A few weeks ago I was approached by the manager of the tuts+ network of sites owned by Envato (the same folks who own ThemeForest and other marketplaces). I was asked if I’d be able to write a tutorial to contribute to a brand new site to be launched as part of the tuts+ network, called WPtuts+. It’s a tutorial site specialized for WordPress, and builds on the past success of the entire tuts+ network of sites. The site manager was looking for experienced WP developers to contribute some tutorials before the site launched so that when it did launch there would be some good content immediately available to users.

I was asked if there were any topics I’d like to write about, and I came up with 3 specific tutorials that I could write. The site manager picked the best one, and I got to work writing. It took about 2 weeks to write, but I was able to have it done before the site launched. It’s called Create A Tabbed Widget for Custom Post Types, and it’s the second tutorial ever published on WPtuts+. The site manager asked me if I’d write some more tutorials. I had to think long and hard about whether or not I’d rather write tutorials for WPtuts+ or create themes for ThemeForest. Personally, I enjoy creating themes much more than writing tutorials, but I suppose I could drop in a tutorial every few months. We’ll see…

It is truly an honor to be published in the same network of sites that I have learned so much from!

After almost 5 months of development, Outer Spice is pleased to announce the official release of Continuum on the Theme Forest Marketplace! After just over 2 days it has garnered 41 sales and a five-star rating. We are also celebrating passing 800 total sales on Theme Forest, and hope to hit 900 very soon. Thanks for all your support during our development phase! Here are some Continuum details:

Stop fussing with lengthy setups; Continuum immediately works perfectly. Of course, with almost 200 theme options, you can customize it to no end. Continuum was designed an built by a die-hard blogger who has used magazine-style WordPress templates for almost 5 years. It is best used for newspaper and magazine blogs, but because of all of the custom widgets, shortcodes, page templates, unique sidebars, and custom menus, it can be molded into whatever kind of site you want, like a portfolio site for example. Continuum fully supports and was designed specifically for WordPress 3.0+. Continuum features an extensive Feed Framework which intuitively groups and displays your posts, and lets the user sort the posts several ways depending on which part of the site they are on.

Continuum is great for Magazine & News blogs, Gaming sites, Movie & Music review blogs, product review sites like Cnet.com, portfolio sites, personal blogs, and book review blogs. Continuum: Engineered for the pros. Crafted for the up-and-comers. Made for you.

View all the details of Continuum or play with the live demo here »

First of all, we forgot to toot our own horn when we hit 700 total sales on Theme Forest. We have 733 to be exact. Caulk seems to be the winner of our two themes as far as the long haul goes. That sucker will not stop selling. We’re so glad people are finding our themes so useful! We’ve got a new theme in the works that we can’t wait to finish and release on the Theme Forest marketplace. It takes full advantage of all of the WordPress 3.0 features, and it’s by far the most complex and interactive theme we’ve designed. The last theme we released was in May, 2010, and we had hoped that we would have released another theme during 2010, but the business that the release of Socket brought us has been overwhelming and we’re just coming out of the other side of it. Finally.

So, our new theme, to be titled “Continuum”, is a magazine style WordPress theme with multiple jQuery enhancements including four different featured sliders, comment sliders, breaking news sliders, fancy hovers, fancy drop downs, as well as four unique home page layouts to choose from. This is going to be a theme for content-heavy magazine sites that need to display as much as they can on the page without over-crowding it with the purpose of keeping the readers’ attention for as long as possible. Look for a release date sometime around early to mid March.

Very rarely I’ll get an email from a client who has purchased our Caulk theme on ThemeForest stating that they cannot get their sticky posts to display correctly in the top right panel. I check out their settings and sure enough everything is set correctly, and they have exactly two posts marked “sticky” in the WordPress admin panel. I still do not know exactly why this happens, but I think it has something to do with a problem originating in their database from a previous theme and actually has nothing to do with the Caulk framework itself. In any case, here’s what’s wrong and here’s how to fix it:

Caulk grabs the first two sticky posts, and ONLY the first two sticky posts, and puts them in the top right panel. Sometimes only one post will display there (or no posts) despite the fact that there are indeed two and only two posts marked sticky. Well, at least it APPEARS that there are only two posts marked sticky. In reality, the database actually has more than two posts marked as sticky in the wp_options table. The reason they aren’t showing up in the blog is because the other sticky posts don’t exist in the wp_posts table. For some unknown reason, when the posts were originally deleted, the “sticky_posts” option in the wp_options table was not adjusted to reflect this.

If you have two and only two posts marked sticky in your WordPress admin panel, then the database value should correspond by storing an array of two post ID’s. If the array is longer than two, Caulk will not display the sticky posts correctly. Here’s an example of a value I recently found in a client’s database:

That value indicates there are four sticky posts (“a:4:”) instead of two. I checked which two posts the client wants marked as sticky and found those two post values. In this case, the client wanted post ID’s 475 and 506 as sticky posts (803 and 289 didn’t even exist in the wp_posts table). So, here is what I manually changed the value to in phpMyAdmin:

Note: make sure you set the “i:0;” to the correct index (i.e. the array inside the brackets must start at 0). Hope this obscure solution can help someone out there!

Internet Explorer market share continues to shrink and is down to 49.8%, which is great news for us web developers. For those of you who aren’t aware of the pains we have to endure to bring you consistent websites across all browsers, there is a consortium called the W3C that creates the standards that we use when coding websites. We need standards so we don’t have to completely rebuild a website for each browser it might be viewed in. If we didn’t have standards, we would have to make a completely new website for Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 8 (and soon IE 9). That’s 7 different websites! As it stands now, most of those browsers are very close to being standards compliant, but IE is not. That means when we make websites, we make one website, and then hack it to work in 3 different versions of IE (since all 3 are still in use by web users). So, basically, when us web developers create websites for our clients, they’re getting four websites for the price of one, unbeknownst to them. You can see why news regarding IE’s continual drop in market share is such great news!

There are some folks out there that are really looking forward to IE 9, and with it’s purported standards compliance focus and HTML5 support, it’s no wonder. However, as I recall, IE 8 was also supposed to be the greatest thing to hit the browser world, and failed miserably. I’ve already seen some speed tests as well, and IE 9 currently falls well behind its competition. Just give up, Microsoft. We don’t need you in the browser world any longer. I bet if I did a case study on the amount of development time wasted making websites compatible with all the different versions of IE, I’d find out that if it weren’t for IE I’d be 50% more profitable. Hard to quantify, but I have a feeling it’s close to that number.

Socket is a very powerful and flexible CMS for corporate and/or portfolio use. It was developed using the latest technologies and web coding standards, and employs state-of-the-art features such as jQuery enhancements, font replacement, AJAX contact forms, social media integration, and more. Here are a few of the most notable features:

• Over 30 page templates (6 different portfolio layouts)
• 9 gorgeous professional skins
• Unlimited widget combinations using 15 distinct widget panels
• A huge, beautiful featured area to showcase your work
• Tons of back-end theme options

To really get a feel for everything Socket can do, check out the live demo and explore all the pages. The features are described on each page, and you can also see the different skins. Here is a list of each skin with a link to see it in action:

Skins (click to see live)

• Slate
• Aluminum
• Epoxy
• Carbon
• Neoprene
• Iron
• Brick
• Malachite
• Magnet

You can create 2 websites that look completely different from each other using Socket, since it has so many options for arrangement of widget panels, number of columns, colors, styles, and page templates. It truly is a premium theme by any and all standards. Here is a full list of features:

Features

• Over 30 page templates
• 6 different portfolio page layouts
• A unique theme design not yet seen on ThemeForest
• 3 separate content sliders
• 15 distict widget panels
• 9 gorgeous professional skins
• cufon font replacement
• superfish drop down menus
• 2 AJAX contact forms
• JQuery enhanced elements including multiple jQuery sliders
• Organized and easy-to-use theme options page
• Twitter & Flickr integration
• Slick “more” panel slides out to expose non-critical content from under the menu
• The best free template icons out there
• Valid XHTML and CSS, and compatible with all modern browsers
• Forward-engineered to work with WordPress version 3! (currently tested with WordPress 3 beta 2)
• Integrates with post thumbnail featured introduced in WordPress 2.9
• No plugins required
• Nested and paged comments
• Related posts underneath blog posts
• Lots of white-space and modern styling techniques
• Indented, spaced, commented, and intuitive code (HTML, CSS, and PHP is all commented in-line)
• Superb, prompt customer service
• Lots more!

This is my second edition of T.I.D.B.I.T.S., and you’re probably still asking yourself what they are and why I do them. Here’s the deal: I don’t read very much. I’m probably in the lower 25% of all readers (and consequently the upper 25% of all TV watchers). So you can rest assured that what I do actually spend my valuable time reading is pretty dang good. Using that same logic, the amount you read is somewhat proportional to the quality of things you’ll read, and that explains why you’re reading our blog. Now we come to the reason for T.I.D.B.I.T.S. Since we’re not real good writers ourselves, the least we can do is point you in the direction of good writing and great resources for your development. Today’s tidbit is one of my personal favorites.

Smashing Magazine is a tremendous web design & development blog based out of the UK. I’ve been reading it for over a year and it has absolutely been the reason for my success and continued skill progression as a web developer. You can find anything from Photoshop tutorials to developing custom WordPress plug-ins. Smashing is very heavily WordPress and open-source based, and consequently you’ll often see posts showcasing free WordPress templates, fonts, and icon sets. The editors of Smashing have a keen eye for beautiful modern web design and spend their time scouring the web for superb websites to include in their showcases. There’s an average of about 2 posts per day – plenty of content but not enough to overwhelm you.

I bring this up now since they recently released a book and redesigned their website, creating a “Smashing Network” of other design blogs and featured posts from the cream of the crop around the web. I can’t tell you how many free icon sets, fonts, and themes I have acquired via Smashing – and most of them are licensed for free commercial use, which is MONEY for a web developer. I highly recommend this blog. If you are at all in the design or development industry, and somehow you have not heard of Smashing, check them out as soon as you can!

Let us apologize right up front for the acronym. There is something so appealing about using acronyms, even though most of the time they are inappropriate (see this article’s title (S.T.A.T.)) Anyway… we’re putting a blog in the spotlight today because we feel it is a great resource for fellow web & software developers, and we want you to know about it. Pay no attention to the banners promoting Outer Spice Web Company – we have no idea how they got there. This is a purely objective write-up.

Chomper Stomping is the blog of fellow software developer Christopher McCulloh. He has been developing professionally for seven years and has co-written and edited a number of development resources. His specialties include AJAX, Javascript, CSS, HTML, Flash game development, iPhone app development, Java, PHP, Python, and ActionScript. Quite a mouth-full, we know. Check out his about info:

E-Commerce developer at Finish Line Co-Author of HTML, XHTML and CSS All-in-one Desk Reference for Dummies Graduated from IU with a Bachelors of Media Arts and Science and a Certificate in Applied Computer Science. Tech Editor for Building Facebook Applications for Dummies and Building Websites All-in-one for Dummies 2nd Edition. Creator and maintainer of the Status-bar Calculator Firefox Extension Three years professional experience in Java E-Commerce Development and four years professional experience with PHP for a combined total of seven years professional JavaScript/HTML/CSS experience

He’s got a couple of creative software projects he’s been working on, including his latest: ShoutMote. He mixes in good resources for development with a little bit of humor to create a blog that is worth having in your reader. If you are a software developer, Chomper Stomping is worth a look.

Stay tuned for future T.I.D.B.I.T.S.!