A brand new theme — Sleeek

Christmas on the door and it couldn’t be better timed for this release, a brand new minimalist blog theme — Sleeek! If you love blogging and if you have lot of photos from your tours recently, Sleeek is an awesome theme just for you. I would recommend you to view Sleeek Demo here before buying.

While everything is documented on its page, I would like reiterate that Sleeek features responsive design, post formats along with full width Image and Gallery post formats and a smooth gallery slideshow. With Theme Options, you can stylize the theme to add more features.

Its been 3 good years that I first published a WordPress theme — SimpleX. Since then, I have been frequently releasing few other themes for free. I would like to thank everyone who have been using these themes and who have donated to support WPshoppe to survive. Thank you all.

Just as a good gesture, I am bringing you Sleeek at a minimum price. This special introductory price will remain until Jan 15, 2012 just so Christmas is more fun. :)

Also, I am adding a new Support Forum so you can ask some questions if you are stuck at something with this theme. A new site, a new theme, a new forum, an special price and Christmas! Can it be any better?

Cheers!! Merry Christmas to ya all.

What’s cooking, huh?

Aite, there has been quite a long silence here on WPshoppe.com. I know I have been inactive on here although you might have noticed quite some updates on twitter. Well, I am still working on WordPress themes, trying to come up with unique ideas, well its hard. :)

Anyways, after the WordCamp San Francisco in August this year, doors opened up for few things. First and important for a UX designer is definitely Responsive Design. Well, I got busy for these months or so trying to convert some themes over at Graph Paper Press into responsive design. It just feels great that now your themes just work on every device.

Apart from that, the GREAT news is that I am once again getting my gears over here. I will be more active.

To share some inside news, I have a brand new (premium) theme completed. Its called Sleeek — just to represent another minimalist clean blog theme. It caters to bloggers mostly. Supports post formats and the best thing is if you have a image or images to share, just create a image post or gallery post and bang, you have a full width slideshow. On top of that, it gets rid of small boring thumbnails for gallery posts. Every gallery post now has a slideshow, how cool is that? It even replaces your header image with a slideshow if you want. Many things to come but the first version will be coming out for Christmas.

Not just that, you can’t beat the price for a premium theme. Guess the price!! ;)

I will add more when Sleeek gets out! Cheers!!

 

minii lite out now!

Good news FIRST!

I have decided to give away minii theme for free as a LITE version. I just submitted to WordPress Trac and until I wait for their official approval, I will post this on here as well.

Grab it NOW and post whatever bug you find out or any feature that you think might be of great help. Look at the minii demo and be convinced! :)

I will put them on a pro version along with few features I have in mind. That will be a paid version though! Again good thing is its cost. While I haven’t decided on the exact amount, I will be giving the pro version on a bargain, probably one of the cheapest WordPress pro themes out there. :)

Bad news now is, if you have been following me on Twitter, you probably know. Last Monday, I had a small cut injury on my right thumb and I had to go through a surgery to fix it. While I can type and work, I cannot use it normally. I cannot sign a cheque, damn! :( Good thing is I work on computers, not papers. :) I will have to take a rest for 3-6 weeks. Another good thing is, I am learning to do things with my left hand. :)

My new hand says Hi!

Anyway, things are going good so no worries. I hope to recover soon and start working on the features of minii.

minii – ready for release

So, its been over 2 months I posted. WoW!

This time its serious though. Thank you all who viewed, posted comments, liked and gave suggestions. They are very valuable. I am not disappointing you for sure.

I have finally worked my a** off this weekend to finalize my minii. Its a pretty sweet experience going back and getting another minimalist theme after a long time. It feels amazing when you know you are done and everything starts coming out as you think. I am sure you agree with me. It happens in whatever work you do. :)

Anyway, I am posting now because, I wanted to say, minii is nearly done. There might be few css issues missing for this beta version to complete which I will work on this week and probably release the theme next weekend. I just finished setting up its demo. The best thing about this theme, as I realized just before posting this, is that it looks awesome in iPhone. Why? Because, the big bold fonts are clearly readable without having to zoom in and look at the text which you may have done it on other themes. That kinda defines the real meaning of being minimalist!

This theme is going to be available for free as a beta version very soon. After a short time of its release (hopefully I can integrate premium features within next 2 weeks), this will become a paid theme. A number of features such as lightbox, different css themes, google fonts, flexible widgets, logo, google tracking, cross browser compatibility and a few more, including bug fixes from beta will be available at that time.

So, grab as soon as this comes out! Follow me, @maharzan, on Twitter and grab this opportunity!

Upcoming theme: minii, like/comment if you would like to see this theme developed

I haven’t been active much, well obviously. I have plans to restart making some simple themes and I have designs on hand as well. I just don’t have much time to code in as I have been relatively busy with Graph Paper Press and Music. :) We have 3 themes in the pipeline there of which the core framework was released this weekend.

That set apart, I had a simple clean design that I wanted to work on few months back. I want to produce this more professionally but want to get your feedback on if you guys really want it. I have the code ready for the core functionality and just need to write it down into a WP Theme. I have called it minii, mainly because it just shows titles but then clicking on the title (block) reveals the actual post. At first glance, it looks clean and the title attracts the visitors attention immediately. This has been my strength – minimalism.

Anyway, I want you guys to post out a comment below or ‘like’ this post so I am bound to start working on this. ha! Sorry for the trouble but I think I need some chains now. :)

Heres a sneakpeak!

Mansion and Work-a-holic selected Top 100 Free High Quality WordPress Themes

If you have not known yet, few days ago, Smashing Magazine selected 2 of my themes, Mansion and Work-a-holic which I made for Graph Paper Press, as the Top 100 High Quality Free WordPress Themes for 2010, themes released between mid 2009 to mid 2010.

If you are a photoblogger and also want to showcase your portfolio, these themes are just perfect for you and they are of course FREE, though you will need to register (for FREE) at Graph Paper Press to download.

I feel so proud. Thanks all for your support. :)

Mansion

Work-a-holic

simpleX now updated to use WordPress 3.0 menu feature

Its been quite sometime WordPress 3.0 is out. So, just took some time off to quickly update my classic theme – simpleX, to make full use of this feature. For those who are using WordPress 3.0 and not being able to make full use of the Menus feature, here you are. Feel free to download it now. :)

On the side note, today I saw a whooping 637 downloads a day at wordpress.org. Not sure how but simpleX has not more than 60000 downloads and has been pretty popular. Thanks for all those who used the theme. I don’t want to promise anything but I have some more plans for this theme and another simple theme is awaiting development. :)

Cheers!!

New Theme in the making

Hey Folks!

Its been quite a long time. Things has gone really busy these days and I cannot find time to do some new themes. So just for some good news, I am making a new theme called Mansion and have been completed. There will be a free version and I will update more information about this around next week.

For a brief, this theme is for photographers but is equally good if you are just a blogger. The beauty is the whole width of the home / archive pages extend flexibly according to your browser width.

More on the theme later.

Cheers!

SimpleX 1.3.2 now available

simpleX

SimpleX has been quite popular amongst the available themes at WordPress.org and it just crossed 41,000 downloads which is pretty impressive for a simple design like that. After almost a year of the last update on the theme and WordPress nearing to version 2.9 now this theme really needed an upgrade. The last update was made when WordPress 2.7 was available. Since then, WordPress has come a long way.

So, after looking at questions on forums and issues people have reported, simpleX has been updated to work with latest WordPress. The 2 issues that were fixed are:

  1. Fixed Tag Cloud (the new WordPress has a different class so were showing the cloud as a list)
  2. Plugin compatibility (plugins like Lightbox now work perfectly).

It was still using the old jQuery manually. Now it pulling new jQuery automatically from WordPress files which means there are no longer conflicts with plugins that use multiple JavaScript libraries.

On the other side, the file size has been greatly reduced from over 100KB to just 75KB. :)

Click here and grab this simple and clean theme.

Another amazingly simple FREE WordPress Theme: Poetry

poetry

This and last week has been pretty busy working on a pro theme for GraphPaperPress. More on that later.

I had some free time today getting this simple theme completed. I was working on it last week but hadn’t had time to wrap up last bits and pieces including testing on IE. So, today, I completed all the initial testing and finalized couple of styles and thought I will give it a go.

Poetry theme is now ready for giveaway. I want to post here a pre-release version so if in any case, there are bugs, I can fix it in a couple of days before giving it a final shape. As mentioned earlier, Poetry is a simple, clean theme that is dedicated to all the Poets out there. Yes, all. You don’t have to be THE Great.

I am not sure if there already exists similar theme but I have only seen blogs / corporate / photoblog style themes. This theme has been inspired by my love to old books and typography. And from what I saw, it looks great on mac Safari and Firefox, and PC IE8. The other browsers don’t render the fonts and aren’t smooth. It might be better on Vista / Win7.

Preview

You can view the screenshot in this post for now as I will be setting up the demo for it a bit later.

Download

You can get the Poetry theme here right now. Please do post any comments / bugs you might have regarding this theme.

Cool Feature

Ah, BTW, one cool feature I forgot to mention is that you can use custom key author in posts to show the author of the poem right below the Title. It defaults to whoever the posting it from wordpress admin (such as admin himself). This way this theme can just look like the old book with all those great poem collection. ;)

Thanks & nJoY!