The Road to New Theme Releases

Two months ago, Westwerk announced the acquisition of WordPress theme shop Press75. Eight short weeks, hundreds of long hours, three themes later, and Press75 has officially hit the ground running!

Within our first three weeks of taking the reigns at Press75, we released a completely overhauled version of the company’s classic, On Demand. In 2009 and 2010, the On Demand theme was one of Press75’s best selling themes because of it’s inspiring approach to video – providing a new way of embedding YouTube and Vimeo videos as well as allowing self-hosted videos on WordPress. We saw the potential, so we decided to focus on On Demand as our first Press75 project. Our overhaul kept those beloved features intact, but pushed the envelope further. We started from scratch with On Demand version 4, redesigning the theme, layout, typography and structure. What’s more, we’ve developed the theme on a new, fully responsive and mobile friendly framework, once again making On Demand in demand in the new age of WordPress. Check out the theme here.

One week later, we released our WordPress.com version of Clear News. The WordPress.org version of Clear News was getting some great mileage, so we decided to bring those same features for blog, news, and magazine websites to our WordPress.com audience. Whether you’re a casual blogger, dedicated news provider, or just looking to showcase your images and videos, consider Clear News on WordPress.com.

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of eCommerce/shopping theme Acquisto, (due in part to our fans for providing feedback in our online poll!). Acquisto is a simple eCommerce theme, promising not to overwhelm with unnecessary options and settings. It features a brand-spanking new design, beautiful responsive breakpoints so that your site looks wonderful on every device and browser, and complete WooCommerce integration so you can easily get your shop off the ground. eCommerce and WordPress go hand in hand with Acquisto — check it out here.

For details on our new eCommerce, news and video theme launches, visit Press75.com. Interested in learning more about our theme customizations or full custom builds? Drop us a line!

Adventures in Plugin Authoring

Adventures in Plugin Authoring

In late 2013, I was working on a website for a local band. In the project specs, they made a simple request: display their Instagram feed in the sidebar. Initially I didn’t think much of it, but once the time came to implement that feature, I found myself at a bit of a loss. While many WordPress plugins existed to display Instagram feeds, they were all either broken (due to a recent Instagram API update) or horrendously complicated. Lightbox dependencies, slideshows, carousels; all I wanted to do was display some images. I found a couple premium plugins that seemed to suffice, but who wants to spend money? My dad’s mantra in life is “for that price, I’ll make it myself!” So in the end I decided to take his advice and make my own plugin:

I called it Simple Instagram.

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