What’s In Store for Develop Daly

With the recent redesign of the site I made it clear that the Hybrid theme has been wonderful to me. Since I began using it I’ve built all client sites upon it and plan on doing that from here on out. Theme frameworks in general are the best thing for WordPress since I’ve been around.

Its also given me the motivation to get back into theme development. Building child themes (why child themes are so great) is a bit different than the usual process. You normally have to build templates for every page and take into consideration lots of things pertaining to standards, SEO, plugin compatibility and the such. With child themes, the process is a lot heavier on the design and usability and much less on the development. This is certainly helpful in creating beautiful themes.

WP Full Site’s Future

While this theme has been good to a number of people I’m not particularly pleased with it. Its purpose is fitting for lots of uses though, so I’m not getting rid of it completely. However, soon I’ll be discontinuing the 1.x branch and releasing version 2 which will be a child theme of Hybrid.

Why is this a good idea?

  • Flexibility (at the moment Hybrid already has 18 different page templates!)
  • Hybrid-specific plugins that are super high-quality
  • You can upgrade Hybrid when new version comes out to get more functionality without breaking your site
  • Already available in numerous languages
  • It’ll be part of the large Hybrid community

This will be the case for all new themes, not just WP Full Site.

This Site’s Future

In general, I’m bringing back some life to this site. Its become quite stale. I’ll be making some effort to post more, post better content, and offer more and more to the WordPress community.

Consolidation

I’ve got projects spread out all over the place, some you’ve never heard of simply because I didn’t do a great job of making them available.

Roping everything back into this site will greatly benefit everyone. For me, I’ll be able to more closely tend to everything. For you, access to all things ‘Develop Daly’ will be a click away.

Support

Because of the lack of consolidation, its been easy to neglect things I wish I would have and could have supported better. So, I’m in the process of setting up a forum where I’ll provide support for each of my themes.

I Need Your Help

Honestly, I need a kick in the butt sometimes. To a fault, I’m motivated by the needs of others and when I feel unnecessary I lose interest. I really love…love being part of the WordPress community and offering my help where I can. So keep me going by asking for help when you need it, letting me know you enjoy my work, and even critiquing it. I’d love to improve where I can, so let me know where I can!

For You Paying Clients…

Everything above is mostly aimed at the community. However, I’m working on a better process of doing client work as well. Hopefully, I’ll have a private client section soon. The goals of this new area will be to manage projects, view progress, and provide premium support.

This is in an early stage at this point. I’m still trying to figure out how all these pieces should work together and what’s even necessary. Any feedback on this would be appreciated!

Seriously, Invite Your Friends!

All of these goals won’t be possible without community! So, bring it on, invite your friends and help me kick-start the re-birth of Develop Daly!

Develop Daly, Version 10

I‘m pleased to announce a site re-design (RSS readers, go check it out). The previous version was fairly similar. The homepage is nearly identical, but there’s a few differences. The major change is behind the scenes…

I’ve fallen in love with Hybrid, a theme framework. Building child themes for Hybrid is easy to do and easy to maintain. The whole idea of child themes is just a wonderful advancement in the WordPress world.

FontsFonts
My favorite improvement is the typography. Overall the fonts are more consistent, but on top of that I’m taking advantage of @font-face which allows you to embed fonts into the CSS. Its not perfect in all browsers (most noticeably Chrome, which won’t work by default). Firefox does the best job rendering the font.


PortfolioPortfolio
The portfolio page makes room for more items. The previous version listed them in one column which eventually would have made for a pretty long page. Now they’re listed in three columns and more friendly with a thumbnail, link to an overview of the project and a link to the site itself.


ThemesThemes
The final major change I made is that I’ve finally got a place to list my WordPress themes. They’ve always been accessible somewhere, but they weren’t always easy to find.

Denton Bible Church Media

Denton Bible Church MediaDenton Bible Church came to me in desperate need of replacing their existing media ministry website with over 4,000 products. It was nearly impossible to find the product you wanted to purchase.

Now, we’ve organized all of the content much more nicely, making the products easier to find and even easier to purchase.

We also added the ability to listen and watch sermons online, making the site a much better resource for everyone.

Hope you enjoy!

Website: Denton Bible Church Media

Platform: WordPress & Shopp

Design by: Pixelight Creative

WordPress States Theme

states-ad

This is is a publicly available WordPress theme.

States was built to allow bloggers focused on state-specific material to have a gorgeous, but unified theme that shares design characteristics of the national government’s website.

The theme will automatically adjust it’s settings to fit the design of each state. The following items are customized for each state:

  • The state seal
  • The navigation background color
  • The sidebar background color
  • The post meta-data (comments & tags) below each post
  • The colors of links

WordPress States OptionsThe theme works very simply. Once installed, a new option appears under the “Appearance” menu inside of the WordPress admin panel. The new option is “WP States Options. On that page you can select which state your blog focuses on. After you save, your theme will have all new colors, and your state’s official seal atop your pages.

Check out all the details and demo the theme at the States page.