Garage Band Theme Teaser

With all the latest action here with UpThemes like our new Tumblr theme business and our announcement of collaborating with Crowd Favorite to begin incorporating Carrington Build in our themes we haven’t had much time to share our biggest announcement yet: the impending release of the most feature-packed theme for bands and musicians WordPress has ever seen, Garage Band.

More Than Just a Theme

Garage Band is more than a theme, it extends WordPress to become the perfect CMS for bands and musicians. This “theme” contains advanced tools for managing upcoming shows, tours, albums, music videos, user-powered fan photo galleries, and even band members! Excited yet? So are we. Read on if you’re ready to rock.

Album Management

Uploading and managing your albums couldn’t be easier with our album management tools. Simply add the name of the album, purchasing information, your tracklist with playable audio clips and album art and off you go!

Custom audio player pulls in songs from latest album.

On the backend, simply enter your track information with links to purchase or download and Garage Band does all the rest! The image below shows how easy it is to manage, just click the image to see a large preview.

Manage tracks with ease with our easy-to-use album management tools!

Show and Tour Manager

Thanks to custom taxonomies with WordPress, you can categorize shows by location and tour to make it easy for fans to find shows in their area. Simply type in a title, description, and add the show time and off you go! It really is that easy!

Custom widgets allow you to display upcoming shows, new albums, and more!

Fan-Generated Photo Galleries

A great way to connect with fans and build some fan-powered content, our Garage Band Theme will come with the ability to allow fans to submit photos to fan galleries defined by you! Simply add new “collections” and configure your fan photo submission form to your liking and your fans can post awesome photos of anything from your recent shows to events or even your drummer’s latest haircut!

Let fans upload images and share fun times at your band's latest concert!

The features mentioned above are only a few of the awesome things planned for Garage Band and we hope to be finished with the theme by the end of September so we can share it with you all! We’re definitely excited about this theme and hope you are too. Make sure to follow @upthemes on twitter and keep up with our blog’s RSS feed as well!

We’ve Gone Crazy for Tumblr!

We’ve been making some big changes here at UpThemes, and one of those changes includes expanding our theme business to a new platform — Tumblr! We’ve been exploring the possibilities with Tumblr themes for quite some time and finally made it happen with our first Tumblr theme release to date.

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UpThemes Framework + WP 3.0 + Carrington Build = Powerful CMS

We have an extremely exciting announcement to make regarding our WordPress themes here at UpThemes. A couple weeks ago, we signed a deal with Crowd Favorite (founded by world-renowned plugin developer Alex King) to include Carrington Build in our WordPress themes moving forward. If you’ve not heard of Carrington Build, please continue reading…
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Theme Launch: Evo

We’re extremely excited to announce our favorite UpTheme to date, Evo, the successor to Gallery Pro, a revolutionary new WordPress theme that makes building a user-generated gallery, photography showcase or personal portfolio easier than ever. With awesome AJAX-powered pagination, David DeSandro’s Masonry plugin for jQuery, and a custom post submission page, Evo is the best gallery theme we’ve seen this side of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Buy Evo Now for $50 or $75 (with original PSD artwork)

Features

Three Beautiful Color Schemes

In addition to the default light theme, there are two additional color schemes as well, which can be enabled on the Evo Colors & Images Options page.

User Submission Page

By popular demand, Evo includes a submission page that can be customized to fit your needs inside the UpThemes Framework on the Submission Form options page.

Flexible Thumbnail Sizes

Using the built-in image sizes, you can set the thumbnails to any size, allowing Evo to look good with a few images or a few hundred!

AJAX Pagination

Evo uses a custom twitter-style pagination to allow you to continue loading new posts into the page without being taken to a new page.

WordPress 3.0 Menu Support

Custom menus allow you to configure your navigation the way you want it! Evo features two menu zones in the header and footer, as well as unlimited widget menus.

Simple Video Embedding

Easy video embedding using the Simple Video Embedder plugin from Press75.com makes video embedding easier than ever. Requires installation of Simple Video Embedder plugin, download separately.

Resizable Thumbnails using WordPress 3′s Featured Image

Thumbnail sizes are completely under your control! Simply set your desired image sizes in ‘Settings > Media’ and a featured image for each post and off you go!

Ad Zones Built-in

There are now two ad zones that accept plain HTML and Javascript below the header and above the footer.

WP Facebook Plugin Now Available (BETA)

Integrate Facebook into WordPress Seamlessly & Effortlessly

We’ve been working on some things under the radar over here at UpThemes and have been planning some big announcements. One of those announcements is finally here, and the big news is that we’ve been working on a new Facebook plugin for WordPress (and BuddyPress) that is now available as a BETA release absolutely free of charge!

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WordPress 3.0, Our Thoughts

WordPress 3.0 was released yesterday and with it a number of features that put it at the top of the list for CMS platforms. Below are a few of the big features that have been implemented and our thoughts on each.

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Get Nostalgic with ‘Old School’ and Save 25%

It’s been a while since we’ve released a new WordPress theme here at UpThemes, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t working hard to bring you the best themes possible. Today we’re proud to (re-)release Old School, a grungy, old-looking theme that really enables you to showcase your photos and blog about your passion. With a timeless, unique design style and some cutting edge features like CSS3 @font-face usage and webkit animations, Old School really packs in a lot of great features in a lightweight package.

Old School is currently 25% off for the next two days, so buy it now and use discount code 05C48F to get your 25% discount by May 18th!

1,000 Customers Means One HUGE Discount

We just recently broke the 1,000 customers mark and because we are extremely grateful for our customers, we want to say thanks by slashing prices on all our themes. Between now and Friday (April 16th) you can get any of our standard themes for $20 (normally $49) and any developer theme package for $40 (normally $99).

Offer good through Friday, April 16th. No coupons accepted in combination with this offer.

Theme Release: Conversate

We’ve been having a lot of fun working on this one. Conversate is one of the most unique and visually appealing WordPress themes we’ve ever been involved with. Based on the famous P2 theme by Automattic, we wanted to take P2 a step further by giving it a sleek look and improved functionality.

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WordPress Master Tip: Display “Time Ago” for Posts or Comments

While working on the upcoming release of Conversate, our revamped version of the now-famous P2 Theme by Automattic, I rewrote one of the functions they used to display the time on each post, which looked rather ugly on the P2 theme. They used the time and date for each post and with a microblogging platform, it’s typically best to show how long ago something was posted. See example below:

So I thought I would share the function to do this:

function time_ago( $type = 'post' ) {
	$d = 'comment' == $type ? 'get_comment_time' : 'get_post_time';

	return human_time_diff($d('U'), current_time('timestamp')) . " " . __('ago');

}

It uses the built-in WordPress function human_time_diff(), which is pretty rad if you ask me. To use it, simply place the function call time_ago() in your single.php or custom comment callback function. Example:

<?php echo time_ago(); ?>