First of all, Happy New Year to all the readers! (a little late but better late than never – I’ve been busy) Thanks for standing with us for the first half of 2009. Since the last part of 2009 Appchain has taken a few steps into the future and has evolved in terms of quality of the content it provides. There was a small period of time where theme reviews where made for free and premium themes. That experiment was partly a success but a huge time killer with too little success to continue. It died and something better took it’s place. Something much better…
I personally don’t like Windows 7 design that much, but if you do, and you have a wordpress blog and you want a wordpress theme that looks like windows Vista , here it is! It’s called Inanis Glass and it’s available at wordpress.org. The gratest thing about this theme is the start menu that has all the things that usually go into the right sidebar or into the header. You can change themes from the sidebar, buttons will appear to write a new post or page if you are logged in and you have permissions, also it has buttons to show logged in user information or to log out. Tabs are inside the start menu just like running applications on windows. Video After the break.
This is how the theme looks in a smaller picture. If you view it in normal size you might get a little disappointed. The padding is a little weird and so are the margins. It’s like pushed to the left too much and the sidebar is squeezed and too far to the left. The only thing that i see OK is the background. If the background was made by the designer of this theme.. I would say: “nice background!”
The description of the blog seems to be missing but is actually at the right part of the header (where usually a Search Box should be).
Enough with the criticism, now for the good parts (and after that some bad parts again).+Continue Reading
A new website is born today. Live Countdown Timer is one of our most successful plugins that we recently updated it to a new version. That new version is a place where we fixed all the requested bugs and added all the requested features( thanks everybody for the feedback! ), but also a place where we linked the plugin (from now on) to a new website: LCT (live countdown timer).
WHAT? WHAT? WHAT?
The idea behind this project is to organize all the events in the world, give them a nice looking timer and let everybody join in. So we decided to start with wordpress because all of the good feedback we received from the Live Countdown Timer Plugin(thanks again everyone!).
How is this useful? How could you take this further?What’s the big picture?
It’s a place where all the events happening in blogs, websites, news ..etc will be stored. A timer for each event is being formed. People will be able to rate and comment these events. People don’t use tags and categories that much (at least we are not trying to “complicate” things by using them) so we are going to try to organize these things as hard as we can.
LCT wants to organize all the events it can get… we are trying to bring it further with new enhancements to the website and we will try to give more flexibility to the functionality but for now you will have to use it as it is.
Let us know what you think!
And just in case you missed it above… HERE’S THE LINK to the website.
The previous theme was not exactly 100% wordpress and performance OK.
Threaded comments where not very well written in terms of design (when more than 3-5 comments existed)
The visual elements, slideshows and all the pictures that needed loading took a lot of pageload (on each new page refresh)
Theme took a lot of space and needed a lot of scrolling down
certain parts of posts where inefficient to appchain (like more about author section at the end of each post)
Certain parts of the theme (sidebar , header) where not editable in terms of simple design, value changing
Anyway, this is a free theme from wordpress.org that makes things more simple and more visual, more beautifull at the same time. I’ve installed and enabled wp super cache (had only wp cache before and i think it was disabled for some reason for about 1 month) and everything seems to be working much more faster right now. (at least x3 times faster).
It’s a little something I won while on WordCamp in Bucharest and decided to make it the default theme on appchain after i chose it from their theme gallery. The creators are wpzoom.com and they’ve done a really nice job at it. Of course, I’ve made some modifications (top pictures in header and logo), and probably still will make some stuff while appchain is evolving. For the next months, this will be the default theme… who knows, maybe a full year (but once we grow bigger, a new theme that organizes everything is inevitable).
Make your blog/website special with dynamic categories that you can customize and you can show in different places on a post! Featureak is helping you do this easy and fast! +Continue Reading
Because you guys and gals are waiting and waiting for a new update on your favorite worpdress plugins, we are giving you today the deadline that we are setting for Live Countdown Timer development . The new version of Live Countdown Timer will save us a lot of time (if you know what i meen) as it will have the option to be included in posts , so each deadline will have a countdown timer for it’s next update. (hopefully this will make everybody happy)…
Now, of course, we need a deadline for the new version of Live Countdown Timer: FRIDAY 4 Sept 2009. This is the date the new version will arrive (but be warned.. it might come sooner).
UPDATE: As project manager for this plugin, i must give the bad news and apologise! We are delaying the deadline until Monday night.
