I’ve always been a bit of a lone wolf when it comes to WordPress development. Sometimes this is because others simply don’t see what I’m seeing. Other times, it’s because we developers are a little selfish when it comes to control of our code.
However, being a lone wolf makes it harder to grow as a developer and severely limits the amount of time one can use to focus on creating cool things. Therefore, I’m stepping outside my usual role and teaming up with three other awesome developers and designers:
- Tung Do (aka Small Potato)
- Ptah Dunbar
- Patrick Daly
Today is the start of something great: DevPress. It is a collaboration of four guys who simply love WordPress and want to create some cool, open source themes, plugins, and tutorials.
What exactly is DevPress?
We don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves into any specific label, so we’re leaving this wide open for a while.
If we absolutely had to give some sort of definition of what the site is about, we’d use something like this:
- We want to make themes that are beautiful, functional, and don’t require 300+ theme options to work.
- We want to make plugins that simply work and do cool things with WordPress.
- We want to write tutorials that are easy to understand and implement on your site.
We want to give things back to the WordPress community. Don’t get me wrong though. This is a business venture, and we’ll be experimenting with various ideas in the future.
Join us for our site launch
I’m not going to list all the reasons I think DevPress will be a great site for the WordPress community. Our work in the coming months should speak for itself, and I hope you like it.
Check out the new site and read our launch post. Membership is free and themes/plugins are licensed under the GPL.
Awesome! You already do some amazing work just by yourself and things will only get better with a strong team to help.
Thanks. We’ve got a great team, so I’m looking forward to making new themes and plugins with these guys.
Hi Justin! It’s really a great news for me..really awesome thinking of you , a great developer and designer teaming up with another 3 guys who love WordPress. I’ll be expecting more of your cool artwork after this.! Long live DevPress!
Being a guy who has written a theme with 400+ options, all I can say is ouch!!
All the best for DevPress! I will follow it with interest.
Isn’t the whole idea of WordPress to make it easier on users? I think having a theme with 400 options just completely obliterates the purpose behind having WordPress in the first place.
Not to mention it sounds like it would be reaaally unnecessarily bulky. That’s a ton of extra database calls for each page view! Think about the poor servers who have to host that monstrosity!
You are joking, right? By your argument one could state that having a framework obliterates the purpose behind having WP. If WP is indeed meant to make things easy for users why are there so many frameworks floating around?
The fact is while WP is a great system for managing content, it does a notoriously poor job of letting you configure most things without writing your own code (either PHP or CSS). Options help you ease the pain of doing the heavy coding as much as a framework does, though both approach the problem from different angles.
Pick an example – menus. WP introduced them in version 3.0, after not having such capabilities in place all these years. Even with the new feature, though, you cannot do stuff like automatically add new pages into the menu. You have to continue going to the menu configuration pages to explicitly select new pages to appear on this. What is the remedy? You guessed it – options or of course, custom code.
Take a look at the premium theme market. Most themes offer you lots of options – particularly the ones that let you customize different aspects of look and feel (think Thesis/Headway/Frugal). Besides look and feel there are other aspects that you could control through options, like getting a “blog-style” layout, or a “tiled” layout, or adding featured posts etc. Try doing these without options and you will spend a lot of time writing code.
You might find having options distasteful, but there are several folks who would pay to be able to do simple to complex things on on their without going through a CSS or PHP or WordPress course first. Stats bear out the fact that most people are either hesitant to code or not capable of doing so. People are still okay with CSS, but they generally balk at the prospect of making PHP edits.
I think your comment comes from confusing a theme designed specifically for a handful of sites where you would need fewer or no options, with a theme designed for general usage requiring many options. I don’t use Hybrid – I just follow Justin’s blog because of the insanely useful tutorials (something that I liked so much that I even paid to join the theme club without using any of the themes or posting a single support query). It goes without saying that my theme isn’t based on Hybrid.
The design of a theme essentially comes down to the business model embraced by the developer. Themes like Thesis are sold as “one-size-fits-all” themes, hence they require more options for viability. The developer in such cases offers generic services for the theme and rarely does individual site customization, which is left to the user. On the other hand a developer relying on fewer options typically offers a lot of themes and supports each theme individually, often building custom sites for users.
Far from requiring multiple database calls for each page view, there is really just one call – you can store all options in one array that goes into the DB. Fetch it once, instantiate your variables and be done with it. Why would you make multiple DB calls per page view? That is obtuse.
With smart design and modular coding you could build a complex system with minimal impact on your memory footprint. More options don’t necessarily equate to poor performance – poor design does.
Sorry, I missed an important phrase in the above. It should read:
In brief defense of a lot of options:
400 theme options doesn’t mean you have to configure each one (at least, it shouldn’t). If a theme works out of the box, but has a lot of features that the tweakers among us can mess around with, I say that’s great. Of course it can be overdone. But it can also be really cool.
@Sayontan
Wow, very lengthy response there, friend. Thanks for taking the time to defend your point.
To put what I’m saying into an example: compare WordPress to Joomla. Joomla has many more out-of-the-box options. Let’s compare the menus for instance:
Just *defining* a menu in Joomla, besides being on a completely different screen, has 3 options: Unique Name, Title, Description.
Compare to WordPress that has “Menu Name.”
Which is less daunting for a user? Which CMS would you say is more popular?
I would hate for someone to go “ooh WordPress, let’s install it, oh and get this cool theme” then a few months (minutes?) later have the opinion “man, WordPress is so complicated, there’s so many features and options” because they don’t understand the line between WordPress and their theme.
I understand your vibe. I understand there is a market for a theme like that. I seriously think it just strongly conflicts with the general idea of WordPress, and feel if someone is looking for something like that, they would probably be happier with a different CMS. There is no “one size fits all” imho, no matter how much themes try to make it seem like there is.
Make decisions, not options. That’s the WordPress way.
I’ve made a theme actually named Options before though.
Excellent guys. Collaboration FTW!
Very cool Justin! Look forward to seeing what you guys produce! Any chance of guest tutorials?
We haven’t discussed guest tutorials yet. It might be something we’ll consider at some point. I’ll at least put it on the list of things to discuss in a later team meeting.
Congratulations Justin! you rock!
This is going to be a great place for WP community. On top of that, News theme is using Hybrid Core, which is absolutely awesome.
Can we consider Hybrid Core is now ready for production?
Yes, Hybrid Core is ready for production. I wanted to release the News theme first so developers would have another example to work from. I still need to write at least the basic documentation though. Look out for an official announcement via ThemeHybrid for this in the next week or two.
Congrats!
I am anxious to see what comes of this.
By the way, how is the forum plugin (using custom post types) coming along?
Seth
We’re thinking of just contributing all the work back to the bbPress community for their plugin. I’ll post an update as soon as we know the direction we’re going in.
I would love to see some dedicated involvement from your / DevPress’ side with regards to bbPress. Thing is, looking at your website, your agenda, your collaborators and your sales pitch, I don’t see anything really separating you from the masses. You’re a great bunch of highly capable developers, no doubt about that, but I don’t see the edge. As it stands, I’d much rather put my money, exclusively, into an established brand like WooThemes for now, checking back in with you guys in maybe a year’s time.
Now, bring bbPress into the mix, and suddenly I have a reason to keep up with your every move. If you make it clear that DevPress will have a definite focus on bbPress, I’d have my money ready the day you open shop. The best way to make such a statement would of course be to engage yourselves in bbPress’ development; applying patches, taking part in meetings, participating in future planning; ideally having a core member on board, but that’s probably asking too much.
Best of luck Justin.
You haven’t seen our sales pitch because we haven’t given you one. All we’ve done is give away some stuff for free.
Templates for forums will be a focus though, at least as far as themes go. The entire code base that we use to run our forums has already been handed over to the bbPress project. I sent JJJ a link to download it a few weeks ago.
I’m really looking forward to this, great news Justin!
Justin, it’s a great news!
I’m going to register right now…
Stefano
Thank you very much for this wonderful work.
I’ve been using Hybrid as a “parent theme” for a while now and this “News theme” from “DevPress” is showing me a way to use Hybrid as a “framework.”
BTW, how to correctly spell “devpress” ?
I’m going to release Hybrid Core soon to the public. I’ve just got some work to do to package it up and document it.
Oh, and it’s “DevPress.” But, our themes/plugins won’t force you to spell it that way.
Wow, i’m gonna check this out, already love your blog for the great tutos. Good luck with that!
Nice work, Justin. I like the theme. If the specs work for a project I’ll be happy to use it. Congrats…
Great news! Actions speak louder than words. This makes it more interesting! It’s like see for yourself.
“don’t require 300+ theme options to work”
I like that part best! Many famous theme frameworks have too much of that.
I wouldn’t consider something with a lot of options a theme framework anyway. That’s kind of the opposite of what frameworks are for.
Our goal is to make things simply work rather than confusing you with tons of options. That’s not to say we won’t develop themes with loads of options. We’ll just take things on a case-by-case basis and use our settings page only when necessary.
I admire the passion and insistence in your inner heart. Being a developer is always a lonely job! Stay calm and fresh, you will have fascinating work after that! good luck
hey that’s is absolutely good news, I has been hunting for new theme for quite a while now.
Hi. This is a great article bringing some great news. Themes have seemed to have gotten stale, so this is a refreshing development.
Great site, Justin. Interested in seeing what you guys produce.
wow! awesome! This is great! not much else to say… hehe
This is great – keep us posted and can’t wait to see what you guys will come up with.
I am always looking for great new wordpress themes for myself and for clients. Thanks for the great resource.
Another WordPress themes resources. I hope DevPress show the creativity and fully customized in their themes
.
i believe that DevPress will make a good job. great site!
My adventure with Wordpress started recently. Usually I implemented my own solutions, because ready-made systems such as Wordpress are not sufficiently flexible. Recently I discovered the opportunities offered by Wordpess. With a little effort I can create really good and comprehensive websites! Thanks to you now is more interesting possibilities to create fine wordpress sites.
Im definitely going to check it out. Im looking for a new theme for my wordpress blog.
Great, good job Justin!
long life to devpress!
Nice work, I like the theme.
i hope you and your team will be success in the future..
Hey Justin – congrats on DevPress. It looks great. I wish you all the success buddy. Wonderful work.
Woohoo, am I too late? This is really cool, have to go to have a look, Justin, really love your work! Keep it up~
Congratulations on launching DevPress Justin. You definitely have an incredible grasp of what makes WordPress the pick of the litter when it comes to which way to go for setting up a blog or CMS site!
I love it. I could really use some good WP tutorials to learn some new skills. Thanks for the great resource.
Just one word: excellent!
I already installed the theme options and I am preparing to install devpress suits me better .. great job guys, a great cheer, it’s clean, friendly, very professional .. I love it! I can not wait to see more.
I just have a quick question: I try to change the size of the track at 70% but it changes the font size of this site: (Is there a trick to put in place?
Strongly thereafter, thank you very much guys, I use wordpress a lot and I feel that you will make sparks;)
It’s a real shame that DevPress appears to have died already! At least one of the 4 founders has redirect his own theme framework domain to it but hasn’t uploaded any documentation as far as I can see, so support for his theme is now woefully inadequate.
I applaud you for launching this, but would prefer to see a fully working site this long after launch.
-John.
We’re relaunching this year. We all had a ton of work last year that didn’t give us much time for DevPress. We’re currently getting back on track though.