When you start developing a WordPress site – no matter if for a client or a private project – chances are you want to see how your site may look in a real environment but without letting regular users see your unfinished work. This is where “Coming Soon” pages come into play.

There are several plugins available for activating maintenance mode or for creating “under construction” or “coming soon” pages. One of the most pupular here in Gemany is WP Maintenance Mode by Frank Bültge. That´s a fantastic free plugin that I used to use in many projects. But the features are of course limited and I always looked for a more flexible solution. So I stumbled over the premium (paid) “Seedprod Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode” plugin.

The plugin is very feature rich and offers tons of options. With this plugin it´s dead simple and lightning fast to create coming soon pages or maintenance pages with an individual look and feel. It works with any WordPress theme (of course: it´s a plugin). It´s simple to install and use. It offers several interfaces with services like MailChimp or Campaign Monitor. Intergration of social media is easy as 1,2,3 and of course you can control all the design and layout of your specific page. On the plugins website you find a showcase with lots of great examples.

One of the best things is the integration of even complex forms (e.g. Gravity Forms). This allows you to interact with your users even before public launch of your website.

Once the plugin is activated and the coming soon page is set up you can continue to create your website in the background. Regular visitors just see your coming soon page whilst you can login and use the site just like it was already launched. You can even provide a temporary link to your client and let him see his site as well without logging in. That is great for pre-launch presentations.

Conclusion

Seedprod Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode is a great plugin and at 49$ for a developer licence it´s worth every dollar. I don´t wanna miss it anymore.

• Seedprod Plugin Website
• WP Maintenance Mode by Frank Bültge

Everyone knows those shiny and nice information bars on top or bottom of many websites these days. They tell you about special offers, promos or just newsletter subscriptions. I needed such an info bar for my own website a while ago and searched for a nice plugin to do the job.

I found some free and some premium (paid) plugins for this specific purpose. After a few quick tests I decided to go with FooBars which is a premium plugin by the guys over at Themercency. This plugin offers a wide range of great features without becoming too complex. You can change almost anything from a nice admin panel. Colors, sizes, fonts, animation an much more.

I´m a fan of premium themes and plugins because in most cases you simply get a much better quality compared to free stuff. And at a prize of 14$ you can´t go really wrong.

So if you need nice and fancy info bars from time to time you should check out the FooBars plugin.

• Plugins Website 

 

 

December, christmas time, time of reflectiveness, time for gifts. Actually you don´t get a real gift from me but I can offer you a great deal. During December 2012 you can save 50% of the regular price if you purchase the All-Themes-Pack. You pay just 59,95 EUR instead of 119,90 (prices incl. VAT) if you have a valid promo code.

The All-Themes-Pack includes all of my eight WordPress themes including lifetime updates for those themes. And even more. If you once purchased the All-Themes-Pack (even as a promo purchase) you will get access to all upcoming themes as well. So if I release a theme in the future, you will be able to use it. Without paying again!

So what are you waiting for? Here is your promo code:

DP-XMAS-2012

You need to enter this code into the voucher/coupon filed of your shoping cart after you added the All-Themes-Pack to the cart. There will be no after sales discounts or other discounts. The promo code is valid until 31. of December 2012.

 

Visit the Themes Shop »

Yesterday WordPress released the first release candidate – a pre version of the final version – of upcoming WordPress 3.5 which will be released beginning of December. Time to let you know that all DER PRiNZ themes are tested and ready for version 3.5.

Today I switsched all demosites to the release candidate 3.5 and – as expected – I didn´t ecounter any issues. Anything runs just fine.  So as soon as the final version is released you can update your WordPress install. But make sure you follow the guidelines for updating WordPress (see below).

• WordPress release candidate article
• Information on updating from the official WordPress Codex

Today I´m very glad to inform you about a quantum leap I took with my famous premium WordPress magazine style theme BranfordMagazine. The new version 9.0 that has been released today comes with a full mobile responsive design. Now it works just perfect on all devices no matter if desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone.

So BranfordMagazine follows the overal trend of responsive webdesign and the new version is also WordPress Multisite ready.

As usual existing customers get the update for free in the download section of the suport forum (requires registration). All others can purchase it for just 39.90 EUR in my themes shop.

All information about the new version of BranfordMagazine can be found here.

• Visit the theme shop
• Go to the forum

Clear Focus is a mobile responsive and highly customizable WordPress business and portfolio theme for companies, agencies and freelancers alike. It comes with some great features focused on individual setup options and full mobile device support via a fully responsive layout.

Find all informartion here.

As usual Premium Users who have purchased the All-Themes-Pack can grab their copy of this fantastic theme in the download section of the support forum.

Clear Focus is a mobile responsive and highly customizable WordPress business and portfolio theme for companies, agencies and freelancers alike. It comes with some great features focused on individual setup options and full mobile device support via a fully responsive layout.

Unlimited colors, Google Web Fonts, image sliders or static leadarticle and various layout options are just some of the great features of “Clear Focus”. 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 and the PRiNZ Widget Factory plugin included.

Theme Features

• Outstanding and fully mobile responsive business layout with  many different layout options
• Unlimited colors for your individual colorscheme
• 20+ fantastic build-in backgrounds for the boxed layout  (unlimited custom backgrounds possible)
• Several Google Web Fonts to choose from
• Smooth and elegant SuperFish dropdown menu
• Responsive FlexSlider for content and images included
• Integrated Nivo image slider (WordPress plugin) with lots of funct
• jQuery powered portfolio or product “carousel”
• Sortable/filterable Portfolio (Custom Post Type)
• PRiNZ Shortcode Collection plugin included
• Auto prettyPhoto integration
• Image handling and resizing via the WordPress post thumbnail function (no TimThumb)
• 960 grid system
• Options page for easy setup without coding
• WordPress 3 features like custom headers, backgrounds and menus
• 7 additional custom page templates (Blogpage, 3x Portfolio variations, 2x Landingpage variations and Fullwidth)
• 15 widgetized areas
• PRiNZ Widget Factory plugin provides 11 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
• Full responsive mobile support: Works on mobile devices like Smartphones and tablet computers

Demo, Support and Purchase

Demo Support Forum Tutorials

 

• 

  Clear Focus

  € 39,90 incl. 19% VAT

  Add to cart

Installation

Please read the readme.html file contained in the downloaded zip-archive before you start.

Change Log

Version 0.9 (released 13.11.2012)

Initial release.

 

 

I love to provide outstanding support to my customers. If you purchase a high quality product such as one of my themes you can expect top notch support if you encounter an issue. That´s part of my philosophy.

Sometimes though I have customers who’s individual needs exceed what is considered “normal” support. This is what I call individual customizations which are not part of the normal support and are only available for an extra fee. Somtimes these little things need to be done quite quickly but I´m right in the middle of a bigger project and simply don´t have the time to provide quick help. Today I´m more than happy to announce a partnership with a new service called Tweaky that lets you have a professional make changes to your site in a very affordable way and at a reasonable price.

Now this doesn’t change the way I´m supporting my valued customers with theme questions. I´m still doing that. An I will always do that. But for customizations that are beyond theme support, Tweaky is a fantastic partner to help you out.

The process is very straigh forward. Essentially you fill in a quote form and their developers bid on your project. The service even comes with a Money Back Guarantee so you have nothing to risk.

If you’d like to get started, you can fill in this  form and they will get in touch with you shortly.

Today I´d like to show you a little sneak peek on my latest upcoming mobile responsive WordPress theme “Clear Focus”. Although almost 90% finished other important projects moved the release but I hope to release it quite soon.

Again this is a mobile responsive theme with a very clean and minimalistic design concept. It comes with a lot of nice features such as responsive sliders, porfolio carousel, various portfolio page templates as well as custom widgets and shortcodes packed in plugins to extend the functionality of the theme.

Check out the demo of the theme right here.

Be aware that some minor things might change in the final version.

To get started with “Clear Focus” to build your website you must do some initial settings. The theme provides a great variety of fantastic options you can choose from. Using these options makes it very easy to setup a unique WordPress powered website.  Read this tutorial before you start the installation.

Download, Unpack and Upload

After you downloaded and unpacked the zip-archive, you have a folder called PRiNZ_ClearFocus. This folder contains additional folders (the theme and a sample child theme), the readme files in English and German and a logo.

Now take only the folder called ” clearfocus” (and the child theme folder if you want ot use it) not the whole PRiNZ_ClearFocus folder and upload it to your WordPress themes directory which is normally located at /wp-content/themes in your servers WordPress installation. If you upload the whole unpacked PRiNZ_ClearFocus folder you might encounter several issues (like “missing stylesheet”). You  need an FTP program to do this. We will talk about the child themes folder later in this article.

Do NOT use the WordPress theme installation functionality for that. The installation functionality tries to upload the whole zip-archive and will create errors.

Setup the Theme Options

Now go to your WordPress admin and open the themes options under Appearance > Clear Focus Options.

At this options page you need to make some settings to make the theme work properly. You might encounter issues if your settings are incorrect. So double-check your settings if you face any issue. Initially the theme has already some default settings you can use if you want to. This is also the place where you can significantly influence the look and feel of them theme. You can change a lot without changing a single line of code. But if you want to customize more I recommend to use a child theme to change things in an update safe way. Read more about child themes at the end of this installation guide.

Keep in mind that your site will look very strange an messed up as long as you haven´t saved your settings on the options page and haven´t set up and assigned a custom menu.

Plugins

Here you find a list of required (or at least highly reccommended) plugins and plugins I can reccommend because they help to work with the theme and build your website. Simply download them and install them as usual (follow their specific instructions where appropriate).

Basic Layout

Here you decide if you want to use the responsive layout. The responsive layout means the layout “responds” to the device the site is viewed with. It changes depending if a visitor looks at your site with a regular PC, a tablet computer (such as the iPad) or a smartphone (e.g. iPhone). This is the reccomended option because it allows users with smaller devices to get a good user experience when visiting your site. The theme basically works on mobile devices also if you are not using the responsive layout but it works better with the responsive layout.

By default Clear Focus provides a “borderless” stretched layout. By checking the “Boxed Layout” checkbox you change the layout from the streched to a boxed look.

You can selct a background pattern. There are more than 20 nice and subtle background patterns integrated into the theme. Of course you can use any background pattern or color you want because the theme supports the WordPress background function.

And you can place the sidebar on the inner pages (homepage doesn´t have a a sidebar) to the right (default) or to the left.

Fonts

The theme uses Google Webfonts for several headlines and the “text-logo” (if you don´t use an image logo). Here you can select the font that will be used for those headlines. You can easily extend the available fonts by using a plugin such as “Typecase Web Fonts“.

In this section you also can change the alignment of text and headline fonts. A justified text might look cleaner and more structured sometimes compared to a left aligned text. This very much depends on your content.

Colors

One of the great things of the Agency WordPress theme is the “unlimited” color-handling. You can select colors for lots of different areas of the theme (using hex codes like #FFFFFF for white, or #000000 for black) such as the header background, links, buttons, headlines etc. Combined with the default WordPress custom background (color) function or the integrated subtle patterns you can easily set your preferred colors and make the theme very unique without beeing limited by pre-defined color schemes and without touching one single line of CSS code. Just play around with it. It´s fun.

Header and Footer

In this section you select if you want to use the blogname and description text that is defined in your WordPress settings or a graphical logo in the header of your site. Default is blogname/description and if you want to use a logo image you need to upload one by using the WordPress “Header” option under the Appearance menu. In some rare cases the headerimage or logo isn´t aligned correctly. If you see your image looking strange apply the “Logo Fix”.

Here you also decide if you want to use the Headerbar (looks a bit like the WordPress adminbar). The headerbar provides two widgetareas which can be used for additional links, social icons etc.

The alternative Footer provides either two or four additional widget areas that you can use to put additional content in four columns at the footer of your site. If you select “no alternative footer” you will just see the regular footer with the credit links. The 2-column footer in the demo is the 2 column version of the alternative footer.

The footer section changes from two/four to one column in the responsive layout depending on the device the site is viewed with. Make sure the content of the four columns is more or less of the same height to ensure proper alignment on mobile devices. This also looks better on regular desktop screens.

Navigation Menus

The theme offers one  menu location for the main navigation menu bar to the right of the logoarea. You can use it to display a menu for pages, categories etc. Be aware that you first need to create a custom menu and assign it it to the location in the theme. It might look strange if you haven´t assigned a menu yet.

Since WordPress 3.0 there is a powerful functionality available called “Custom Menus”. You find this under Appearance > Menus. With this custom menus you can create very flexible menus, you can mix pages and categories, add external links and define your own order of menu items completely independent from the WordPress defaults. See also this screencast that explains the custom menu function in detail.

You can use additional menus by using the custom menu widget (a default widget in WordPress) e.g. in the regular footer, the headerbar or your sidebar if you like. If you use a menu in the headerbar or the footer you should only use simple menus with no subpages or subcategories because that will not fit well into the layout. These positions are good for not so important menu links like “About”, “Contact”, “Imprint” etc.

Homepage Layout Options

The homepage layout options allow you to switch on or off almost any area on the homepage or re-position them. If you don´t need it, switch it off. You can play around with it to see the effect of ticking or unticking the checkboxes. If you decide to use the actionbar which will be displayed right above or below the slider/leadarticle you also need to enter a text for the punchline (Actionbar Text) and maybe some HTML for links or buttons. You can also move the actionbar below or above the slider and you can change the position of the portfolio caroussel (more details below).

Leadarticle or Slider

First you need to decide if you want to use a slider, an article from a specific category with a headline, text and image or no slider at all (that removes the enire area). You can select between two sliders (FlexSlider and Nivo).

FlexSlider: The best option probably is to use the FlexSlider because it´s build into the theme and supports it the best.

You can change the settings for the FlexSlider. The most important is to decide if you  want to use post or pages for the slider. If you use posts you need to select the category where the content is coming from (or the last posts from all categories are shown). It´s always the featured image (see “images” section below), the excerpt and the title of the post that you will see in the slider. Or it´s just the image if you decide to use the “Image WITHOUT text” option” If you choose to use specific pages for the slider instead of posts you need to check the box that you find in the edit page panel for every page. Checking the box “tells” the theme to add this particular page to the FlexSlider. Pretty easy, right?! No playing around with cryptic custom fields. Just tick the box and your page belongs to the slider. I guess the other options are self explaining and you can play with them to find the result that you like the most.

It´s recommended to use large images of the same width and height because the slider always displays at 100% of the browser window (stretched layout only). If the image is too small it might display in poor quality. In the demo I use images of 1.600×650 pixels. If images have differnet sizes it might not look nice.

Nivo Slider: If you go for Nivo Slider  you need to install the plugin which you can download from the themes optionspage. This plugin is huge and has many functionalities. After you have installed the plugin (like any other WordPress plugin) find a “Nivo Slider” menu item in your WordPress admin. Here you need to make several settings. Check out this Screencast that explains the Nivo Slider plugin in detail.

Leadarticle: You can also decide not to use a slider but static content (headline, text, featured image) from a category (maybe called “Leadarticle”). Select the category here.

Any category selection expects that this category already exists. Otherwise it will not be in the list.

Home Middle Section – Featured Area

There are no specific settings on the options page for the 3-column section that comes  below the action bar and image slider. This is a widget area and you need to use widgets to display content here. The best way is to use the custom “Featured Page” and “Featured Post” widgets that are part of the PRiNZ Widget Factory plugin that you can download from the “Plugins” section on top of the themes options page. Just install and activate that plugin and then go to Appearance > Widgets and play around with the widgets.

Homepage bottom Columns

The lower four columns area of the homepage is also a widgetized area. It works just like any widgetized area. Aganin you can use the fantastic featured page or featured post widgets instead (from the PRiNZ Widget Factory see above). Go to the Widgets area under Appearance and you will find two widget areas for the homepage called “Homepage Bottom Left” and “Homepage Bottom Right”. Here you can put the featured widgets. They have various options to play with. Just try it.

Images

Here you can define the dimensions (width and height in pixels) of some images on the homepage and the archive pages if you want to change the default sizes.

Here you can also switch the prettyPhoto image lightbox effect on or off. You might not need it if you use another lightbox plugin like Fancybox.

By default images on the homepage, in the sidebar and on the blogpage appear in grayscale (black & white) which is a very cool looking effect. But in some cases you might want the images to appear as they are (potantially colored). You can check the box if you want to REMOVE the grayscale effect on images an let them appear as they are.

The image size function is a very powerful feature that allows you to change the image dimensions basically whenever you like. But be aware that you need to re-generate the thumbnails after you have changed sizes for the changes to take effect. The settings effect the images of the leadarticle and the archive (category overview) pages.

If you need to change image dimensions this plugin might become very handy.

You need to set a featured image in every post you write which will be used as the thumbnail. There is a very detailed tutorial about the WordPress featured image function written by Justin Tadlock here.

Portfolio

The portfolio page is a page template that can be assigned to a page and display specific content. The portfolio page can be used to show some of your recent work, or clients.  For the portfolio you can select from three different template styles (large = 1 column, medium = 2 columns and small = 3 columns)

If you want to use one of those portfolio templates create a page (not a category or post) and assign the template to this page. You don´t need to enter any content (But you can if you want to write an short introduction for example). The regular content will be taken from a custom post type called “Porfolio” which you can find in your WordPress administration on the left hand side menu normally below the “comments” section.

Just enter a portfolio entry (called “Project”) just like you would enter a regular post or page. Assign tags to the project to make it filterable (See the Demo). The tags act like a kind of categorization for the portfolio projects. In the demo you can see “All” (which shows all projects without filter)  “Logo Design” and “Web Design” which are tags assigned to the portfolio projects. If you click on one of those tags the portfolio page gets filtered and you see only the entries (projects) assigned to that tag

The portfolio page will display the images and headlines of the portfolio projects. The portfolio page template displays the image and the title of the entry (and some text in case of the “large” portfolio template) on the portfolio page. When you click on an image it will open in larger size using the prettyPhoto lightbox effect. Pretty nice and very easy to do.

In the Portfolio section of the options page you select if you want to use the postfolio carousel on the homepage, how many portfolio entries it should display anddefine an optional headline for the portfolio carousel.

Blog Page

The blog page is also a  page template that can be assigned to a page and display specific content.  The blog page is obviously a page that you can use as your companies blog on your website.

For the blog page you need to define the categories that you want to use for the Blog. The blog page can display one or more categories in a regular chronological order.

If you want to use the template create a page (not a category or post) and assign the blog template to this page. You don´t need to enter any content (But you can if you want to write an short introduction for example). The regular content will be taken from the categories that you set.

Custom Scripts

Here you can enter custom scripts to the header and footer like Goolge Analytics or other Javascripts. And you can use custom CSS for simple editing of fonts, colors etc. If you want to make bigger changes to the styles you should use a child theme instead.

Using a Child Theme to customize your Theme

As you see you can make a lot of customizations without touching the code of the themes template files or even the CSS files. But in some cases you might want tocustomize the theme even more. If you do that by editing themes files all your changes will get lost in case of an update of the theme. A themes update doesn´t work like an update of WordPress. You never change WordPress core files, right? At least that´s not a good idea. If you want to change your theme but stay safe in case of an update this is where child themes come into play. Read about child themes at the WordPress codex or take a look at this tutorial I wrote to explain the what and why of child themes. There is a very basic sample child theme included into Consultant that you can use as a starting point.

Troubleshooting

Installation Error

Do NOT use the WordPress theme installation functionality to install your theme. Always use FTP to transfer the theme files to your server as explained in the beginning of this article. The installation functionality tries to upload the whole zip-archive and will create errors.

No articles appear

The reason why no articles appear  is because you have no articles in that category. Once you write an article it will apear. So always make sure your categories have articles.

It´s quite a good helper to write e.g. 3 testarticles and assign them to each category. That gives you a good overview how it works

Need more Support?

Got to the support forum to get more support and additional information. Read the forum guidelines before you start using the forum.

Further Readings and Tutorials

• Watch the Screencasts
• More Tutorials
• FAQ