Buttons design changes

Improved Styling

Styling change continue with this latest update. Website uses less images than before, and all the button images are gone, and replaces by much better looking CSS styled buttons. Old and no longer used templates are gone, and some of the existing ones updated to better take advantage of xScape Framework layout engine (Documentation).

Twitter Accounts

Dev4Press has a new Twitter account: @dev4press. This account will be used to automatically posts updates to the website, release news, discounts and promotions and everything else relevant to Dev4Press and Dev4Press products. My personal account @milangd is remaining in use, and will be used as usual. Link to both accounts are added to the sidebars and into the footer links map. You can follow both account, or if you want only Dev4Press related info, follow @dev4press.

Comment Subscriptions

Up until now we were using old Subscribe to Comments plugin. But, this plugin is no longer updated, and it generates PHP warnings and it is not that easy to customize. Now, we are using  Subscribe to Comments Reloaded plugin. All old subscriptions are still in use, so you will not loose that. But, new plugin offers many more interesting things: subscribe without commenting, confirm subscriptions (mandatory on Dev4Press), subscript to full thread or only replies to your comments. And next xScape Theme Framework will have a template for this plugin (in use on Dev4Press already) for subscription management.

Cross Selling offers example

Price changes and Cross-Selling offers

Prices for some products are adjusted, so we now have more evenly distributed price ranges. Don’t worry, this adjustment means, that prices are actually lowered. Some products were unaffected by this, but most are, including: plugins pack and theme club membership, lifetime licenses for individual products and more.

Shopping cart makes easier to purchase more than one of our products. But, to make things even better, once you get to ShareIt checkout page you will get some additional special offers for cross selling. Depending on the products in your cart, you will get a list of additional products you can add to the cart with a special discount. Since there are a lot of products and combinations, I can’t give the list of what is offered for cross-selling in advance. But, discounts for these cross selling products go up to 30%.

Shopping Cart & F.o.t.D.

Shopping Cart  is covered in much more details in it’s own post last night, so check it out here. And Feature of the Day also has it’s own post here.

Coming soon

Next round of changes will include full rework of the plugins and themes pages, improvements to archives, forums and few other things. Another major improvement will be new formats for newsletters and digest emails. More on that to follow.

FrameFX: Header

Previously announced theme called FrameFX is close to completion, and the beta is expected during this week, and as usual will be available for testing on xScape.info. Several templates are still unfinished, but main focus is in creating special effects for blocks and layouts.

Theme has (as usual) 2 vertical widgets sidebars and footer widgets blocks. Posts lists will be available to display as standard lists, and as boxed. Boxed display will use before mentioned special effects powered by CSS and jQuery. There will be no slider, but there will be something called focus posts block that will be used to display featured posts from selected categories, and will also allow for use of special effects.

FrameFX: Widgets

Theme will have at least 10 different color styles built in. Background color and image can be set from the control panel, and you can upload any image, but also, there will be set of filters to change background on any page you want. Theme will also have several unique banner ads positions.

xScape framework has gone through some changes to fix several issues, and improve work with custom page templates, and all other themes will be updated with it soon.

FrameFX will be completed in about 2 weeks, after the period of beta testing that has proven to be very useful with 2 previous themes.

This is news type theme, as the name suggests, and the intention was to make it simple and clean, easy to read, with many interesting features.

newsScape Sidebar

Some of the previously standard elements of the layout will be used here also. There will be 2 vertical sidebars, one footer widget area, top header (with menu, date, search, social icons), header (with main menu), featured posts slider, categories latest posts block and footer. Bye default, per design, only one sidebar will be active by default.

Theme is very clean, with almost no images used. Theme is in gray, with one important color that will be available from the control panel and in several of pre-built sets. There will be no background apart from small header tile. Featured slider on top will be different from previous themes with 2 different widths (fit with sidebar, or above it full width). Also, by default sidebar will use already existing tabbed widget as on the image on the right.

All theme colors will be settable from the control panel, so you can make it more colorful.

Theme will be released on xScape.info as a Beta on Tuesday or Wednesday. Stable version will be released on September 20 2010. Expect a discount coupons for club membership and individual themes next week when Beta becomes available for test.

xScape 1.4.5 is in works with one major new option, called Theme Upgrade. Theme will still be updatable only through Dev4Press Updater, but this new Upgrade panel will allow you to set folders and files you want to keep after upgrade. This way you can add templates or whole folders with code and after upgrade all will be safe.

To see themes and framework in action, visit the WordPress 3 MultiSite powered demo website and get your own blog to see who the framework back-end works:

Demo Site:
http://xscape.info/
lightScape:
http://xscape.info/lightscape/

Themes are updated, and reached new major numbers: baseScape 1.4, photoScape 1.3, eScape 1.1 and airScape 1.1. And for the most part, these themes are not going to change anymore. They will be updated with new frameworks from time to time, fixed if needed, but nothing new will be added to them. To avoid releasing new versions each time xScape is updated, xScape will be download-able separately, so you can only get the framework and upgrade the theme with it. I will also try to build that into Dev4Press Updater.

lightScape is now 2 sidebars theme. Also, it features many updates and fixes to styling, blueprint grid model, updated POT translation file. Next lightScape update will be to improve the slider and few other things. There is no ETA on the next version right now. For users that got developer license for this theme, I must apologize about being late with releasing the PSD sources for this theme. It will be released on Tuesday.

What’s next? Well, new module called Translate This is in works. Also, I am working on several new tutorials. First new tutorial is released yesterday: Adding custom page Templates. Work has resumed on newsScape theme and I hope that it will completed soon, but I can’t give any more info right now. And with new plugin to be released soon (GD Amazon Fusion), framework will have full support for it to display data for Amazon products.

Test all themes,and try them with a free test drive, for both front end and back end before deciding what is right for you:

Demo Loader: http://xscape.info/load/
Demo Home: http://xscape.info/

airScape

Theme has 6 preset color schemes, with more to come in the next versions, but you can set all colors from control panel and make your own unique look. Theme has support for two sidebars that can be resized and moved left or right or completely disabled depending on the template needs.

To see the theme features and read more about it check the main theme page:

airScape Info:
http://www.dev4press.com/themes/airscape/

airScape Screenshots:
http://www.dev4press.com/themes/airscape/screenshots/

To see the theme and framework in action, visit the WordPressMU powered demo website and get your own blog to see who the framework back-end works:

Demo Site:
http://xscape.info/

airScape:
http://xscape.info/airscape/

Bugs Fixed

This version of framework is only for bug fixing, and no new features are included.

eScape

New theme is available on demo website and for test drive from yesterday. Theme has 20 styles built in (10 color schemes, each one with or without background image), and can be classified as business or portfolio theme. This is first theme to use new front page feature in xScape allowing use of template that is not made of normal content. This front page has own layout settings. In the next 2-3 days I will post tutorials on how to set eScape theme.

xScape 1.4

Next major iteration of framework is in works. And as a result, there will be new theme released before already announced news type theme. That next theme will be very simple, will have two sidebars (plus footer widgets area), and design will be controlled through control panel. This will be primarily personal or blog theme with very clean design, fast and as usual packed with all xScape features. Also, this theme will add another new feature in xScape and that is resize-able sidebars. That feature will be available in all themes once completed.

Another new feature is part of the next xScape release cycle, and that is Typography settings. First versions will add some decoration elements, but more will be added later.

Upcoming themes

Work on starScape II theme has also begun. So, current plan for theme release:

• Yet to be named theme: May 13 2010
• News theme: end of May 2010
• Another work in progress theme: middle of June 2010
• starScape II:  end of June / first week of July 2010

And more

Also, during next week, new Showcase page will be completed, and you can submit your websites using xScape for review and adding to the Showcase page.

Bugs Fixed

There are many bugs fixed with this release. This include minor problem with breadcrumbs on the 404 pages, missing nesting UL classes for drop down menus, small problems with Contactable module and several bugs with layout manager and other control panels.

gMap This module

This module now uses different jQuery library for Google Maps because of the problems with previously used gMap. And in the same time, a new features are added: traffic and streetview overlay and working change of the map type. Also, another display mode is added, allowing to display only static image instead of whole map. It’s limited with API for this, but most settings will work, and in the end you will see only static PNG image.

And more

Footer block is improved with few more tags added for customization including post and category. But, basis is created for adding menus into the footer: simple links and sitemap like menu elements (like the one on this website). This will be first introduced in eScape theme this week, and next week current themes will be changed to support that.

Menus Designer

New items are added to menus including Admin options (dashboard, profile, new post) and Login options (login, logout, register). But, more importantly, menus are nested by design. Previously you could add elements that are going to make drop down, but now you can move any element deeper within the menu.So, if you compare xScape Menus to WooNavigation or WordPress 3.0 native NavMenus, you will see that xScape is much more powerful and flexible with more options you can use to create wide range of items. A tutorial covering more aspects of menus coming later today.

New mapping desinger

Layouts Manager

As you can see, middle blocks got new buttons for moving blocks left and right. This will allow you to move sidebar from left to right. Also, master templates introduced in xScape 1.1, are now functional. Many more things are changed in layouts code allowing some of the things planned for next two themes (multiple sidebars is one of them).

Two tutorials covering all the changes and use of master template will be published later today.

Author Widget

Author Widget

Another new widget is added. This one allows you to set up About Author area to display some info about the author, gravatar and a read more link.

Both current themes are updated with new framework. Next theme is eScape and this one will be released by the end of the week. After that we are planning one news styles theme and long overdue starScape II.

Also, I can confirm that by the end of this week, or over next weekend, lite version of baseScape will be released. Making lite version of the framework wasn’t easy, but it’s almost done now. Lite framework will not get any new features any more, and only, if needed will be fixed from time to time.

Beside new themes, we have planned few more things for the framework, including 3 more widgets, but more on that soon. Stay tuned for number of new tutorials this week, and more improvements to Central Documentation.

Here is the list of features in xScape theme framework that will be part of the initial 1.0.0 release. Features marked as PRO will not be available with free themes:

• Settings panels: for theme and framework settings, ajax powered and easy to use
• Basic Tools panel: clear cached data, export and import of settings,
• PRO: Extra Tools panel: existing images custom fields conversion
• PRO: Layouts panel: advanced management for theme templates and sidebars
• Menus panel: advanced menu designer with many customization options
• SEO controls: search engine optimization for titles, meta tags and much more
• GD Star Rating: direct integration for standard and multi ratings into comments for review websites
• jQuery powered: breadcrumbs, comments forms validation, contact form, featured posts slider
• Visual elements: paged navigation for posts and comments, author and related posts blocks
• WP Integration: post and page panel integration for additional options and images upload
• Custom Taxonomies: template support with page integration and navigation
• Extra Templates: twitter statuses, archives and website site-map
• Actions & Filters: expanding theme using actions and filters, same way the WordPress works

Additional elements included with framework include widgets and modules. Modules are similar to WordPress plugins, but integrated into the theme with own settings and controls:

• Widgets: Flickr, Twitter, Recent Posts, Single Ad, Networks Social Links
• PRO: Modules: Share This (Submit to social websites), Translate This (Google Translate support)

As for the requirements, theme will require PHP5, and will work with different versions of WordPress:

• WordPress 2.8.x
• WordPress 2.9.x
• WordPressMU 2.9.x
• WordPress 3

Free themes will have no support (apart from reporting and fixing bugs and access to some basic tutorials). Pro themes will be sold for one time fee that will include premium support (forum, premium tutorials), critical and regular updates.

For Pro theme, there will be two different editions: Standard and Developer. Developer edition will include Photoshop PSD files and 2 email support tickets. Single Pro theme will cost 35 EUR (46 USD) for Standard edition and 55 EUR (75 USD) for Developer edition. When you purchase 3 same editions themes, you get one additional theme for free. Once the number of themes is increased, we will offer subscription based model (both standard and developer) to cover all themes and add some additional support elements like SVN access and more email support tickets.

In the next 24 hours, GD Star Rating website will be the first website to get new baseScape theme. By the end of this week, WPMU website will be activated on xscape.info domain where everyone can sign up for a 24 hours blog that will allow you to test drive each theme before deciding if you want to buy it.

Stay tuned and feel free to ask anything you want to know more. xScape will be unleashed very soon…