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

It is called PB-Tweet, and you can download it now on Extend. PB is for PluginBuddy in case you live under a rock.

So download it, test it out, and please let me know what you think. If you like it, please post a link to your site that is using it in the comments of this post.

There is no doubt that a lot is changing. In fact, one of the first things you will notice after you update is that even the dashboard is a different color. With all of these changes, I just wanted to mention a few things you should consider before you update your site to the latest version.

First and foremost, MAKE A BACKUP. Hopefully you make regular backups of your site already. But if you don’t, now is definitely the time to start. If you don’t have a backup of your entire site (database and all), you risk losing everything if there is an incompatibility somewhere during the update. There are several backup solutions available. Some are free, some are paid. As with most things, I believe you get what you pay for. Since your website and content are extremely vital, shoot for the stars and get a good backup solution. Personally, I use BackupBuddy. I highly recommend you skip McDonalds for a few days and pony up the measly $45 to ensure you have a great backup.

Ok, you have a backup. That is crucial. The next thing I would look at is plugin compatibility. In 3.0, there was a major change in the way plugins use the automatic update system in WordPress. Because of this, you will want to make sure that all of your plugin authors went in and updated their code to work in the new system. First, check to make sure you are at the latest version of the plugin. Next, find the changelog or history file that tells you what that latest update did. If you plugin author is smart, he informed you there that his code now works with the new updater.

The last thing I recommend you double-check is theme compatibility. I put this after plugins because a lot more changed for plugin authors than for theme authors. Although tons of new features were added that themes could take advantage of, almost all of them are ‘opt-in’ features. For example, the new 3.0 menu system does not appear in your theme automatically. Your theme author would have to write in the code to make the 3.0 menus work. This is a good thing. That means that if your theme author didn’t update for the new menu code, you old menu will still work just fine. The same applies to custom-post-types and the MU merge.

Hopefully, you won’t have any trouble updating your WordPress install to the latest and greatest. I have been using WordPress since version 2.7, and I have to say that 3.0 is by far the greatest version yet. Enjoy.

-matt

Here is what we came up with.

The Standard Headshot

Pretty easy to explain. Just a plain old cropped in shot of shoulders and head. The face is clearly distinguishable, and I have the greatest chance of recognizing you in person if you use this type of photo.

The Full Body

The fully body shot on twitter is exactly what it sounds like. Head to toe. Don’t get me wrong, I am sure you have pretty feet. But you are overlooking a very important part of the Twitter profile pic: it is TINY. You get a roughly 50X50px area to show me who you are. At that size, your full body shot looks like a stick figure in the frame.

The Uncropped Shot

This one gets me every time. In case you didn’t notice, the image that shows up next to your name is square (you know, the shape with four equal sides). Yet, even with this very obvious fact, I still see people using images in their pictures that are not square. This results in a terrible crop that ends up showing me some random body part.

The Candid

This is actually one of my favorites. This is not a profile picture at all. Rather, this is an every-day image of you that you have cropped to use as a profile pic. When this is done right, it can be beautiful.

The Silhouette

The silhouette is an “artsy” shot of yourself in which you are completely unrecognizable. If you are really trendy, you probably even color shifted the images so your abstract-self is a different color.

The Buddy Shot

We get it: you love your wife. We love her too, but there just isn’t enough room in that tiny little picture for you to show everyone how much you care about her. To get back to the explanation, the Buddy Shot is the commonly seen shot of multiple people in the frame. Besides the rant I went on above, I see this used with a group of friends all the time. The problem is that it makes it hard to know which on of the people you are, especially if the people in the shot are the same gender.

The Cartoon

The cartoon is the profile pic that doesn’t have a picture of you at all. Instead, it has a cartoon image of something else. This type of profile pic can be humorous, especially if the image you choose has some resemblance to you and your personality. The only problem with this, much like some of the others, is that you are not recognizable in the real world by this image.

Now that we have covered the basic styles, here are a few DOs and DONTs -

DO – Crop tight. We want to see your face so we can connect with you.

DO – Think outside the box. Some of the best profile pics I see on twitter are the candid shots that are out of the box.

DONT – Take the picture with a bunch of your friends.

DONT – forget to crop your image to a square.

DO – Follow me on twitter, here.

-matt

Heading down with me are three other members of the iThemes/WebDesign.com team: Cory Miller, James Dalman, and adBrad Ulrich.

I know that there are a million things going on at once during the 5-day Interactive Conference, so I decided to make a list of a few “must-see” speakers while I am in Austin.

• REWORK by 37signals – Jason Fried is going to be talking about the new book, and I definitely want to hear about it. Maybe I will even get to meet him for a bit.
• CSS3 Design with HTML5 – We are constantly trying to push and use the latest tools for web design, and I am hoping this session will help me move deeper in to CSS3 especially.
• Is WordPress Killing Web Design? – I think it is obvious why I want to see this one. It is going to get controversial I am sure. I hope it gets good.
• Gmail: Behind the Scenes – 5 of the folks from Google will be there talking about one of my favorite pieces of software I use all day.
• WIRED Happy Hour – Wait, how did that get on there? hmmmmmm

There are TONS more sessions that I hope to be a part of, but I don’t want to let my list get too long where I will be stuck in a schedule. With so much going on and so many people to connect with, I want to have a flexible schedule while I am down there.

Me and Brad are planning on blogging some while we are down there. If you are interested, check us out at sxsw.ithemes.com.