Today is a very exciting day! The brand new AppThemes Marketplace is officially open and ready for business. This online outlet of child themes and plugins is full of products meant to tap into the full potential of our already powerful application themes. Now’s your chance to blow away the barriers holding back your internet business. Get bigger features. Choose more designs. Make your site everything you always wanted it to be.

Dazzling Child Themes

Our application themes are made to look great and the default designs deliver attractive layouts. The only problem is that hundreds of other sites have exactly the same look. You want something unique but hiring a designer can be costly and beyond budget constraints. Well forget all that because the AppThemes Marketplace is chock full of child themes that will bring your site to life. Colorful and attractive, the latest designs and the hippest graphics are available to you. You’re site is going to look fantastic and stand out above the rest.

Attention: anyone using a child theme with ClassiPress or developers that have created a child theme for ClassiPress should absolutely read this post!

ClassiPress 3.2 Child Theme ChecklistAs you know, the creation of Vantage brings a lot of changes to our other themes. The goal is to make all our themes a little more alike and a little less different. Common functions should use standardized code. Common features should be similar from theme to theme to theme. The benefits are great. Themes are easier to maintain, they’re easier to build and much, much more.

While we strive to implement these changes with minimal impact, there are some changes that are going to require a little extra work on your part when you update to newer versions. With ClassiPress 3.2 on the way, we want to give everyone ample opportunity to prepare for changes that might have an impact on your site.

Last week, we ran a survey to find out how we’re doing with Tutorial Tuesdays. The feedback was great! We really appreciate the positive comments we received from everyone. Looks like Tutorial Tuesdays have been a rousing success. We’ll work hard to keep the great tuts coming every week.

This week, we have a couple of help WordPress tidbits from founder Dave Cowgill.

In Redirect Your WordPress Feed to Feedburner, Dave shows how you can bump up your marketing by leveraging the RSS, email syndication and analytic tools available with Feedburner.

Dave’s other tutorial, Add Custom Styles to the WordPress Editor, will show you how to add your site’s styles to the WordPress visual editor. No need to switch back and forth from preview. Just work in the visual editor and you’ll exactly how your page is going to look.

Tutorial Tuesdays are for You

According to our survey, you want to see more tutorials on customizing our themes. You also want to see more video tutorials. Well, we’re happy to deliver. Expect to see more of both in the coming weeks. Remember, these tutorials are for you. If you have any suggestions, please add them in the comments section.

Cheers!

Earlier this year, we started making an effort to produce more tutorials. In an effort get these tutorials out to a wider audience, we created Tutorial Tuesdays.

We’ve been posting Tutorial Tuesdays for two months and we decided it might be a good time to check in with you, our loyal customers and regular readers. So what do you think? Do you look forward to Tuesdays with eager anticipation? Do you crave the recurring cranial content? Do tutorials improve your life with AppThemes?

Well, we want to know. Take a few minutes to complete our survey. It’s painless, we promise. In fact, it’s only three simple multiple choice questions and a comment fields. What could be simpler?



We’ll use this feedback to produce even better tutorials. Remember, Tutorial Tuesdays are for you and we want to make the tutorials that you want to read.

Cheers! And thanks for your participation.

Today’s Tutorial Tuesday tempts with two tutorials from talented Tyler – whew!

Using Actions and Hooks in Your Child Themes

Using Actions and HooksYou know the AppThemes mantra when it comes to customizing code, “Child themes, child themes, child themes!” It’s so important to create child themes. Well, we’re making an effort to ensure you have the right tools and information to do just that.

Sometimes, creating a child theme is not as simple as adding template files to your child theme folder. It would be nice if our themes were that elementary. Instead, they are complex, robust applications that require more than templates.

When you’re creating a child theme that needs to work with the more complex features in our themes, you might need to take advantage of actions and hooks. Luckily for you, Tyler has created a tutorial on using actions and hooks to tell you all about it.

We have three tutorials for your pleasure today. Two useful tutorials for Vantage and a great little tip from Dave on creating category-specific RSS feeds.

How to Set Up and Use “Claim Listing” in Vantage

Claim Listings in VantageThis simple feature in Vantage is probably also one of the most useful. Business listings are the lifeblood of any decent business directory site. Listings generate traffic, traffic helps you get more listings and more listings help you get even more traffic. It’s an upward spiral once you get it rolling. But how do you get it rolling?

With the upcoming release of the AppThemes marketplace and the introduction of our framework and payments API, we’re going to focus a little more on creating tutorials for developers.

Whether you want to create a plugin for purchase by other AppThemes customers or you just want to super-charge your AppThemes enabled site, these tutorials will be just what you’re looking for. In fact, we think that code junkies will be so jazzed about these developer-focused tutorials, that we created a special section on our docs site. The list is small now, but we’ll adding more every week. Check back regularly.

So this week’s Tutorial Tuesday will focus on a trio of tutorials about developing gateways for the AppThemes payments API. Payments is already in Vantage and we’re migrating it to ClassiPress and Clipper at this very moment. Soon, it will be available in JobRoller, too. Once all the themes have the payments API, one gateway plugin should work in all themes. Imagine your gateway plugin working in Vantage, Clipper, ClassiPress and JobRoller. Wow!

Here are the tutorials…

With the release of Vantage 1.1, expect to see a lot of Vantage tutorials. Some of the new features are really useful and we want to make sure that you get the most out of them. Let’s jump right in and take a look at the new payments set up in Vantage.

Setting up Payments in Vantage

Setting up Payments in Vantage: Payments SettingsPricing plans is one of the exciting new features introduced in Vantage 1.1. Pricing plans and the implementation of the new payments API are going to give more choices to create the payment models that work best for your site. This is a huge tutorial so we split it into two parts.

Part one covers settings for listings and payments in Vantage. Part two of the tutorial shows you how to set up pricing plans. The tutorial provides several different examples of plans that you can use on your site. If you’re going to charge for listings on your business directory, you’re going to want to read these tutorials as soon

Well, here it is. Vantage 1.1 has been released. With this release, it could be said that we’re claiming it may be your favorite release yet. You’ve been patiently waiting for new features and updates, and we have listened. Our development team has been working hard to deliver an awesome feature-packed release!

Check out this list of the highlighted features:

Claiming Listings

You can now import or input many listings and flag them as “Claimable”. When the actual business owner finds their listing on your Vantage site, they can “Claim” it. After their payment, and upon your approval, the listing is handed over to them. They can edit, upload images, upload PDFs, modify any custom fields, etc.