The opportunity to work on both well-defined, specific problems and built long term products is a really great way to make sure we take a pragmatic approach to both.

The work is demanding and you will be expected to understand what you need to do and largely manage your own time and deliverables – we don’t have babysitters. If you want an opportunity to learn and grow, to work with a team of great people, smart people, I want to hear from you.

All of these positions are available in our Denver office. The non-intern positions are all full time with benefits. And you’ll get a pretty cool t-shirt.

WordPress HelpCenter will be ceasing operations on February 28th. Between now and then we will be working with existing customers to wrap up all of our committed projects, but we will not be taking on any new projects. For customers that purchased WPHC support for the Carrington Business theme, we have created a special premium support offering through Crowd Favorite to fulfill your support needs from March 1 forward.¹

That’s the summary, here are the details.

This was a really tough decision for me. When I created the HelpCenter I had a couple of goals for it:

1. Provide a support and quick-turn development service to the WordPress community that I think it desperately needs.
2. Provide relief for plugin and theme developers that don’t wish to offer support, and give their users a good resource for support when they need assistance.

I never expected it to be a very profitable service due to the nature of the work we were targeting, but I thought it would fill a significant need.

Unfortunately we were not able to get the traction with developers that I was hoping for. Part of that may have been due to the $1 payout amount, so we were planning to increase that to 10% and created a set of tools to make it really easy for developers to include in their plugins. We never made this change or released these tools because their readiness coincided with the culmination of feedback from the community that commercial support for free plugins and themes just wasn’t something they were willing to pay for.

When we initially started the service, we did so as a partnership with another hosting and development company. Unfortunately, didn’t work out as I’d hoped and we brought it in-house and hired full time staff to help it grow. Since then we had as many as 4 full time staff on board.

Hiring for WPHC was extremely difficult. We needed generalists that knew WordPress very well, that were also personable and comfortable talking with customers. It’s a hard combination to find, and harder still to find at a salary range that the WPHC projects could support. Ultimately many of them left, tired of dealing with the fraction of our customers that were rude and unpleasant.

My experience building businesses is to grow them organically. This has worked well for Crowd Favorite and BackupMoxie, and is working nicely for CloudMoxie; however it didn’t work well for WPHC.

In retrospect (and as advice for the next person who decides to create a service like this), a different approach would have probably worked much better. I would recommend getting funding in place so that you can hire and do internal training, then come to market with a 5-6 person team (with dedicated sales and project management roles) in place from the start. Then it’s just a matter of providing great service and doing smart marketing to generate revenue. I would also recommend including a training offering, as that seems to be a service many people find valuable.

I still think the concept of the WPHC is an important one for the WordPress community, and a service that is very much needed now that WordPress has made the transition from Open Source project to a product that many folks (who do not consider themselves technical) rely on and use on a daily basis. I hope that next foray into this space is more successful.

At the same time, Crowd Favorite is flourishing nicely. We’ve got a number of open positions right now, including spots for interns and more experienced developers.

1. You will receive an email about this shortly. [back]