http://spectacu.la/forum/ A great WordPress community en Fri, 10 Sep 2010 12:26:56 +0000 http://spectacu.la/forum/topic/new-design#post-73 Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:17:07 +0000 clopinettes 73@http://spectacu.la/forum/ <p>You'll see that we're slowly implementing various changes, including the introduction of our first little monster - these friendly but hairy little fellas will be representing us around the place, on adverts and so on. </p> <p>The monsters are the creation of Jon Reilly, an illustrator from Northwich, Cheshire. He's well known for his work on many top computer games, and his graphics will be introduced into some of our forthcoming themes - you'll see some very cool stuff soon :o) </p> http://spectacu.la/forum/topic/grassland-20-preview#post-59 Sun, 14 Dec 2008 14:33:04 +0000 clopinettes 59@http://spectacu.la/forum/ <p>There's a few issues to be resolved yet, but you can spy an early version of the forthcoming Grassland 2.0 theme at <a href="http://liverpoolwebdesigner.com" rel="nofollow">http://liverpoolwebdesigner.com</a> - it's on the same branch as Evening Sun, so has all the same features, but with some further refinements.</p> <p>Grassland is rapidly becoming a favourite theme of bloggers, so we thought it worth developing further. </p> http://spectacu.la/forum/topic/wordpress-27-thoughts-anyone#post-47 Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:48:56 +0000 clopinettes 47@http://spectacu.la/forum/ <p>I didn't want to jump in on this too early, but in the absence of responses(!) from others....</p> <p>I really like the new interface. 2.5 introduced some new ideas, but didn't address usability in the way it should. I've found that if you're doing a lot of work in the back with 2.7 you can really do things a lot more quickly. It's more customisable, and, as important in some ways... it looks cool when you show it to a client. I know that shouldn't be an issue, but as someone who has to help a client choose a CMS I find that often they'll choose pretty over functionality. One client was insistent on Joomla, once, because they preferred the back-end. No matter that their productivity would have suffered. </p> http://spectacu.la/forum/topic/wordpress-27-thoughts-anyone#post-46 Fri, 28 Nov 2008 13:23:00 +0000 romana 46@http://spectacu.la/forum/ <p>I saw the new 2.7 interface on the screencasts. Looks nice. Has anybody here actually tried it? </p> http://spectacu.la/forum/topic/caribou#post-34 Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:41:53 +0000 clopinettes 34@http://spectacu.la/forum/ <p>We've just confirmed that there's a minor bug with the image uploading, so we'll add that to the fix list.</p> <p>We've also made the decision to implement the option of not showing a page on the navigation menu. </p> http://spectacu.la/forum/topic/caribou#post-33 Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:15:00 +0000 clopinettes 33@http://spectacu.la/forum/ <p>Hi Avril - sorry it's so quiet at the moment - it's been a busy period for us, and I do apologise here for the slow response.</p> <p>Anyway - to answer your questions:</p> <p>1. The logo ideally needs to be a png with Alpha transparency set. You can do this in Photoshop or, our preferred package for web work, Fireworks - both from Adobe. You can also do it well with the free and Open Source package called The GIMP. An alternative approach is to make the logo rectangular within a box without worrying about transparency. If you need us to, we can convert the file to you for a nominal charge.<br /> 2. There is no hiding of pages from the navigation bar in Caribou - we envisioned that most people would place sections only in the navigation bar. However, we're now looking at adding this option prior to release - we'll make an announcement in due course. Unfortunately you're working with a beta (new one to come this week).<br /> 3. You can ignore the custom fields box - they're used by the theme, but you don't need to play with them.</p> <p>Blend is a simpler to use theme than Caribou - Caribou is primarily designed for sites that need to organise large amounts of content. eg, Online newspapers, long running blogs and so on. </p> http://spectacu.la/forum/topic/youre-a-quiet-lot#post-31 Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:03:47 +0000 clopinettes 31@http://spectacu.la/forum/ <p>I'm guessing that things aren't breaking very much then :o)</p> <p>It's what I like to see - a support forum that doesn't need much attention! I suspect Caribou might change things because it introduces some new ideas to the WordPress way of working. </p> http://spectacu.la/forum/topic/revolution-goes-gpl#post-29 Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:33:30 +0000 clopinettes 29@http://spectacu.la/forum/ <p>Hi Daniel - it's an interesting one. My own view is that Revolution could fetch a premium while it was a new idea, but now nearly everyone's got a news theme the competition must be intense - heck, a client who'd paid for Revolution but needed our back-end quality got us to rebuild it completely. It took us just a week to do, pretty much from scratch. If you look at the Fresh News stuff they're way ahead of what he was doing.</p> <p>We've discussed the idea of making our themes Open Source, while making the downloads and support only available here to members. In a way it makes sense - policing rip-offs is almost impossible... we couldn't afford to sue a company in Indonesia anyway... so our code would sell purely on trust unless we go the obfuscation route. But that would go against the grain. But no - instead we'll offer themes on at approximately 50% GPL, and 50% paid. Caribou, for example, will have a sophisticated and fully featured members only version, and there'll be a free version which removes a lot of the cleverness and navigation tricks but gives a nice and neat blog.</p> <p>Sorry it's been quiet here - we've been busy working on our designs. Until our marketing starts we expect it'll stay that way, and we're not going to do any marketing until Caribou is released along with a third GPL theme. </p> http://spectacu.la/forum/topic/revolution-goes-gpl#post-28 Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:20:41 +0000 dan13l 28@http://spectacu.la/forum/ <p>Hi all,</p> <p>I know it's a bit quiet around here, but I thought I'd ask what you guys make of the Revolution theme ditching the premium theme model and going open source?</p> <p>I appreciate that the comparison isn't massively valid, as Spectacu.la sports a much lower price than Revolution ever did, but I'm interested given how vocal certain figures associate with WordPress have been on the issue. </p> http://spectacu.la/forum/topic/resource-sharing-and-wordpress-26-user-guide#post-27 Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:54:15 +0000 clopinettes 27@http://spectacu.la/forum/ <p>Sometimes we create resources that we use with clients. To this end we've created the <a href="http://spectacu.la/wordpress-26-user-guide/">WordPress 2.6 User Guide</a> in pdf format for free download, and in MS Word format for members to download.</p> <p>This guide contains a huge range of improvements over the previous version that covered up to 2.3, is longer, more detailed, and has better screenshots.</p> <p>A French translation of the guide could well be released in the near future.</p> <p>This Word document can be rebranded, edited and re-distributed, within reason, to your clients. The pdf file can be redistributed, in unmodified form only, without limitations.</p> <p>Our plan is to share these kinds of resources with members. We hope you like it. </p> http://spectacu.la/forum/topic/caribous-growing#post-26 Thu, 11 Sep 2008 22:34:20 +0000 dan13l 26@http://spectacu.la/forum/ <p>Colour coding sounds good. I've hacked that into another site of mine, but might consider switching themes if this one lives up to its promise!</p> <p>Even so, Caribou is looking like a prime contender for my main blog once it's been released. </p> http://spectacu.la/forum/topic/caribous-growing#post-25 Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:40:58 +0000 clopinettes 25@http://spectacu.la/forum/ <p>Just to let everyone know that the coming Caribou News Theme is coming on beautifully. There's been something of a style shake-up as we felt the one in the teaser ( at <a href="http://spectacu.la/caribou-teaser/" rel="nofollow">http://spectacu.la/caribou-teaser/</a> ) wasn't sufficiently clean and clear - the slider taking up too much space and being too inflexible with respect to some people's long title lengths.</p> <p>Another feature that's been decided upon and given the go ahead is the ability to colour code by section. So you can select the colour for, say, a Sports section in the admin and this will then be reflected in any posts placed there.</p> <p>Oh, and the working logo is done. Screenshots of the work in progress to come soon in <a href="http://spectacu.la/category/news/">News.</a> </p> http://spectacu.la/forum/topic/tip-included-contact-form#post-24 Sat, 23 Aug 2008 20:13:10 +0000 clopinettes 24@http://spectacu.la/forum/ <p>One thing you may not have noticed is that most of our themes come with an included contact form page template. This allows you to create a page with a contact form very easily and quickly.</p> <p>You can also customise the form with any number of check-boxes and fields (no radio button functionality yet, but it's coming) and instructions on how to do this will be included soon. However, this is currently set up as a developer feature and you'll have to dig into the code. One day we'll do a full control panel for it - perhaps with some subtle cleverness thrown in. </p> http://spectacu.la/forum/topic/wordpress-26-easter-egg#post-23 Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:54:42 +0000 clopinettes 23@http://spectacu.la/forum/ <p>You may not have seen it yet, but if you're on WP 2.6 in the Write page and try to compare a version of the document with itself, something very interesting happens.... </p>