Curtis Henson

Design Has No Name has done some pure genius work and I could not pass up posting this. It is a packaging concept for a Beck album and I have never seen anything like it, or anything as cool. Check out all the photos.

Give me feedback and feature ideas for the next version of Checkmate now!

I told you earlier I was going to release it, and here it is! The Checkmate WordPress theme. It is a classic blog style template with a minimalist design packed with features and customizing options. This is one to definitely download and try out and includes a quick start guide to show you how to use some of the features.

Checkmate Demo - The demo is a bit messy looking because I tried to show off as much of the theme as I could.

Continue Reading

No new posts in 10 days! I can hardly believe it myself, but when you are having fun time flies. And by fun I mean busy(oh and those few days I took off). I feel it is important for me to unplug from the interwebs every now and then and recharge the batteries. A few updates:

Template for Sale

I have a WordPress Template for sell on DigitalPoint right now, if you are in the market for a unique design this could be a great way to get a website from me for CHEAP. Check it out now!

Template for Free

You are probably more interested in this one. I am releasing another free WordPress template! It’s name? …CHECKMATE! Yes the theme that was going to charge you for is now going to be free, sorta. By sorta I mean the blog portion of Checkmate is going to be free. It is jam packed with features and customizing options, this is one you will want to “check” out. Look for the release very soon.

Freelancing

I am concentrating more of my efforts into freelancing. This will mean some changes to the site, but probably not much. I also don’t foresee a change in the direction this blog is currently heading content wise.

If you want to hire me drop me an email, leave a comment, or use the form on the about page!

Side Projects!

Can’t tell you much about this, but I am working on a new side project that is sure to make you laugh…or cry…we’ll see about that later! Just thought I’d throw that teaser out there.

My previous post on writing a simple related posts plugin was a popular one, and one reader wanted to take it further for a website he was working on. Well it was painfully obvious that my example was inadequate for doing any sort of fun stuff so I started adding bits and pieces to create a more robust widget. If you haven’t already, you might want to read the first post to get caught up.

This isn’t a true “plugin” in the sense you can activate it in Wordpress, but more of a widget you can plug into your theme. This widget is going to grab posts based on tags and return specific info from the matching posts. This will be a good chance to see some of the guts of Wordpress being used and how you might use them for your own projects.
Continue Reading

Wow I got all sorts of goodies in my RSS reader today!

TimThumb

First up is the release of TimThumb by Tim McDaniels. This was a script created for use in the Mimbo Pro Premium Wordpress and Darren Hoyt and company have released it as open source. I can’t wait to try this out and start incorporating it into my themes. What it does is resize images so the user doesn’t have to anymore, and I think no matter what your level of skill this is much appreciated. Grab the files at Google Code.

bbPress ver. 0.9

The bbPress team has released a new version, which is primarily to update it to work with Wordpress 2.5. There have been a few improvements though.

• New Installer, better integration with Wordpress
• New RSS feeds
• Support for gravatars
• New core theme
• Better Security

Check out the release notes for a full list of the changes. I’ve been meaning to get my hands dirty with bbPress and I think now will be the time. Look for some themes and tutorials in the future for bbPress.

Checkmate

My premium Wordpress theme Checkmate is coming along nicely and will be released “soon”. The first release will be the blog only portion. There will be an advanced business version that will function more as a CMS coming out soon after the blog version. I’ll write a more detailed post in the coming days about the features, design, and all the rest of the details.