Steve Rio

Steve Rio – Executive Director of The Cheaper Show, as well as Lead Strategist and CEO of Briteweb spent 5 minutes with us telling us more about their fun, unique, and ever growing art show, and the site they built to market and showcase it.

I’ve been working with WooThemes since the early days when Adii answered the support emails himself most of the time. I’ve probably employed WooThemes 30-40 times in the past 2 years, so I’ve seen them develop from good templates to an excellent framework.

While I don’t always use Woo (some of our projects are highly customized builds where we employ our own base theme/framework), I think WooThemes is incredible and the fastest way to get a website from 0-60 in days or even hours sometimes. I love the framework as it advances, the shortcodes and in the most recent iterations, really impressed with the built in social media box widgets etc and inclusion of Google Web Fonts. Two techniques I’ve been coding in to your themes until they were included.

The Cheaper Show

The Cheaper Show is a grass-roots show in Vancouver, BC Canada that was started 10 years ago by 3 artists who needed a way to have their art seen. It’s now grown to become the biggest one-day art event in Western Canada and perhaps the entire country.

We received 1200 artist submissions from over 50 countries and hundreds of cities on every corner of the globe this year, all facilitated through the website. We are currently working on our first event in Tokyo (a fundraiser for victims of the earthquakes), as well as developing a business model for expansion into other cities, working with localized arts collectives and non-profits to act as Cheaper Show ambassadors in their communities.

Technical details of the site

Using Gravity Forms, with a hack in place to have the form populate a Custom Post Type (‘Artists’), we received all the artist submissions through WordPress. I then built a customized Curation Tool for our Curator to review submissions, and change a custom field to move entries from a Submission status to a Selection status or Rejection status. This way there was no data-entry and it was easy to create a custom loop to display the 200 Selected Artists by simply pulling Artist CPT’s with a status set to Selection.

The Cheaper Show website

This site is built on the WooThemes Kaboodle theme, which we essentially stripped entirely from a styling perspective to apply our typography-heavy design aesthetic and stark white-black-yellow color scheme.

We’re using multiple widget areas (8 currently I think), including 3 on the homepage. We’ve created multiple custom widget plugins to handle a diverse range of content within these regions, including a Custom Sidebar Block post type that allows creating sidebar blocks using the typical post edit screen and creating ‘locations’ to dictate where the blocks show up.

The custom artist archive page.

We use the Amazon Cloud plugin to host the majority of post images etc on Amazon to deal with the traffic spike the website receives as the show ramps up and international blog attention drives traffic.

The Headlines theme listing page on WordPress.com

We were contacted by the theme wranglers at Automattic and asked if we would like to offer one of the first two premium themes on WordPress.com. Naturally we said yes and decided Headlines would be a good theme to trial, given it’s magazine layout, neat slider, and slick color schemes.

Headlines - A magazine theme for self-hosted WordPress Sites and now WordPress.com users

The news is already covered on the WordPress.com blog and it has made it onto TechCrunch. Hopefully our servers can handle the traffic surge.

A special thank to Matt Mullenweg for entrusting us with pioneering the way, along with the guys at Theme Foundry, and to Lance Willett and Ian Stewart at Automattic helping us optimize the theme for WordPress.com usage.

Headlines for business done the right way!

We love this modification of Headlines on iContact’s blog, because it uses the default sexiness that is packaged with the theme as the base and purely builds on that to achieve their business goals. Beautiful!

This means our Drupal collection grows to four themes and we look forward to adding at least another two themes next month.

And on that note… Which two themes would you like to see ported to Drupal next?

And with his new design – Headlines – that’s exactly the situation once again.

Headlines (which changed slightly from the initial teaser we posted in September) is a superbly designed magazine layout, which we’re sure will quickly jump to the top of the (already great magazine themes) pile. Whilst not reinventing any wheels with the release of Headlines, we wanted to prompt the users of old-timers such as Busy Bee or Fresh News to give their blogs a little overhaul before the start of the new year.

Clean & sophisticated means that Headlines will be extremely easy to bend & break according to all of your creative requirements and you should see a spade of amazing user modified versions to be added to the Showcase in the near future. It is however the pretty new featured slider that we’re sure will woo all the fans the most…

The sexy new featured slider used in Headlines

We’ve also experimented with a little bit of new functionality on Headlines… First experiment allows you to set the alignment of the post images / thumbnails right from the backend; so no more editing pesky template code. The second “experiment” (we’ve done this in one or two themes before) is to allow you to switch between using a left- or right-aligned sidebar. These surely aren’t groundbreaking on their own, but both are representative of our new development mindset which is geared to release our themes in a much more modular way in future.

Image Alignment Options: From left to right in one click

If you’re not convinced of the awesomeness yet, have a play with the demo and read up on the nitty-gritty with regards to Headlines’ theme features. Irrespective of whether you like Magnus’ design style; you will love this theme!

So with his new magazine-type design – titled Headlines – he completely took the team by surprise, as we didn’t know he was working on a new design. Whilst Headlines hasn’t reinvented any wheel, the team has been very impressed by the design and the feedback we received from the teaser we posted on Facebook seems to confirm our early positive feelings about the design. So let’s take a closer look at the new theme…

Headlines - Homepage

Headlines - Inner Page

As with all of Magnus’ designs, you’ll notice that his signature style comes to the fore in a very prominent manner. But you’ll also see that he’s tried to break that mould a bit and the most apparent deviation from his signature style, is the “around-the-corner” ribbons & navigation items. Generally though, Headlines has been designed on the same basis that has made Busy Bee & Fresh News our two most popular themes ever.

Layout-wise, we’re hoping to develop Headlines in a very customizable way. One of the most important features we’d like to include is the ability to effortlessly switch from a left sidebar (as on the mockup) to a right-aligned sidebar. The main reason we’re keen on this, is the fact that most of our themes seem to adhere to a content+left sidebar layout and we’re just hoping to mix that up a little (in the process further diversifying our magazine themes collection).

So what do you think? Features wish list? Specific functionality we should include? Shoot away with suggestions, feature requests, functionality demands etc. and we’ll try our best to evolve this theme into a real beauty when the time comes to release it.

Note: Keep track of the themes we’re working on, on our Themes in Progress page.