PixoPoint

Beta: bbPress Forum Theme Generator

Ryan — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 18:51:10 +0000

The PixoPoint Template Generator now supports bbPress themes. You may edit the colour scheme for your theme via the new ‘forum’ tab and export it via a new ‘Export to bbPress’ link in the ‘Upload/Save’ tab in the generator.

bbPress theme generated forum

Note: This is a beta product which only works with the latest bbPress 1.0 and has had minimal testing. If you experience any problems, have suggestions for improvements or need help in setting up your theme, please do not hesitate to ask in our support forum.

WordPress integration

The bbPress themes are designed to integrate perfectly with WordPress. If you setup a deep integration with WordPress, your menus and sidebars from WordPress will be integrated into your new bbPress theme. When WordPress is not integrated, the theme will still work, but will display bbPress specific information in the menus and sidebars.

Demo

We do not have a full bbPress theme demo setup, but you can test your theme designs on our bbPress mockup page. The mockup page is not functional but will demonstrate how your them will appear when used in your bbPress forum.
PixoPoint bbPress theme demo

Dropdown shadows

Ryan — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 01:56:30 +0000

We have recently added some improvements to the menu system within the PixoPoint Template Generator.

Dropdown shadow as seen in the Revolution Generated theme

Most of these changes are under the skin, improvements to cross-browser compatibility, bug fixes etc. However one of them is the addition of subtle shadows to dropdown menus. You can control the depth of the shadows from within the menu editing panel (depth of 0 gives no dropdown at all). Hopefully some of you will find this a nice addition to your site.

This feature is not yet available within the Suckerfish dropdown menu generator but it will be available eventually. If you have any suggestions for improvements, bug reports or just want to comment on the service please leave a comment in our support forum.

Simple CMS theme update

Ryan — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 05:18:33 +0000

A new version of the Simple CMS theme is now available.

Simple CMS theme for WordPress

Download Simple CMS theme version 1.5

The Simple CMS theme does not display comments, tags, categories or anything not needed for a basic static website. The theme folder only contains four PHP files, header.php, footer.php, index.php and 404.php. Unlike regular blog themes, static themes do not require large numbers of theme files.

New features

Simplified code
Improved SEO
CSS indenting
Improved code comments

Support

As per usual, all bug reports/improvements will be dealth with through our forum. As this is intended for developers, we will not be providing support for basic theme modifications.

Multi-level Navigation plugin Update Version 1.6

Ryan — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 11:33:48 +0000

After extensive testing, a new heavily updated version of the PixoPoint Multi-level Navigation plugin for WordPress is now available for download.

PixoPoint Multi-level Navigation plugin used in the Aqua Vaccinium template

Demo and download

Download PixoPoint Multi-level Navigation plugin

Link to activate PixoPoint Multi-level Navigation plugin on this page

Changes

Here is a list of the major changes between versions 1.0.8 and 1.6.

Changed menu option names from ‘blogroll’ to ‘links’ along with some other minor naming changes to make things more obvious to new users of the plugin
Added support for blogroll/links categories as a menu option
Added ability to include as well as exclude specific pages or categories from the menu
Total redesigned of the admin interface
Added support for changing wp-content/plugins folder
Added option in admin panel to allow users to change between their own themes CSS and the plugin CSS (for themes designed for the Multi-level Navigation Plugin
Added support for hover delay
Added uninstall system. When plugin is deleted via the WordPress admin panel, it automatically removes the database info added by the plugin
Added improved keyboard accessibility scriptj which uses jQuery. Script courtesy of malcalevak
Removed need to tick enable animations box. You now just need to change the speed of the menu
Changed function calls from suckerfish() to pixpoint_menu() as very few people know what a ’suckerfish’ is
Added ‘recommended plugins’ section in admin page
Added FAQ section in admin page
Added sensitivity option in admin page
Added mousein delay option in admin page
Added maintenance mode

PixoPoint Multi-level Navigation Plugin used within the Revolution Generated template

Credits

Special thanks to malcalevak for massive help with development of this version.

Support

As per usual, we prefer to offer support through our support forum. We do not offer free support by email or IM. If you do not wish to post your questions in the support forum you will need to upgrade to Premium Support.

Revolution Generated - magazine style template

Ryan — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 04:00:54 +0000

We have received numerous requests for the implementation of a magazine style templates into the PixoPoint template generator. We originally intended to launch an entirely new magazine style theme of our own creation, however Brian Gardner of the Revolution themes recently announced a new site, RevolutionTwo.com, which features a wide range of great magazine style themes which are all GPL licensed. Since they are GPL licensed we have been allowed to implement these directly into the PixoPoint template generator. Instead of having to modify the Revolution themes code to create the magazine style theme that you want, you can simply modify a few options in the template generator, hit the export button and have your very own magazine style WordPress theme!

Revolution Generated

Revolution Generated template for the PixoPoint template generator

The design of the Revolution Generated template is based on the Revolution Church theme. This is a great design and we have ported it over to look almost exactly like the original design. Since we expect most people to use the design for non-church themes we have removed some of the ‘churchy’ styling on it and replaced them with a more generic design which will hopefully be more suitable for those of you looking to modify it for your own purposes.

Note: The home page of this template is still under development. We are yet to implement a content gallery and there is a minor bug in IE which causes the date and feed links at the top of the pages to be slightly out of alignment. If you find any more bugs, please let us know and we will fix them ASAP.

Demo

You can see a live preview of the theme in the template generator … Live preview demo

Or if you want to dive right in and start editing … Start editing Revolution Generated

To download the theme, go to ‘Upload/Save’ and choose ‘Export to WordPress’ in the editing area.

Improvements over previous magazine themes

A common complaint heard from users of magazine themes is they have to add a custom field for every post they create. We have alleviated this problem by allowing you to specify a default image URL in the themes WordPress admin page for each section of the home page. When a default image URL is specified, that image will be shown in the particular home page area whenever you forget (or can’t be bothered) to add a custom field.

We have also made it easier to control what content is shown on the home page. Instead of making modifications to the theme code, you can now alter which categories of posts and how many characters from those posts are displayed in the various sections of the home page directly from your WordPress admin page.

These changes are all GPL licensed, so feel free to use them in your own themes. Links back to our site are much appreciated though

Credits

All credit for the styling of this theme goes to Brian Gardner of RevolutionTwo.com who created the Revolution Church theme which this template was based on.

Web host failure

Ryan — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 12:31:57 +0000

EDIT: Systems seem to be back to normal. Our web host found the server fault and has fixed it.

Apologies for various problems which have appeared on our site in the past 24 hours. Unknown to us, our web host has changed something on the server (we don’t know what yet). After spending many hours trying to figure out what the problem was, we realised that an identical problem had occured across ALL of our sites!

We have temporarily managed to correct most of the issues, however there are still likely to be some issues. If you find anything out of place, please let us know via our contact page and we will try to add a temporary fix for whatever problem you find.

The main problems we are having currently are with the login system for the template generator and CSS generator. When they failed, they brought down a large number of other features but the fundamental login problem still remains.

In the mean time we are trying to move hosts, however this may take a while. Hopefully things will be back up and running as per normal within the next 24 hours.

Apologies for any issues you may experience.

WP SlimBox2 plugin

Ryan — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 06:56:11 +0000

The WP SlimBox2 plugin for WordPress is a jQuery version of the WordPress Slimbox plugin. It was developed and is maintained by Greg Yingling (malcalevak). The SlimBox plugin creates animated jJavascript powered overlay popups of your images. This new version has many improvements over the original, including the addition of a plethora of options to allow you to modify it’s behaviour. The use of jQuery allows for better integration with other plugins and a smaller size and therefore faster page loads.

The WP SlimBox2 plugin features more options than any other Lightbox/Lightbox clone plugin for WordPress yet

Support for the plugin is being hosted in our support forum by the plugin author … WP SlimBox2 plugin support forum

When clicked, your images will be enlarged in a professional looking animated overlay.

Thanks to Greg Yingling (malcalevak) for creating this great plugin. More information is available on Greg’s site and in the WordPress plugin repository.

Support

Support for the WP SlimBox2 plugin is available in our support forum.

Template Generator Update

Ryan — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 08:29:21 +0000

We’ve completed a large update today for the PixoPoint Template Generator. The changes include a huge number of bug fixes. Thank you very much to the dozens of you who have reported various bugs to us, without your help we wouldn’t have been able to improve the system. If you have any questions or bug reports, please leave them in the forum.

Some new features have been added for premium subscribers including the ability to add the date, RSS feed links and search boxes to the header, plus breadcrumb links and a dropdown sub-menu.

HTML example page

Ryan — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:57:57 +0000

To help show the various changes made in the PixoPoint template generator, we’ve added this blog post which features a range of different HTML tags, attributes and classes to display those changes. You can still use any page on our site to see most of the changes, but if you need to see a particular feature which we haven’t used on another page, then this is the place to look.

Heading 2: Unordered list

Lorem Ipsum
Lorem Ipsum
Lorem Ipsum
Lorem Ipsum
Lorem Ipsum

Heading 3: Ordered list

Lorem Ipsum
Lorem Ipsum
Lorem Ipsum
Lorem Ipsum
Lorem Ipsum

Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Heading 4: Block Quote

Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Heading 5: Right Justify

Heading 6: Centered

New Aqua Vaccinium WordPress theme

Ryan — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 01:49:54 +0000

The Aqua Vaccinium template features a smooth blue and green design and has a prominent dropdown menu built in (no plugin needed). The template was originally released as a standalone theme, but has been incorporated as one of the standard templates in the PixoPoint Template Generator.

Download template as a WordPress theme

Download Aqua Vaccinium WordPress theme

The big blue bar

The blue section (below the main menu) is controlled via the ‘Main menu shadow’ section in the ‘Main Menu’ box in the template generator control panel.

If you require any (paid) customisations specific to your site, please get in touch via our contact form.

Naming

The word Aqua came from the mixture of the blue and green tones of the design. The name Vaccinium is the genus for a variety of berries including blue berries which we baked a pie for in honour of the new theme.