The team blog

New year, new horizons

We have exciting news. Peaxl has been acquired.

Joke. The team is growing, actually.

Francis and I are designers. We got used to develop websites using WordPress for clients and for Peaxl but it’s not what we love most. Design is what we love. Designing, developing and working for clients at the same time is simply too much. It is one of the reasons why it takes us so long to produce new themes.

Jonathan Buttigieg. This is the name of the guy who accepted to join our team and to take care of the development of future Peaxl themes. Jonathan is an amazing developer and he knows WordPress really well. He is also author of different books on WordPress and PHP/MySQL and has a well-known blog, GeekPress.fr (in french only) where he also writes about WordPress.

Having a developer on board will allow us to have a better organization regarding the different phases involved in the release of a premium WordPress theme.

We are really thrilled about that because it also means that we have more human resources to make Peaxl grow. We are convinced that this hiring is the best way to produce more high-quality themes… and is one of the biggest steps since Peaxl has been launched.

Welcome to Peaxl, Jonathan.

Peaxl is ready for WordPress 3.4

Today WordPress has released their much-awaited version 3.4 —after 4 release candidates— with a lot of improvements and new features.

We just finished the update on our main site as well as on our demo and test platforms.

This is a go

Our own WordPress websites are deeply customized but everything went well so… it should be the same with yours. If you did not hardly modified your setup, you should not encounter any problem on your website.

Please let us remind you that you should always make a backup (database + files) before attempting an upgrade.

We have tested our themes during the development of WordPress 3.4 and we made some changes in order to make sure that they are compatible with the new 3.4 as well as with the previous version. Updated themes have been deployed and customers should have received an email with instructions on how to download the new packages.

What’s new in WordPress 3.4

The WordPress did a great job on this release and they added some very nice features for the end-user. Many changes involved won’t be visible, though. Most of them only concern developers.

One thing you can’t miss is the Theme Customizer. It allows you to modify many aspects of your theme without having to edit any code at all. If your theme supports it, you can change the title, tagline, background color, image and more with a click of a mouse.

Further reading: if you want to know more about what’s new in WordPress 3.4, here is a good article by Aaron Brazell.

If you’re one of our customers and did not receive the email containing the link to download the new themes versions, please send us an email.

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! -