First, I released my own (GPL licensed) theme to augment the small number of available themes. The theme, which goes by the name of “Solar” for its use of the Solarized color palette, can be downloaded and demoed on GitHub.

That was a start, but what few publicly available themes exist are still spread thinly across GitHub and who-knows-where. Jekyll lacks a central repository like WordPress has had for years. So my next project was to attempt to bring as many of them as possible into one easily browsable place. I picked up the JekyllThemes.org domain, made a simple responsive showcase design for it and published the site. As of this writing, there are eight themes featured in the gallery, with links to their home pages and demo links if available.

Jekyll Themes is on GitHub, so if you have a theme to add, you can fork the site and add it yourself.

Without further ado, I would like to introduce Solar, a theme I based upon the Solarized color palette. It includes stylesheets for both Solarized Dark and Solarized Light, since the colors are defined separately from the page structure. It’s responsive, all the way down to mobile size, and it’s built with link-blogging in mind.

You can view a demo of Solar here, and download it on GitHub. It’s licensed under the GPL, so feel free to fork it and go crazy.

The process required to add the new uploader is a bit different, but not too much more difficult. I was able to adapt the old tutorial a little, so it shouldn’t be too hard to replace some code in an existing project and get the new uploader instead of the old.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s start with the same HTML snippet as in the old tutorial. This goes along with the rest of the HTML for your admin page, or wherever in the admin you’re trying to add an upload field.

<label for="upload_image">
	<input id="upload_image" type="text" size="36" name="ad_image" value="http://" /> 
	<input id="upload_image_button" class="button" type="button" value="Upload Image" />
	<br />Enter a URL or upload an image
</label>

Now we need to load up the necessary JavaScript files.

add_action('admin_enqueue_scripts', 'my_admin_scripts');

function my_admin_scripts() {
	if (isset($_GET['page']) && $_GET['page'] == 'my_plugin_page') {
		wp_enqueue_media();
		wp_register_script('my-admin-js', WP_PLUGIN_URL.'/my-plugin/my-admin.js', array('jquery'));
		wp_enqueue_script('my-admin-js');
	}
}

We bind the my_admin_scripts() function to the admin_enqueue_scripts hook, and enqueue both the media scripts and our own JavaScript file. Also, the scripts will only be loaded if the current page is equal to “my_plugin_page,” which you would of course replace with the slug your admin menu has.

Now for the complicated part: the script that hooks into the uploader. Continuing with the above example, it would be named my-admin.js.

jQuery(document).ready(function($){


	var custom_uploader;


	$('#upload_image_button').click(function(e) {

		e.preventDefault();

		//If the uploader object has already been created, reopen the dialog
		if (custom_uploader) {
			custom_uploader.open();
			return;
		}

		//Extend the wp.media object
		custom_uploader = wp.media.frames.file_frame = wp.media({
			title: 'Choose Image',
			button: {
				text: 'Choose Image'
			},
			multiple: false
		});

		//When a file is selected, grab the URL and set it as the text field's value
		custom_uploader.on('select', function() {
			attachment = custom_uploader.state().get('selection').first().toJSON();
			$('#upload_image').val(attachment.url);
		});

		//Open the uploader dialog
		custom_uploader.open();

	});


});

When the button is clicked, it creates a new instance of the wp.media object and configures it to only accept a single file, since the text field can only hold one file URL. Then it binds a function to the selection action, which gets the file attributes when an image is chosen and sets the #upload_image text field value to the file’s URL.

Providing everything went as expected, you should have a form field that will accept an arbitrary URL, or allow the user to upload one.

Frank is built atop the responsive Foundation grid framework, and features a layout customization tool that lets you adjust how the homepage is displayed.

Frank: A Free WordPress Theme Designed For Speed [Smashing Magazine]

I like the new look, with its flat colors and additional negative space. It seems more current, as excessive gradients seem to be falling out of style in web design lately—just as browser support for them is starting to catch up. It’s definitely easier to find what you’re looking for on the new site, so the new navigational structure is a success.

The design looks great, but I find the switch to WooCommerce to be the most interesting. Not only is WooThemes “eating their own dog food,” but the fact that the largest and most known supplier of commercial WordPress themes is using it is good to know for anyone looking into e-commerce solutions.

We’ve re-designed. Everything. [WooThemes]

I might have used Launch for my personal blog if it had been released before I made my new custom theme.

Alex King and his company Crowd Favorite have a proposed solution. Their plugin adds a really nice UI to the New Post screen, with tabs that appear depending on which Post Formats your theme enables and different input fields that change depending on which tab is selected.

In addition to the way cool plugin, they have a sensible naming convention for custom fields to go along with it. I think it would great if the Core team adopted that as a recommendation for theme developers, and incorporated the UI plugin into WordPress proper.

Alex King did say, back in November, that he planned to suggest it to the Core developers once WordPress 3.3 shipped, so keep your fingers crossed.

WordPress Post Formats Admin UI [Alex King]

It’s hard to believe that a year has passed since our last WordPress theme collection, but there you have it — the time has come again. Once a year we feature the most useful and interesting WordPress-themes that we are collecting over months and present them in a nice quick overview. The collections from 2007, 2008 and last year are still useful, but some of the themes are outdated or updated now.

100 Free High Quality WordPress Themes: 2010 Edition [Smashing Magazine]

PliablePress is going to be a purveyor of quality WordPress themes, particularly ones that “aren’t simple little themes that you can turn out in a weekend.”

The themes will all be based upon the custom “Chameleon” framework. It offers some functionality along the lines of Thesis or the WooFramework, letting the end user make customizations without digging into the template files.

Even though all of our other themes use Chameleon as a groundwork, you can use it on its own as well.

On its own, Chameleon is an ultra-clean, professional looking site. You might find that it’s already everything you want in a web design

I’m looking forward to seeing what the PliablePress themes, and the framework itself, will be like. It should be interesting.

It’s not for everyone, but it’s a nice niche business. They only need to roll-out a new template once in awhile, which is considerably easier than a whole WordPress theme, and process sales. The price point is low enough to be an impulse buy, too.

I wonder if we might start seeing more sellers of small theme components in the future?