Not far behind our previous release comes version 3.0.4 which addresses a couple important bugs. We preferred to wait and fix these in v3.1 which is scheduled for the end of September, but felt these couldn’t wait.

The main bugs fixed in this patch release are as follows:

• Cron Jobs Not Triggering – Ads were not being correctly expired due to a hard coded table prefix.
• Ad Editing Resets Values – Some customers were having problems with their ads losing custom field values when editing them.
• Home Page Sidebar Widgets – Using language packs prevented the home page sidebar widgets from being changed.
• Child Category Search – Searching a parent category for something that existed in a child category returned no results.
• Relist Ad Date Issue – Non-standard dates caused an issue with the free ad re-listing process.
• Child Theme Login Page – Issue where changing the header and footer did not effect the login page.
• Ad Edit TinyMCE – Editing an ad with HTML enabled was not loading the TinyMCE editor controls.
• A couple other minor fixes.

Last week we held a contest with our friend Hong and decided to give away five free copies of our popular ClassiPress theme.

To enter the contest, all you needed to do was leave a comment on the contest post and at the end of the week, five people were randomly selected.

Now that we are officially a “theme company”, it’s important to produce more high quality, well, themes of course.

Launching AppThemes took many months of development and migration which slowed us down on product development. With the new infrastructure in place, we are now in a good position to scale and offer more products to our customers.

Our goal over the next several months is to release a handful of nifty new WordPress apps and sprinkling in some typical premium themes.

Now many of you have asked if there will be a subscription-based pricing model so you can get each theme as it becomes available. The good news is yes, there will be a “theme club” which we will announce later this year.

Yes, its finally here. I know you all have been anxiously awaiting some guidance on creating a child theme. This first part of the tutorial will cover the basics. I’m going to try to assume you know absolutely nothing about WordPress or child themes.

It will however, require that you understand some simple things like how to FTP to your server, browse the file structure, and upload/download files to your WordPress installation.

Step 1: Creating the Folder and Stylesheet Files

What I have to show you here is that I’ve downloaded the most recent version of WordPress, at the time of writing this article. Then I’ve placed the folder on my desktop and navigated to the “themes” directory. I’ve also already copied my “ClassiPress” theme folder that I purchased into this folder.

If someone has ever submitted an ad on your site without any images attached, you’ll notice it uses the “No Image Available” placeholder image. For most people that’s fine but if you didn’t like the wording, color, or wanted to change it to a different language you needed to use image editing software.

Not anymore. Here’s a simple tutorial on how to easily change the default placeholder image without using any editing software.

With the roll-out of ClassiPress 3.0.3 behind us, we can now focus some of our resources on our next theme slated for release, JobRoller. This new premium theme will address the need for those looking to have their very own job board.

We decided to keep the design simplistic since many customers will want to style their job board to match their existing website. For those of you who don’t, it’s elegant enough to run as a standalone website so you can charge people to list their job reqs on your site.

The latest and greatest version of your favorite Classified Ads Theme has just been released. You can download it immediately from your customer account dashboard.

This patch included over 60 tickets ranging from bug fixes and a few minor enhancements. The most noteworthy change has to do with child themes. 3.0.3 takes full advantage of child theme capability including pluggable ClassiPress functions. No need to modify the core functions and risk losing your changes when it’s time to upgrade. You can override certain functions with your own modified version instead. Seth will be writing a tutorial on how to do this soon.

In addition, this sets the stage for an aftermarket of ClassiPress child themes built and contributed by our community. The door is now open for all you developers and we look forward to seeing your child-themes. An official AppThemes Marketplace will be announced later this year.

To see all the changes and which files were affected, take a look at the changelog.txt which is included in the 3.0.3 download. Make sure to read the 3.0.3 upgrade instructions if you are upgrading from 3.0.2. For a high-level of fixes, check out our previous blog post.

Some of you have been asking us how to make it easier to distinguish parent categories from sub-categories in your drop-down lists. It’s a great question and pretty easy to do.

Here’s what your drop-down lists should look like currently before the change we are about to make:

Here’s what your drop-down lists should look like after we make the change:

A new version of ClassiPress is scheduled to be released next week. It is a general patch release that will address a handful of bugs along with a couple of new enhancements. Not all fixes are listed below but rather just the higher priority issues.

This release was actually delayed a few weeks because two important things had to happen first. The release of WordPress 3.0 (to make sure we didn’t have any compatibility issues) and the launch of AppThemes (so you can login to your account and download 3.0.3 instead of searching for your original e-junkie email).

Now that both of those milestones have been reached, it’s time to push out 3.0.3.