My junior year of college, while I was Colorado skiing with Cory and some friends, Cory first brought up the idea of me coming to work for iThemes. At the time, iThemes was in need of someone to help respond to sales emails. I had a little bit of experience with WordPress (meaning I had broken a few sites, and begged Cory to help me fix them), and Cory thought I could help lighten the load of sales emails.

It only took a month or two of working at iThemes for me to realize that this was something I wanted to be part of for the long haul. At that time, the team was only about 5 people, so I was surrounded by incredible talent. Chris and Cory immediately started investing knowledge in me. Eventually, Cory confronted me with a question: “Matt, what do you want to do here?” To be honest, I wasn’t completely sure. I eventually figured out that I loved developing and solving problems, and decided I wanted to do theme development.

iThemes has an awesome culture of continued learning, but I also had to make a personal investment of my time to learn the skills to get the job I wanted. I used nights and weekends (and eventually dropped out of college, but don’t tell my mom) to soak up everything I could about web development. Then, I would utilize resources like Chris Jean during the day to help push me and show me what I needed to learn. I can say without a doubt that even if I had all the drive in the world, I could not have learned as much as I did as quickly if I hadn’t surrounded myself with the best and most talented developers and leaders.

Eventually, I started developing the front end of all of the themes we were releasing. I even released a free plugin or two. Our company continued to grow, and Cory started helping me shape some of my roles in that growth. One thing Cory challenged me with was helping to create and sustain a culture that made iThemes a great place to work. He cast a vision for the culture he wanted to work in, and charged me to help make it happen. As we grew even more, we knew we had to look for more space. Then, about a year ago, we moved in to our third office space (fourth if you count Cory’s house). Now we had 2,500 square feet of playground. It was a perfect space to cultivate our culture. It wasn’t much to look at when we first got it (and admittedly is always a work in progress), but we have tried to make a space that is more than just a place to plant your butt for 8-10 hours a day. We wanted a space that inspired creativity. I think we have made a great effort in that direction, and plan to continue making it better (as I type, there is literally a painter putting some new color on our dev room walls).

Now, our company has grown to 20 team members (with more coming all the time). Cory recognized that we were going to need to have some leadership in place so we could continue to mold the culture of our workplace. About a month ago, he gave each of our 4 brands a team lead to help direct the teams. Additionally, he started talking to me about a new chapter in my role here. We didn’t really know what it would be called, but we knew some of the things that needed to be done. After some planning, Cory came to me with the idea of COO. I had to look it up, because I wasn’t really sure what all that meant. After reading about it, and comparing it to the goals that we had set for my new role, we both thought it was a pretty good fit.

Honestly, I’m lucky to be here. I have no doubt that there are people out there that are smarter than me, but haven’t gotten the same opportunities that I have. I am grateful to Cory and his partners for taking a risk on me. When people ask Cory how he has been so successful at what he is doing, I always hear him respond with, “I was in the right place, at the right time, and I was ready.” I’ve decided to adopt that. It’s not that I was the best at the time, it is that I was at the right place. at the right time, and I was ready.

Via WordCamp Seattle Lightning Talk.

-matt

Last week, I had the chance to shoot (more) photos of Cory Miller, and I wanted to share a few of them with you.

Something really interesting happens to Cory when he is in front of the camera. It is almost like the lens turns him in to an uncontrollable being, and he just makes a lot of really weird faces. I’ll have to post more pictures to include a few of those, but for now, these will have to do.

I had to pull this one out of the gallery and show it full size below. It was just too pretty to only be on this page once…

-matt

Here are the basics to adding alternate module styles to your own Builder child theme. The following code block would go in your child theme’s functions.php file.


if ( ! function_exists( 'it_builder_loaded' ) ) {
  function it_builder_loaded() {
    builder_register_module_style( $module, $alternate_name, $css_class );
  }
}
add_action( 'it_libraries_loaded', 'it_builder_loaded' );


$module – This is the slug of the module you want to change. It is the default module name, all lowercase with spaces replaced by dashes. ex: A Widget Bar module would be represented as widget-bar. A Footer module would be represented as footer. Rinse and repeat.

$alternate_name – Here, you set the name that you want for your alternate module style. This is what will appear in the dropdown when choosing an alternate module style.

$css_class – Here you can assign a new CSS class to your alternate module style. Any style applied to this class in your stylesheet will be applied to the alternate module style.

It’s just that simple. Here is an example of a working alternate style:

if ( ! function_exists( 'it_builder_loaded' ) ) {
  function it_builder_loaded() {
    builder_register_module_style( 'html', 'Green HTML', 'builder-green-html' );
  }
}
add_action( 'it_libraries_loaded', 'it_builder_loaded' );


-matt

Demo Site | Download

To be honest, I built most of this theme in one night. Brad put together a set of color schemes in about an hour. So why did it take so long to get this released? The WordPress theme review process has undergone some changes recently that make it mighty difficult to get a theme on the repo. While I agree, quality control is important, I did find the process somewhat nit-picky.

One thing I will give the reviewers credit for is their helpfulness. They were more than willing to spend some time with me in the IRC chat room (#wp-themes) and get some of (what they saw as) the kinks out of the theme. Another thing that has improved dramatically since the start of the process is the time it takes to get a theme reviewed. The first and second submission of Quick-Vid sat untouched in the review process for a month EACH. Now, they have the process down to a few days at most.

As far as improvements to the process, the main one I would like to see would be SVN access for the theme author. I think this is especially critical after it has been approved. Theme authors need to be able to push an update with fixes to bugs quickly to their users. Having to re-upload the theme and start the process all over again for a bug fix is a bit ridiculous.

Anyway, hope you enjoy the theme.

-matt