Happy to announce that I will release a new WordPress premium theme in a few days. It´s called “Incorporated” and it will be a business theme for small (or big) companies and freelancers alike. It comes with some great features focused on custumization and individual setup.

Unlimited colors, Google Web Fonts, image sliders or static leadarticle and various layout options are just some of the great features of “Incorporated”. It also includes a sample child theme you can use for even more customization in an update safe way. And as all PRiNZ themes it comes with the new PRiNZ Shortcode Collection plugin included.

So make sure you don´t miss the release. Stay in touch via Newsletter, Twitter etc.

Theme Features Overview

• Outstanding business layout with many different layout options (e.g sidebar left or right)
• Unlimited colors for your individual colorscheme
• Several Google Web Fonts to choose from
• Smooth and elegant SuperFish dropdown menu
• Integrated Nivo image slider (WordPress plugin) with lots of functionality
• WP-Cycle slider support
• PRiNZ Shortcode Collection plugin included
• Auto prettyPhoto integration
• Automatic image handling and resizing
• 960 grid system
• Options page for easy setup without coding
• WordPress 3.0 features like custom headers, backgrounds and menus
• 3 additional custom page templates (Blog, Portfolio and Fullwidth)
• 11 widgetized areas
• 8 custom widgets
• Sample Child theme for update safe customization included
• Fully localized front- and backend. Default language English. German language file included.
• W3C valid code works in all modern browsers
• Mobile device ready: Works on mobile devices like iPhone and iPad

After some very busy weeks where I spent most of my time working on my WordPress themes I ´m happy to announce the release of updates for all of my  themes and the release of a fantastic shortcode plugin today.

It turned out to be a major update for all themes. Many new things where added, several functions updated and the code was cleaned up and optimized. You can find a list of all (new and existing) features in the themes section.

The biggest thing might be the release of the PRiNZ Shortcode Collection plugin. This plugin is shipped as an add on with all PRiNZ premium themes and adds an interface to your WYSIWYG editor that allows you to use many useful shortcodes. There are shortcodes for multiple column layouts, for content boxes, sliders, togglers etc. Check out a demo of the shortcodes on the Freelancer (or any other themes) demopage.

Thanks to Ralf Albert for creating this plugin for me.

Take a look into the FAQ if you don´t know exactly how to use updates or new versions of themes. It´s a bit more complicated than the auto-update of WordPress.

Happy new year everyone out there. For me the new year started very busy while I´m working on some major updates of my WordPress themes and the release of a fantastic shortcode plugin that will add more functionality to my themes but can also be used in other themes as well.

The theme updates vary from smaller bugfixing to adding new functionality and even a complete makeover (in case of WyntonMagazine). BranfordMagazine is already done (but not released to the public yet), the others will follow in a few days. I will release them all at once.

Additionally I provide the PRiNZ Shortode Collection, a plugin that adds (as the name suggests) some shortcodes to my themes. Why not building them right into the theme, you might ask. Well, most WordPress theme developers do that but what if you want to change the theme? Right! All your shortcodes don´t work anymore. But with a plugin you can use the shortcodes in other themes as well. I kept the styling of the shortcode output very clean and simple an I guess it will fit for many other themes as well. This plugin starts as a beta release with a handfull of nice shortcodes but I will add more in the future.

The plugin was build for me by Ralf Albert, a talented young coder from Germany who did a great job with this.

That´s all for today. So stay tuned and make sure you don´t miss the theme updates in a few days.

I started to add screencasts (or video tutorials if you like) to the support section of my website. Starting with currently two screencasts you will find more and more professionally produced video tutorials here in the near future.

All screencasts are bi-lingual in German and English and can be wateched directly on the site, in fullscreen mode or on YouTube.

• Watch the Screencasts
• Support Overview

For my German speaking users I provide a daily WordPress christmas calendar (Adventskalender in German) on my German website. There I present a tiny little WordPress tipp every day from December 1st to christmas eve on December 24th.

So if your understand German and are interested in a daily dose of WordPress tipps & tricks head over to my German website and follow the christmas calendar.

A tipp for those who don´t understand German: The guys over at WP-Engineer provide a similar calendar in english.

Once in a while it makes sense to get rid of old stuff. That´s why I cleaned up the support forum today.

All posts prior to July 2010 have been deleted now. I guess it´s important to remove this old stuff to avoid confusion with issues that are not present anymore.

Visit the forum

If you wrote me an email via my contact form between some time yesterday November 22nd and today before 16:00 h I will not be able to reply if you haven´t entered your email also  into the message field.

The reason is that my server for some reason ignored the senders email and used my own email adress as the senders email. So I received two messages via my contactform – one concerning issues with the checkout and an inquiry from a German teacher – where I don´t have an email adress to reply.

If you are one of these people you should write me an email again either by using the contact form (which works again) or using the email adress support [AT] der-prinz.com.

Please accept my appologies for this inconvenience.

Seems like the ghost in the machine wants to play tricks on me these days

Right before the weekend I had some trouble with my RSS feed that´s powered by Googles Feedburner. For some reason Feedburner had issues retrieving my original WordPress feed. Seems as if that´s fixed now.

At least I can see my feeds updated correctly and the isse that occured with the dashboard widget that´s used in my WordPress themes is solved. In may take a while until this is updated everywhere. If you still encounter issues let me know.

There seems to be an issue with my newsfeed which is powered by Feedburner. This only effects the dashboard widget in my WordPress themes.

If you encounter issues with my PRiNZ News dashboard widget you can either simply switch it off by unticking the checkbox unter screen options on the top-right of your WordPress dashboard. If you are a bit more familiar with PHP code and want to get rid of it completely just remove these lines from /lib/admin/theme-admin.php.

I will see if I can fix this issue or remove the widget and provide an update for my themes.

UPDATE: 11.11.2011 at 16:50 CET
It´s definitely an issue with Feedburner. I checked the functions with another RSS feed and it works without issues. So let´s hope Feedburner fixes the issue and updates my feed asap.

End of August I started my social media break because of two reasons. First I wanted to have some more time – time that I normally spend on social media activities. And secondly I wanted to see what difference it make if I´m active on Facebook, Twitter & Co. or not. Today I´m back to social media and guess what: I didn´t miss very much.

Of course I was not completely locked off. I was still reading several RSS feeds to stay informed and was kind of active on XING which is a bit outstanding from the crowd because it´s clearly business focused. There were some times when I really missed to be an active part of the social media plattforms and that was when I was looking for the one or the other solution. Normally I post a question on Google+, Twitter and also on Facebook and normally I get an answer qite quickly. This time I had to find other sources and that was in fact not a real problem. Aunt Google finds a solution for almost anything

The Results

Interesting about it is that the number of followers/friends/fans or whatever you like to cal the people who you are connected to on the various plattforms didn´t decrease. In fact it slightly increased although I dindn´t write anything during this time.

Before/After

Twitter: 352 / 357
Facebook Page: 86 / 89
Google+: 109  / 138

The Conclusion

My simple conclusion is that beeing part of the social media community it nice but not crucial for me. In some cases it´s quite helpful but you can´t expect any miracles from it. For a one-man-show like me who can´t spend too much time on a fancy social media strategy it doesn´t seem to be the big thing.  So of course I will continue my social media experience but I will spend less time and effort on it. I guess for me it´s more important to focus on my core business and produce more outstanding WordPress themes and great websites for my clients. Social media to me is one part of my personal marketing but it´s by far not the most important and it´s not the “healer for all diseases”. Producing good quality in my clients work and word-of-mouth from satisfied customers is much more valuable.