In recent months I’ve been working on Themes Kult. I always wanted to open a shop to sell wordpress themes.

Themes Kult is going to be the place where we publish everything related to WordPress.

At the moment we have 3 themes published:

Symbol Theme

Solar Theme

wp-svbtle

Visit Now: http://themeskult.com

This vanguard platform allows users to have instant access to their WordPress Site through XML-RPC. Essentially, now they are able to play and interact with their ideas and posts within a polite and elegant form-plus-function design, without being worried about upcoming updates -automatically provided by us-, neither the storage of their posts nor passwords due to we don’t keep any sort of info.

The process is simple: our server connects to the user’s and we don’t intervene in the mechanism of data insertion. We only secure a strong bridge between creativity and a cleaner window to the world, between an encouraging panel to develop core ideas and the user’s site.

In spite of the big number of successful blogging platforms breathing in the cyberspace, we assert that WordPresss Svbtle is potentially the cornerstone of a new worldwide experience in the social communication field. It embodies the values of a progressive open community, which main goal is to nurture a self-reflexive flux of knowledge that includes users needs and proper and dynamic solutions. It is the moment for WordPress Svbtle to strengthen/refresh the network bonds.

Note: You need to enable XML-RPC on your WP

Project is open sourced at Github.

We’re extremely happy to announce a huge update on Balloons.IO.

For this update we did our best: creating a simple UI, making the installation easier and improving the performance.

Now the project is live and you can use it: http://balloons.io

The Roadmap

• Private Chats
• Single chat with users
• Invites (you will be able to add people to your private room via Twitter API)
• Upload (images, videos, photos…)

Get it from Github or Follow the conversation on HN

This is not the first post about Svbtle. It only tries to show how you can easily build the same product in WordPress. 

View Demo or Go to GitHub to get this project.

The interface

When I read about Svbtle just seemed to me to write great posts without noise from view. Having a list where these ideas “cooking” and another where the already published is just great. Only someone with experience doing great publications could accomplish this interface.

Technology behind

Since I did not want to ignore the features already offered by WordPress and reinvent the wheel by creating a login system, writing (drafts and published), optimizations of queries, features that are not visible to the user’s eyes as the cache (WP Super Cache) , pushState (WP History.js) and minimize js and css files (BWP Minify).

On Friday, after reading the publication on Techcrunch started implementing the idea in this blog. The first thing I did was do a little research on how WordPress handles the login:

if (!is_user_logged_in()) {
	auth_redirect();
}
if(!current_user_can('publish_posts') or !current_user_can('edit_posts')){
	die('You don not have access to this area');
}

I included PHP Markdown class written by Michel Fortin.

$post_id = wp_insert_post( array(
	'post_author'	=> $user_id,
	'post_title'	=> $post_title,
	'post_content'	=> Markdown($post_content),
	'post_type'		=> "post",
	'post_status'	=> $post_status // Idea=>draft || Public=>publish
));

Screenshots

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• Responsive Design
• Improving access to open source projects
• Optimize load time

Responsive design

After reading Responsive Web Design, I decided to took the initiative and start on a new version of this website. Ethan Marcotte (book’s author) proposes a design of gridsbased on percentages rather than pixels. This style contrasts with the well-known 960.gs adaptive where the grids are defined by pixels and its width are changing according to the stylesheet corresponding to the width of the browser (e.g.  1200px.css to max-width 1200px).

At the time of my design go from photoshop to HTML decided to keep the fixed content width at 1000 pixels. I wasn’t completely satisfied with using percentages for the container and I liked using a maximum of 1000 pixels version (yes, even if I see it from a TV).

Improving access to open source projects

One of the goals to be achieved this year is to increase the presence in Github and using this little snippet I could get all repositories.

Optimize load time

The loading time is an important issue in my view. I hate websites that take ages to load and didn’t even get a message during that time. Following this idea and decided to use WordPress plugins like History.js,  WP Super Cache y WP Better Minify to improve the speed.

I attached each script using the wp function wp_enqueue_script:

wp_enqueue_script( 'prettify', get_template_directory_uri() . '/js/libs/jquery-syntaxhighlighter/prettify/prettify.min.js');
wp_enqueue_script( 'jquery.syntaxhighlighter', get_template_directory_uri() . '/js/libs/jquery-syntaxhighlighter/scripts/jquery.syntaxhighlighter.min.js');
wp_enqueue_script( 'jquery.syntaxhighlighter-css', get_template_directory_uri() . '/js/libs/jquery-syntaxhighlighter/prettify/lang-css.js');
wp_enqueue_script( 'view-js', get_template_directory_uri() . '>/js/libs/viewjs/view.min.js?auto');

The site is running on a micro instance under the settings of this tutorial.

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The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care.

Hugh MacLeod

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Logo

Logo Revisions

Icons

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The project was solid from the programming but insufficient in the user interface and thought I could help and improve the problems that Github has.

Try the demo here.

Today I’m working on improving this excellent project and solving usability problems. My route map is the following:

• Redesign Issues (Currently working on it)
• Redesign Website
• Redesign Blog

If you have any idea that can improve Gitlab contact me @gravityonmars

Steve Jobs was born out of wedlock, put up for adoption at birth, dropped out of college, then changed the world. What’s your excuse?