The custom twitter widget fetches the data with JSON from twitter using API 1.0. Since Twitter retires the version 1.0 of the API in March 2013, the custom twitter widget won’t work anymore.

The new API 1.1 is way more complicated and requires to create an application, authentificate to twitter with oAuth dealing with consumer keys and access tokens and also take care about API rate limits.

This leads to some changes in implementation of the twitter widget. I have created a new tutorial in the docs explaining how you can embed twitter with the new API.

The year 2012 was a great one for the ThemeZee business. Started as a free wordpress theme provider back in 2010 and with the breakthrough in 2011, this year I mainly worked on the new Premium Themes and the ThemeZee Theme Club with the attached support forum.

Finally in October 2012 the theme club went online and I’m very happy with the successful start. Thank you so much for using my themes and special thanks to everyone who has joined the Theme Club so far. I’m overly glad and really appreciate it that so many of you trust in my services.

Due to the introduction of the theme club there weren’t many themes I have released in 2012. Therefore I plan to release several new themes in 2013 and also a smart plugin to insert shortcodes easily. As a matter of course all new themes will be under the banner of Responsive Web Design. I hope you’re looking forward to this as much as I do.

I would like to wish everyone Merry Christmas as well as a happy, healthy and successful new year.

Best Wishes,
Thomas

Picture from Photodune

Join the Theme Club

From now on, you can sign up for your Theme Club Account. Then you have access to the PRO Themes, the online Theme Documentation and the new Support Forums.

To become a Theme Club Member you have to pay the small fee of $36 per year. That’s amazing $3 per month. The payment is an one-time charge and processed through PayPal. That means there is no automatic renewal or recurring fees. Your Membership expires after one year, but you can of course extend it manually.

The bare facts:

Get 10 (at the moment) amazing PRO Themes
Get access to the Theme Documentation
Get one year top-notch Theme Support

Join the Theme Club for $3 per month respectively $36 per year

*LIMITED* Introductory Price for you

At the start of the Theme Club a special offer for you. Join the next five days (until Friday, 28 Sep 2012) the Theme Club and SAVE 50%. That means you get the normal One-Year Theme Club Membership for just $18.

Join the Theme Club now

Support Forums

Check out the new Support Forums, the future home of all your support questions. It’s based on the genius bbPress Forum Plugin and seamlessly integrated into the ThemeZee website. There you can ask unlimited questions to install, configure and tweak your ThemeZee’s WordPress Themes.

PRO Themes

Pro Themes are the upgrade versions of my free themes and have additional features to customize and configure your theme. You can find more information about PRO Themes in my last blog post “Introducing ThemeZee’s PRO Themes”

What else is new?

Member Panel

To provide a great user experience to every Club Member I have created a smooth MemberPanel, where you find all relevant Links to your Membership. There you can easily update your account information, download invoices, view your membership details, extend your account and download PRO Themes.

Slide Panel

Some eager ThemeZee Followers have surely noticed the new sliding panel, which I have already uploaded a few weeks ago. The Panel allows every user to login (and logout) anywhere on the website and grab the most important links quickly.

Startsite Intro

I have adapted the startsite template and added an elegant intro / welcome screen which introduces new visitors about the ThemeZee.com Website and what it’s about.

Theme Market

My goal is to make ThemeZee to a stunning place of the greatest WordPress Themes and help Users to find the one-and-only WordPress Theme which fits perfectly to their needs. Therefore I want to continue to present and review themes from other authors and even expand this area. The first step is the new Theme Market, which shows the best wordpress themes from themeforest.net authors.

Beside this, I have installed a new footer sidebar and also enhanced the whole design: played a lot with CSS shadows and unified the colors and buttons and much more little details. Enjoy the new ThemeZee. I do

How to get the PRO Themes?

The PRO Themes will be included in the ThemeZee Theme Club which I plan to launch the next few days. You can become a Member for just $36 per year (that’s only $3 per month) and then download ALL Pro Themes. Furthermore you have access to the Online Theme Documentation and Support Forum.

Features in Details

The exact features vary slightly depending on the theme. You find a table with all features listed at every theme info page (e.g. themezee.com/zeebusiness). But here is a summary of the most important features.

Pro Widgets:

You can choose from a bunch of additional widgets: Latest Tweets, Recent/Popular Posts (with Thumbnails, Postmeta), Recent Comments, Tabbed Widget (include Archives, Pages, Categories, Recent Posts/Comments, Tags and more). All Widgets come with several clever widget options to customize.

Frontpage Template:

Nearly every PRO theme got a sophisticated frontpage template, which is completely configurable via theme options. The template comes with an extra frontpage slider, intro text, latest blog posts, frontpage widgets or category boxes (depending on the theme).

Font Manager:

The fonts in each theme can be customized now in detail choosing from hundreds of available fonts (using the Google Font API)

Better Color Options:

The free themes only allow to set one main color. Now the colors of different areas of your website can be changed separately. Choose different colors for links, post titles, navigation etc.

Better Layout Options:

There are new options to configure the Theme Layout: Select between sidebar left/right, hide or show the postmeta/postinfo bars, remove the credit link or display an author box.

Theme Previews

I haven’t created an extra preview website for the PRO Themes, but simply used the same previews for free and pro version. So you can see the PRO Themes in action as before via preview.themezee.com.

I hope you like the new PRO Versions and can await the launch of the Theme Club. Any suggestions, feedback or questions are highly welcomed. Just leave a comment.

The new option panel comes with a sidebar which contains the most important links to the theme and ThemeZee. Furthermore the options are now separated into tabs which make the whole option page more clear and easier to configure. Moreover all image fields include now a button to directly upload your images/logos/ads.

Screenshots

Despite the option panel I have added the often requested Pinterest Button to the SocialMedia Buttons. And the dropdown navigation menus now have a CSS fallback if javascript is deactivated.

So far six theme updates are already live in WordPress.org Extend (that was fast, compliment to the WordPress Themes Review Team). The remaining four themes will surely go live in the next days.

Moreover I would like to establish a pro version of some of my themes which will include additional features. Despite that, I don’t like to abandon the roots of ThemeZee. I plan to launch more wordpress themes in the future, and they are supposed to be free and GPL licensed. So you have nothing to pay unless you don’t need support.

But until the new themezee.com can be launched, it will need a few weeks (or months?). There is a lot of stuff to integrate: membership plugin, bbpress forum, paypal, a complete redesign and lots more..

With that in mind, I go better to work now

Best wishes
Thomas, from Germany

The other themes have been updated a few days ago. So finally all of my free wordpress themes are up to date now.

Update Changelog

This was mainly a bugfixing update and I make really a lot of small changes. The most fixes were css issues. There were css bugs with captioned images, with displaying text elements in comments and some issues in the Search Template.

Furthermore all my themes get a new theme option panel. It only has a new header style, but in the backend of code I changed a few things. The new version do not use global variables anymore, which makes it more secure.

In addition I added a slug to some admin functions which were too generic. This can cause errors when a plugin use the same function name. All functions comes now with the “themezee_” slug in front of function name.

All themes contain now a new Page Template called “Page with Slider”. It allows to create a static page with the Featured Post Slider included. This feature was requested several times.

Update Hints

If you have modified the theme files, note that an update will overwrite these files. So make sure to have a backup of old theme files.

New Themes

My new themes zeeSynergie (Preview Link) and zeeBusiness (Preview) are completely finished and already uploaded to the WordPress Theme Directory. I decided to publish them when they are approved from the WordPress Review Team.

This makes sure the themes are free of bugs. I learned a lot about wordpress the last month and have a good experience now in create wordpress themes, but it happens very fast that I overlook some little mistake. And the WordPress Review Team is really thorough, they will found every existing error.

Theme Documentation

So, what else? I get very often comments with the same questions about wordpress or theme basics. So I decided to write a theme documentation how to install, setup and configure one of my free wordpress themes.

The documentation is currently in early stadium with four written pages. Altogether it will contain about 20 pages with tutorials about theme installation, wordpress settings, appearance configuration (menus, widgets), themezee option panel, code structure and code snipps to modify theme files.

Cheers,
Thomas

After about 6 months I got tired of the themezee.com site and it’s webdesign. In the past few days I worked on the new version. I made just slightly changes in design to not confuse anyone. Beside the design ThemeZee offers now a directory for premium themes.

Changes in Design

Logo: I changed the logo font and a little bit the color gradient. In my opinion the new logo looks way more professional than the old one.

Header Image: The old crimpy black header background looks really ugly against the new image pattern with elegant stripes

Navigation: I have only changed the white into a transparent background – simple turn, but great effect

Intro Text: The Welcome Text about ThemeZee are now two stylish boxes colored in light blue and green. The right box shows my recommendations of theme frameworks.

SocialMedia: The buttons of RSS, Twitter and Facebook were spread around the whole page in different widgets and the header. I combined these in a new “Stay in Touch” Widget.

Other changes are only small like a new posttitle font, increased post thumbnail images, highlighting author comments and so on…

Premium Themes Directory

Apart from my and other free wordpress themes there are several theme companies who offer premium themes for small money from $30 to $80. These themes always comes with a lot of more features like Shortcodes, Widgets and various page templates, exclusive and professional design, an extensive documentation and superior support.

As you can see these are really good reasons to buy a premium theme – especially when you run a business or a professional magazine website. There are hundreds of premium themes out there – so it’s difficult to find the right one.

In the new Premium Themes Directory I carefully select my favorite premium wordpress themes. The highlight is a Theme Search where you can find your fitting theme by choosing the theme category, columns and preferred colors.

Free WordPress Themes

My free wp themes become more popular from week to week. That’s awesome. I’m really excited about your great feedback and the amount of downloads. There were about 25000 downloads the past 4 weeks.

I’m always happy to see people who finally choosing one of my themes for their websites. That’s a stunning response for me. Also I’m glad about every commenter, rss reader, twitter follower and facebook fan.

I was quite busy the last weeks to bugfix, update and tweak my existing themes to get them in the official wordpress theme directory. Finally all my themes are in the directory now.

So it’s time for new free themes I guess. I have two new themes in pipeline called zeeSynergie (Preview) and zeeBusiness (Preview). They are ready to 95% (just a few bugfixes to make) and will be released within the next two weeks.

As German I hope my English was not too bad. You can keep grammar and spelling mistakes – thats a german saying Thanks!

Here is a screenshot of the old themezee design.