High Art goes live!

Although High Art can be used for a wide variety of things, it is primarily a theme for Artists, Art Galleries, & Exhibitions spaces. It’s packed with all kinds of features that allow you to bring the experience of an art galley to the web in a new and interesting way. Check out the demo and review some of the amazing features:

• Promote artists and gallery shows with the Exhibits custom post type.
• Schedule events and shows with the Events custom post type.
• A theme options page for custom logos, theme colors, footer options & more.
• Support for Video embedding using oEmbed.
• Flickr integration which displays photo sets directly from Flickr.
• 5 Custom page templates for Archives, Events, Exhibits, etc.
• Free updates and support! (For bug fixes and errors only).

Also for a limited time there’s a free, blog only version available which has the styling of the Full version of High Art, without all of the extra bells and whistles.

Check it out!: http://fthrwght.com/highart

A new and vastly improved version of AutoFocus is now available at my professional design & devleopment site fthrwght.com.

Here’s a brief description:

In short, AutoFocus+ is a clean and simple WordPress theme developed for photographers looking to showcase their work. A slight departure from the original verision, AutoFocus+ takes things a bit further by providing stronger markup, better browser support, and Theme options that enable you to customize various elements of the theme without ever touching code. I’ve also ported over the back-end to Thematic, one of (if not) the strongest WordPress theming frameworks to date. That means AutoFocus+ and Thematic come together to make for a pretty slick theme that can be used for almost any type of site. There’s both a Free version and a Pro version($15) available which comes with tons of new and ever developing features.

Speaking of  features, here’s a few notable ones:

1. 5 widgetized sidebar areas.
2. Fully configurable color options through an admin options page.
3. An optional EXIF data display.
4. An optional Featured Posts section which pulls “sticky” posts and displays them front and center.
5. Much improved CSS styles for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, & Internet Explorer (including the dreaded IE6!).
6. An admin configurable logo option (Pro Version only).
7. A per-post sliding Gallery (Pro Version only).
8. And tons more…

I hope you like it!

Second: I’ll be moving the majority of my WordPress theme related work to fthrwght.com. As you may or may not have noticed some of my more recent themes have been popping up over there anyway.The plan is to have this up and running some time in the first quarter of 2010.

Third: fthrwght.com will have a support forum to more readily handle bug reporting and theming questions. The commenting system used here will no longer be used.

That’s pretty much it. Hope you all have a Happy Holiday. See you n 2010!

Thanks to everyone who took the time to listen to me geek out about WordPress Child Themes!

Download Allan Cole’s WordPress 2009 Presentation.

It’s filled with tons of  resources to help you develop WordPress themes the smart way — using Child Themes!

This plugin will save your life! If your are using, Neutica, Neutica+ or really any theme that uses custom thumbnail image sizes, this plugin will be ESSENTIAL to you. It deletes your old thumbnails, and generates new ones based on your settings. This way you can easily switch to a new theme and upgrade your thumbnails to match. I’m amazed i’m only finding out about it now. (Thanks Rob!)

See who’s going. Buy a ticket or help sponsor.

I know I will be there.

More info here.

Fixes:

• Adds IE6 & IE7 support (still a work in progress but FAR better than before).
• Fixes the ‘Leave a comment’ page jump link.
• Fixes images on the home page using the blog formatted index.php template file.
• Fixes image ‘floating’ issue in the front page template that broke the image alignment.
• Improved static navigation arrows for an easier UX.
• Now pulls the ‘large’ (800px wide) image instead of the full size image for CSS backgrounds on the homepage (Images loads faster as a result).
• Adds EXIF Data to image attachment pages (However, Shutter Speed does not work).
• Fixes borders and shadows for Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4.
• Reworked comments section to include Pings.
• New 404 template that adheres to the site’s format.

Download it here.

IMPORTANT: If you’ve made modifications to your AutoFocus theme, you may want to back up your current version before over-writing the files, so that you don’t lose anything.

A big thanks goes out to Walker for some insight into pulling EXIF data from images uploaded to WP.

Also thanks for all of the GREAT comments I keep receiving about AutoFocus. I really appreciate it! If you find any bugs or errors which is kind of inevitable, please be sure to leave a comment so that I can include fixes/corrections in the next update.