The team blog

Behind the Diary post formats

Besides using WordPress for clients and Peaxl, I am a longtime WordPress user. And I am a longtime Tumblr user as well. Everybody loves the way Tumblr makes it easy to publish any kind of posts, should it be a text or a video. And I like it too. They (re-)initiated the tumblog.

Since the beginning, WordPress is an efficient content management system and a very easy to use writing tool. But the system lacked the Tumblr way of posting medias.

Some time ago (precisely on February 23, 2011), WordPress introduced a theme feature called “post formats”. That sounded like a relief for people that wanted to use WordPress for maintaining a tumblog. But that feature just added some meta information to posts and a few functions that developers can use in their themes. When you enable custom post formats in a theme, you have a new metabox near the post editor (to choose the format of the post, obviously) and that is all: you are not provided with an interface to use images/galleries/videos/sounds/etc. like Tumblr does.

As I was designing a new theme for my own use, I suddenly thought that it would make a nice WordPress theme… if we could post various content types (or formats). A few premium themes shops used post formats to offer some different post designs (in front-end) or tried to find workarounds: taxonomies, post types, quickpress, etc. Other people developed a few plugins too. But it was not enough for me. I wanted post formats to be directly integrated into the theme and a better user experience. I decided to do it myself and to take the default WordPress post formats further. JavaScript, PHP, custom metaboxes and a lot of time allowed me to achieve that (I even used a few PHP snippets available under GPL).

But I didn’t reuse what others did or wrote for their previous themes: we use the original post formats meta data from WordPress, we just improved it.

The result is a nice WordPress theme called Diary, containing an easy interface for publishing real standard/image/gallery/link/quote/video/audio posts. If you liked Tumblr you’ll love WordPress thanks to Diary.

Peaxl V2 and Diary released

We have been silent for quite a long time but we were working hard to deliver something new! Please welcome the new Peaxl website and our brand new theme, Diary!

A new website

When Gilles left the team, we had to rethink and reorganize both our offer and the way we communicate about it. At the beginning, we sold parent and child themes. As the time passed by and with more experience, we realized that it was a complicated way to sell WordPress themes: a lot of people had problems to understand what the “parent and child” thing is and they seemed to not find it very convenient.

As we planned to redesign the website, it was a good opportunity to rethink our global approach. Thus, together with Thibaut, we decided to come back to a simpler organization and to sell “normal” WordPress themes. We don’t just sell parents and children themes anymore but mainly casual WordPress themes.

Aeronef and its children are still there but they’re delivered as packages. For now, we won’t sell Aeronef alone but always packaged with one of the child themes. Communication will be based on the child theme, no more on Aeronef. If you browse the website you see the child themes names only, but every package includes the parent theme Aeronef.

Peaxl V2 is clear, light and nice but completely in sync with what we sell: pixel perfect, powerful but without overrated and useless features.

We changed our pricings too: every theme or package will now cost $35 only.

Diary, post formats made easier

Today, we are also pleased to introduce our new theme, Diary, designed and developed by Thibaut. Diary is a tumblog theme that has a very nice and slick design. It does use WordPress Custom Post Formats but we took them a bit further for a better user experience. We took Tumblr as a reference and brought its simplicity to WordPress. Watch the video below to know more.

Post formats video demo

Diary is responsive, available in English and French and has many features we can’t tell here! Have a look at the demo and the Diary theme page for the full details!

What’s next ?

Our next theme, Vitrine, is almost done (it just passed the beta tests) and should be available in a few weeks. Vitrine is going to be a fantastic portfolio theme, easy to customize and of course, responsive ! We are also already working on the upcoming themes. More news soon on Twitter!

For your convenience, the video is also available on YouTube and Vimeo.

Christmas sale

Since we launched Peaxl, a lot of people have shown interest in our themes and many of you actually bought them.

While waiting for some fresh themes coming early 2012 and as a thank you for your support, we’d like to offer you the opportunity the get the full current collection (or to complete yours), with an all-in-one package.

For just a little bit more than the regular price of a child theme, you can get the other themes. More, you can get them all. Valid until Christmas.

Merry Christmas.

- The bundle sale has ended, thanks! -

Support as a community

Wow, there is a lot of news from the Peaxl HQ these days! A few days ago we talked about our upcoming themes, we launched our Affliate Program and yesterday we made another move.

As you may now, we used Zendesk to manage the support requests we receive from our customers. This web app is really great… but not for us.

We think that solved support requests may help other users. We want to think the support as a community. So one of the main features of Zendesk (its private ticketing system) doesn’t meet our needs.

This is one of the reasons why we decided to drop Zendesk and to use a custom made solution, based on bbPress 2.

The deal remains the same, globally. Our customers have access to the entire forums and -obviously- can post and answer to any topic. And just like before, the full themes documentation is still free and public.

We hope you’ll enjoy our new community forums.

Concours : des pass pour le WordCamp Paris

This post is about a contest to win a pass for a conference in Paris, France. We expect the participants to speak French.

Les deux gagnants du concours sont @parcevaux et @agencehorizon. Merci à tous pour votre participation !

A l’occasion de la première édition du WordCamp Paris qui aura lieu le 25 novembre 2011, nous avons le plaisir de vous donner la possibilité de gagner 2 × 1 ticket donnant accès à la journée de conférences du WordCamp.

Pour gagner un des deux pass et avoir la chance, ô combien inestimable, de voir notre ami Francis sur scène, il vous suffit de tweeter et faire retweeter grâce au bouton ci-dessous avant ce mercredi 16 novembre à minuit :

Tweeter

Si vous préférez le faire à la main, n’oubliez pas le hashtag #pxlwc2011 :

Gagnez votre pass pour le WordCamp Paris 2011 grâce à @peaxl #pxlwc2011 http://cl.ly/Bnq0

Les gagnants seront tirés au sort parmi les tweets valables mercredi matin. Assurez-vous de suivre le compte Twitter @peaxl afin qu’on puisse vous contacter si vous êtes un des gagnants.

Si vous avez des questions, laissez un commentaire ci-dessous. Bonne chance !

Rappel : si vous avez raté le précédent article, sachez également que Peaxl propose maintenant son système d’affiliation.