Vanilla Mist

I have been receiving many emails from people who, in the past days, have either customized or ported the Connections theme to another platform. I would like to share some of these with you, as they might be useful either as a reference to customizing your own or, in case you use another blogging platform, you might benefit from the ported versions:

• Teo, from http://mindtrick.net/ has ported the theme to Movable Type
• John Cox from http://wyome.com ported over to Xaraya
• Eddie from http://dhtmlnirvana.com/spiritual/ has worked on a complete customization of the theme and was kind enough to let me know about it. He named it “Nirvana“. The theme can be downloaded from here.
• Matt from http://schinckel.blogsome.com is using it at Blogsome, so for those of you who need help setting it up there, he might be able to help.
• Kahpeng from http://kahpeng.com/weblog/ has customized the sidebar with expandable sidebar items. Looks really good!

Please comment on this post if you have made your own customization to the Connections theme. Even if you have just changed the top image, this could serve as inspiration to others. Thanks much!

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I have seen some blogs using Connections and some people have customized it to fit their needs. Evamaria, from Chocolatedream.net has asked me in an email if I minded having people customize the theme. Actually, I think it’s great. I hope many people give their personal touch to it, and I also hope that they let me know about it.

Just today I came across Matt’s site, who has used a different top image and this alone has given the theme a complete different flavour. Go check it out!!!

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I have just learned that my (our) theme “Connections” won Alex King’s WordPress themes competition! Won!! I’m still trying to believe my eyes, as there were so many wonderful themes. It took me a while to realize that we had actually made it, seriously! I kept looking at the screen in disbelief! I feel incredibly honoured to be among so many talented people and, as I’ve said in previous occasions, the big winner is the WordPress community who will benefit from the themes that were made available.

Both on a personal and a professional level this prize means a lot to me and I want to thank Alex and the judges who selected this theme as the winner. You will never be able to realize how much this means to me, so just take my word for it: you have just made my day, my week, my month, my year… Thank you, thank you so much!!!

I would also like to congratulate all the other designers and coders who entered their themes. I mean this with all my heart, there were really fantastic entries, what an honour it is to be among you guys!!!

And last, but not least, I want to thank Sadish, who made this possible by coding the theme and, above all, to have put up with my extreme perfectionism. We share this honour equally. As some of you know, we partner on WPThemes.info to offer free themes for the WordPress community. Sadish has posted an entry on wpthemes.info about the competition results and speaks for both of us. However, the Fast Track theme, that won the “Pixel Perfect Design” prize, is his own merith, so: congratulations, Sadish!!!

My husband helped me pick the name for this theme. As I said in a previous entry, I had a hard time coming up with a name for it. Connections summarizes many concepts that I wanted to achieve with this theme and it also represents a current personal state of mind. So I have to thank him too for being so supportive as we drive together on our personal journey.

Oh, my…

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! I couldn’t be happier. This is definitely as good as it gets!

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I have just upgraded my version of WordPress to 1.5. and now I’m using the other theme that I entered in Alex King’s theme competition. Do you like i? If you use WP 1.5 yourself, you can use it too: click here to download the ‘Connections’ theme.

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I finally emailed my 2 entries to the WPThemes competition over at Alex King. I feel a bit frustrated that Sadish and I were unable to get other themes ready. We had, as I said in a previus post, 8 themes altogether, but we will still make them all available at wpthemes.info in the near future.

The themes I ended up sending were Fleur-de-Lys, which is the theme I currently use in this blog (which actually has 3 different color schemes, but I sent just one of them) and another one called Connections – and boy, I had such a hard time picking a name for this one! I showed this theme to many people and was surprised to see how many different interpratations each one came up with. Take a look at this screenshot and tell me what you think the top image means. Every single person who saw it gave me a different interpratation. How odd!!! This is why it was so hard to name it, because apparently it means different things to different people. So I decided on a more generic name that, itself, can be interpreted in a number of ways. But just out of curiosity, I would like to know what other people think it means, so please, please leave a comment with your input.

I’d also like to mention that:

1. There was a huge number of entries in this edition of the competition.This is definitely a wonderful contribution to the WP community.
2. There are many many good designs. I think it’s such a bliss to see how many talented people contributed with their work. It will be tough to pick a winner this time. Perhaps in the future, should there be other contests, it might help to pick winners in different categories, maybe by design style, I don’t know. Last time I checked there were 105 themes and that didn’t include the themes that would be sent today. I think this is huge!!!

Good luck to all of you who participated, but I have a feeling that the big winner here is the WordPress community.

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Sadish and i have been working against the clock to have all the themes ready for Alex King’s competition. We might not be able to enter all the themes we have created, though… I’m going through my monthly creative phase righ now, so I just keep new themes coming and there’s no time to code them all. The deadline is tomorrow. We have entered with Fast Track. Fleur-de-Lys is ready and just in need of some minor adjustments. We have the following themes lined up either to be coded or completed:

1. Tunnel Ride (100% coded, but needs a fix for a bug in IE)
2. Acqua (80% coded)
3. Pixel Colors (designed, not coded) (this is Pixel blue)
4. Pastel (designed, not coded)
5. Steel Elegance (designed, not coded)
6. Sushi (designed, not coded)
7. Sand Box (designed, not coded)
8. Stage Coach (90% coded)

Those that we don’t manage to send to the competition will probably be released in our free themes section on WPthemes.info.

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Alexking.org is running another WordPress themes competition, this time for version 1.5. There are already 16 themes entered. Sadish and I will enter some themes too.

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I have been working like crazy the past days. Sadish and I are getting many request for custom work from WPThemes.info. There are very interesting projects in the making and still more to come, to the point that we already felt the need for a project management system to organize things before we start losing track of the many requests that are coming our way. This is such a blessing… I honestly did not expect that many requests in so little time.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about: Sadish, from WPThemes.info, and I have partnered to make free WordPress themes. After a while, we started offering custom themes for a nominal fee. It’s a good deal for those who want to stand out from the crowd by having a unique and exclusive theme developed for their blog. We design and code and get everything up and running. So, if you’re looking for a custom made theme for your blog or a regular website, contact us.

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People already using our Fleur-de-Lys WordPress theme (that I know of, so far):

http://www.librarymonk.com/
http://tony.brilliant-talkers.com/wp/
http://jdk.phpkid.org/

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Sadish an I released Fleur Blue Version on monday. Here´s a screenshot of what it looks like. It´s available for download here. I finished the design of the next theme, called Acqua and now Sadish is working on this one. Stay tuned.

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