The Official UpThemes Blog

The best place to find WordPress tutorials, theme teasers, company news and much more.

Responsive Web Design, The UpThemes Way

Posted by Anthony on February 27th, 2013 in Tips and tagged: ,

At UpThemes, we care about making our products the best they can be and are committed to ensuring the themes we create are kept up to date with the ever-changing standards in web development. Responsive web design involves an approach to development that ultimately delivers a website that adapts to any medium you may be viewing it on, whether that be your phone, tablet, or desktop computer.

While most themes sell responsive web design as a premium feature, we believe it to be not a feature at all, but a standard practice for every product we put out.

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Add some Personality to your blog

Posted by Chris Wallace on February 6th, 2013 in Theme Release and tagged: ,

Personality Theme

Personality is a simple, beautiful blogging theme that combines clean typography and a flexible layout, making it easy to blog about anything with great clarity. Our goal was to deliver a clean, crisp, elegant typography-based theme for bloggers. I think we succeeded.

Offering multiple page layouts, Sass/Compass-powered styles, and integration with the WordPress Theme Customizer, Personality makes it easy to get a custom look for your blog in just a couple minutes. If you’re looking for an easy to customize yet simple and elegant theme, Personality is for you.

Personality is a responsive, fluid-width theme that looks great on any modern smartphone or tablet and makes it easy to share different types of content with your readers.

This theme is now available for a one-time cost of $39 with lifetime support and theme updates or can be downloaded through our Theme Club Membership for just $39/year.

View Theme Details or View Theme Demo

Free Theme Launch: Gallery

Posted by Matt on January 17th, 2013 in News & Updates, Theme Release

Remember me telling you about the upcoming themes for January? I know, it’s probably been the longest week of your life. Well, as promised, we are excited to release Gallery into your capable hands today.

Gallery Theme

As I said before, this is not the Gallery theme of old. We improved the codebase from the ground up. We made it responsive. Content types get their own unique touches like custom styling for all the new post types like “Status” and “Video” and a slick slider for the photo “Gallery” posts. We also put serious thought towards making theme customization easy. Incorporating SASS and Compass makes a completely different look only few color value changes away.  And the list goes on.

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UpThemes Framework 2.3 Now Uses Iris Colorpicker & New Media Uploader

Posted by Chris Wallace on January 10th, 2013 in News & Updates and tagged: ,

I’m extremely excited to announce that the UpThemes Framework, our tiny little theme options framework, now uses the new WordPress 3.5 Iris colorpicker as well as the new media uploader.

What Does This Mean for Users?

Well, for one, it means you must upgrade to WordPress 3.5 before using the latest version of our themes. The framework is no longer backwards-compatible with old versions of WordPress. Sorry, but we want you to be as secure and up-to-date as possible.

For two, it means easy usage of the Live Theme Customizer to preview your theme modifications without tinkering with your live site until the changes are loaded in and ready for launch.

What Does It Mean for Developers?

Same stuff as above. No changes are required to the way you instantiate your theme options. Simply create your option arrays just like before and the new colorpicker and image uploader will work seamlessly out of the box.

Thank You!

I want to recognize two developers that helped (unknowingly) contribute to this update. Rachel Baker, wrote a lovely post on how to use the new WordPress color picker in a plugin, which helped me out tremendously when implementing this new functionality for the UpThemes Framework. Also, Thomas Griffin, developer of the incredible Soliloquy plugin, who wrote a well-documented and extremely simple plugin to help folks like me integrate the new WP media utility. Thanks Rachel and Thomas!

Questions? Let Us Know!

If you come across any issues, feel free to help us out on Github, where the UpThemes Framework is currently hosted and being actively developed.

Sneak Peek: Understated Theme

Posted by Chris Wallace on January 7th, 2013 in Teasers

We’re releasing a new theme for both WordPress and Statamic (an awesome new CMS requiring no database). The theme was designed by Galen Gidman and is called “Understated” and focuses on beautiful typography with a pop of color. We decided to put together a short 30-second clip to share it with you all:

The theme will be released in the upcoming Statamic Add-On Marketplace and will also be available in our Club Membership which is an amazing value at just $39 or $99/year. Learn more about our membership options here.

Sneak Peek for January

Posted by Matt on January 7th, 2013 in Teasers

Things are different in 2013. Can you feel it? If you so, it’s probably has something to do with the new things happening at UpThemes. Let’s start with a sneak peek at the new themes coming at you in January.

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Introducing the UpThemes WordPress Tips & Tricks Newsletter

Posted by Matt on December 18th, 2012 in News & Updates and tagged: , , , ,

WordPress Tips & Tricks For Everyone

While browsing through the archives of the UpThemes blog, I noticed something interesting. There is a ton of good information there for people serious about getting the most out of WordPress. And you know what else? The people that write it know what they are talking about. They live and breathe (a very advanced technique) WordPress  and want to share what they’ve learned.

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Meet Mi, The Microblog WordPress Theme That’s All About You

Posted by Matt on December 13th, 2012 in Microblogging, News & Updates and tagged: , , , ,

mi theme

It’s dead-simple. It’s you. It’s Mi.

In this crazy, mixed-up world of web this and mobile that, wouldn’t it be nice for a few pixels of the world to be all about you? That’s what we thought. And that’s why we created Mi, a beautifully uncluttered microblog WordPress theme that removes the distractions and puts the focus on your content.

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Yumblog, Our New Food Blog Theme for WordPress

Posted by Matt on December 12th, 2012 in News & Updates and tagged: ,

yumblog home

Your All-In-One Food Blog Theme

Here at UpThemes, we’re fans of food. Big fans. But we looked around for a simple and and intuitive way to share our favorite recipes and came up as empty as search for good Pad Thai in El Paso (Nada. I’ve tried). So with the design help of the lovely and talented Gedy Rivera, we did what we do best – made our own.

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Black Friday Deal: 50% Off All Themes on Creative Market

Posted by Chris Wallace on November 22nd, 2012 in Blogger

For today only, get a huge 50% discount on any of our individual themes listed on Creative Market. Every theme is available at an amazing price of just $19 per theme.

In addition, for Black Friday, we’ve released a brand new theme called Yumblog – a totally rad responsive food blogging theme. If you or someone you know needs a way to share recipes, this theme is perfect in every way. Buy this theme now and gift it to a friend, use it for a customer, or give it to your mom. This theme is an excellent way to share recipes.

View All Themes on Creative Market

Say Hello To Our Newest Team Member

Posted by Chris Wallace on November 5th, 2012 in News & Updates

Such a beefcake!

Today is the first day for our newest team member, Matt Riopelle. Matt comes to us with over 10 years experience in sales, project management, user strategy and marketing. We are extremely excited to have him join our small team of (now) 7 as our Product Advocate. His role will be to analyze everything about UpThemes and constantly improve customer relations and overall product quality. Matt will be spending this week getting to know our products, customers, and affiliates so make sure to reach out to him and welcome him to the team!

Got any questions for Matt? Hit him up on twitter! He can be found manning the @upthemes twitter account or at @mattriopelle.

 

Online Tools for Editing and Improving Your Photos

Posted by Siobhan on October 22nd, 2012 in Photography and tagged: , ,

Photography is an art form that grew exponentially over the past decade. Like other arts, there are some basic lessons. Learning those basics and practicing them can dramatically improve your photographs.

Have you ever looked at a stunning photo and wished you could take one like that? Wondered why even everyday objects look spectacular on some photographs? They probably got their basics right. The route to being a good photographer is to know the technique and then shoot photos using those techniques. Lots of them.

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