My friend Adrian Diaconescu has released a new free WordPress theme called Empty Canvas. Those familiar with his previous theme, Corporate Sandbox will observe the similarities between these two themes, but as Adrian says: “[...] don’t download this theme and expect the Mona Lisa. It’s only a simple theme, that does wonders for me.”
Click here to read the full blog post!

The time when WordPress was used strictly as a blog platform is long gone. WordPress has evolved into a mature CMS that gives designers and developers the right tools to create amazing non-blog websites for their clients. As proof for that stand these 10 beautiful websites powered by WordPress.

FernWoodCoffee.com

Visit website

Herout-Caves.com

Visit website
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Today I’ve exchanged a few emails with one of Simple Balance’s users which made me think about several things that users could do to help out WordPress themes and plugins developers.

This article is written purely for the purpose of giving you an idea on how to give back to those that invest time and knowledge to give your free quality WordPress resources.

So, here are a few things you can do to help them out:

Offer to test out their themes and plugins

If their project is still in Beta stage, ask to join the testing group or register we’re this is permitted. Test out the product in whatever environment you have available and report bugs and unusual behavior to the designer / developer. They are only humans and most of the time work on too many project and might miss out things, being so closely involved in the project. An outsider could observe things that they can not.

You can also test the projects after the official release. Help is welcome anytime.
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It has been brought to my attention that the Simple Balance theme has a display bug which causes the right sidebar to drop below the content on single post pages.

After looking into this problem I’ve seen that this only happens when users are required to be logged-in in order to post a comment.

The bug is fairly easy to fix and a fix has already been included in the Simple Balance 2.2 download package.

In order to apply the fix, you only need to download the package and replace the “comments.php” file in your theme’s folder with the one inside the package.

Manual bug fix

Alternatively, you can apply the fix manually by opening the “comments.php” file in a text editor and scroll down to the end of the file where you should see this code snippet:

</form>
</div>

<?php endif; // If registration required and not logged in ?>

<?php endif; // if you delete this the sky will fall on your head ?>
</div>

All you need to do is to replace the above lines of code with the ones below:

</form>

<?php endif; // If registration required and not logged in ?>
</div>

<?php endif; // if you delete this the sky will fall on your head ?>
</div>

The closing tag of the comments section should have been placed outside the conditional loop that checks if the user is logged in. Since it was not, the sidebar was considered to be part of the comments area and displayed below.

Sorry for the inconvenience if you have had trouble because of this bug. Now it should be alright.

Thanks to the amazing involvement of Florian from Floeschen.ch, the Simple Balance theme has been translated to German, from front-end to the extensive control panel.

As Florian and I have agreed, the translated version will only be available from his blog and is to be considered the only official German release. Otherwise we could not guarantee for the safety of the scripts.

All future updates of Simple Balance will also be translated by Florian and released by him on the same page that the current version is available from.

Here’s the link: Simple Balance WP Theme auf Deutsch

Thank you Florian for the hard work!

Although not a day goes by without someone putting out there another WordPress theme, days like this one, when I see one theme that truly impresses me, don’t come that often. On January 26th, Performancing.com, in collaboration with Sophia Lucero, launched the “Too Newsy” free WordPress theme, and this is one theme you should definitely check out.
Click here to read the full blog post!

Simple Balance 2.2 is now available for free downloading. Although it was previously working with the recently released WordPress 2.7, now, the theme has built-in support for threaded comments (you can reply to people’s comments with a maximum depth of 3 steps) which is a new functionality added by the latest WordPress release.

If you’re running a WordPress version prior to 2.7, fear not! The comments section has backwards compatibility.

Another cool feature has been added to the options panel and it refers to the 125×125 right sidebar banners. Now, you can also add Google AdSense code, individually, for each of your banners.

And that’s not all! Christmas is around the corner, and so’s the New Year.

New color scheme: Xmas Edition

Why not give your Simple Balance themed blog a cool new color scheme to match the Holiday spirit? A new color scheme – Xmas Edition – has been added, raising the total number of schemes to 10!
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By popular demand, I decided to publish a short tutorial on how to add your own logo to the Simple Balance WordPress theme.

So, in order to achieve this we’ll walk through the following steps:

1. The logo image guidelines and instructions;
2. Files to update;
3. Code explanation.

Click here to read the full blog post!

One month and 2000 downloads later, the new version of the Simple Balance Free WordPress theme is released.

New options have been added – along with the options of Simple Balance 2.0 – to the theme’s control panel, including:

1. Easy to set up featured post (does not use categories);
2. Google AdSense alternative for both the top and right sidebar ad space;
3. Easy to set up email subscription form; *
4. Page selection for the top menu (only selected parent pages will be displayed);
5. Two brand new color schemes: Blue Bubble and Curly Green

Click here to read the full blog post!

Since its launch, over 1800 people downloaded the Simple Balance 2.0 WordPress theme. For that, I thank each and every one of you!

The idea behind this theme was to keep it as simple as possible, yet effective. Simplicity in administration is one of the keywords behind its creation. But some things need a bit of coding knowledge to tweak.

One of them is the email subscription form, which, once you install the theme, serves only as a design template that does not work unless proper code has been added to it.

I’ve been asked via comments and email what’s wrong with it, or how can it be made functional and this made me write the following step-by-step tutorial on how to integrate the FeedBurner email subscription form in Simple Balance 2.0.
Click here to read the full blog post!