Flash Moto CMS

Flash Moto CMS is a revolutionary Flash content management system aimed at Flash developers and designed to simplify the publication of Web content to Flash websites.

Features

• Flash Moto CMS is the first content management system based on ActionScript 3 and realized as RIA on Flex.
• The final product of Flash CMS use is a complete user and SEO friendly Flash website with a convenient control panel.
• The website is controlled just like a standard CMS but with the extras that Flash offers.
• FlashMoto also offers a collection of Flash CMS templates that correspond to the main FlashMoto requirements.

ConceptFeedback

If you have follow LoonDesign updates, you may notice we reviewed ConceptFeedback awhile back. A few weeks ago they started offering a Premium Concept feature for users who want to get maximum exposure for their concept. Once a premium concept is live, it is featured on the homepage for 1 week, giving users maximum traffic and reviews. They also personally invite our top members (highest reputation scores) to review the concept, ensuring top quality feedback.

Tweet To Win

Tweet one of these 2:

• Tweet this to win a premium concept worth $ 9.99 USD.
• Tweet this to win a license of Flash Moto CMS worth $199USD.

Then, include your tweet in your comment in this post before 16th March 2010. We will select winners randomly. That’s it! I hope you enjoy this giveaway and don’t forget to follow us on twitter or subscribe to our RSS to get the latest updates from us!

• Grand Prize ( 100 credits ): Benard

• 2nd Prize ( 60 credits ): Keint Villarroel
• 2nd Prize ( 60 credits ): webbografico
• 2nd Prize ( 60 credits ): Niki

• 3rd Prize ( 40 credits ): DRAGYN
• 3rd Prize ( 40 credits ): Hjörtur Scheving
• 3rd Prize ( 40 credits ): Adzfar
• 3rd Prize ( 40 credits ): adamos
• 3rd Prize ( 40 credits ): patam

• 4th Prize ( 30 credits ): GeekBlitz
• 4th Prize ( 30 credits ): Bert
• 4th Prize ( 30 credits ): Angel
• 4th Prize ( 30 credits ): BebopDesigne
• 4th Prize ( 30 credits ): gamel James
• 4th Prize ( 30 credits ): Cheap Logo Designs

Enjoy!

Rollip is an online professional photo effects editor. There are 40 effects for you to choose. Simply upload images and select the effect you want, then download the modified images in seconds!

How It Works?

1 credit means 1 photo to process. When your normally buy (pro) credits, you get 15 credits for $2.99 per time you charge.

Upload Process

1. Choose an effect.
2. Upload an image.
3. Done! and download the image. You will receive an email which contain the download link as a backup.

The Result

I’ve tested the effect, please take a look. I am using the Drawing Style.

Original image

Edited image

It is easy and efficient!

What You Can Win?

A total of 660 credits are ready to be giving away! You can modify an image using 1 credit from Rollip.

• 1 x 1st prize: 100 credits
• 3 x 2nd prize: 60 credits
• 5 x 3rd prize: 40 credits
• 6 x 4th prize: 30 credits

How to Win?

• Simply comment on this post using your contactable email before 30th December 2009.
• Winners will be randomly selected.

Enjoy!

ThemeForest is an Envato Marketplace. At ThemeForest you can buy and sell HTML templates as well as themes for popular CMS products like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal with prices ranging from just $5 up to $40. Items are priced on the complexity, quality and use of the file. The site is home to a bustling community of web designers and developers and is the biggest marketplace of its kind.

How to Win?

1. Head over to the post.
2. Simply comment on that post will do.
3. Write about which theme you would like to win and why? And, how are you going to use it?
4. They will randomly pick the winner for each theme.

The Characters

The Objects

Usage

These illustrations are completely free and you can use them for what ever you like including items for sale on ThemeForest and ActiveDen, all you need is a link back to this page. Enjoy!

I am always excited to be part of Envato team ( marketplace reviewer ), this time, it is even more awesome because I had the pleasure once again to work with Collis Ta’eed and the team at Envato. It is a true honor for me.

It is not an easy job to redesign such a huge network of sites, a lot of pressure on the team behind it. You will need to know what the community needs, what to be included and what not. The first time I saw the nearly finished mock of the redesign, I know that the community is going to love it. It provide lots of great features and possibilities for future implementation.

I am going to break down a few points on how I see the re-design and show you some of my drafts (logo and concept design).

The Logo

I am not sure who else is involved on logo redesign part, as far as I know. Collis is the person in charged. He contact me and show me the sample of what he want. The first impression when I saw the sample is, I like the font! Seriously, it makes a lot of sense to use that font to match the logo style and sizes. For logo, I am not really 100% re-design it but partly. If you still remember the old logo. It is an animal hiding behind the marketplace name. We keep the same concept, but this time, it is more stylish and minimal. We only show part of the animal of every logos.

New Envato Marketplaces

Here’s some screenshots of the brand new marketplaces.

What Work Did I Do?

I’m going to show you some of my early mock-ups that I sent to Collis months ago. Before you look at the mock-ups then, it’s probably interesting to know how Collis went about the project. He approached 3 designers (Liam Mckay, Aaron Lynch and I ) informing us of his master plan to give the Marketplace a refresh. He wanted a new perspective on the design and some ideas from outside of his own head.

Our brief was to create something conceptually new and fresh, and we had lot of creative freedom on that. I understand that Collis was going to take our designs and create something himself in the end. So, what he was looking for is actually idea and usability. I think it was clever approach on Collis’ part, it offered him a variety of styles from a variety of designers that he could take and shape into a fantastic design. So, aesthetic quality isn’t the major issue when doing the re-design. Below are the mocks.

My initial idea is to turn the item page into the author selling page. The priority will go for the author’s items. Then followed by related items or recommend items. Looking through the final live version I can see tiny things that could have been made as a result of my designs, but I am not sure.

Final Thought

It was a great experience to be able to directly work with Collis and such a good company. I hope to have more chances like this to learn from them. Besides, I am just too excited that I can be listed alongside with Liam Mckay and Aaron Lynch. I love their works every much!

Now that the site is all new and shiny it’s the perfect time to sign up, if you haven’t already. One account will be able to access all marketplaces and get some awesome audio, flash, templates, graphic and other digital files in low price!

Updates

1 thing I love about the new re-design is the author follow and the announcement feature exclusively for authors.

It is very straight forward, is either people like it or not. User can vote, suggest and comment. It is something “in your face”. The result, any design problems are caught earlier, ensuring that only high-quality ideas make it into launch. It saves your time in keep repeating the same process when you are going to launch a product.

I realize that there might be copyrighting issue when you publish your concepts and ideas. This is the feedback from the company founder and CEO, Andrew Follett.

There is not a whole lot we can do about copyrights that I know of. Design may be stolen, but so far we have had zero complaints and ConceptFeedback is not much different than a gallery site in that respect. Anytime a designer puts his/her work on display, there is the threat of copycats, but I think it is more of a perception than reality.

- Andrew Follett

But, there is also another way to prevent that. ConceptFeedback allows users to post concepts privately. This means they will not show up on the “public” forum and the concept is only viewable by the e-mail addresses selected (this could mean clients, co-workers, friends). You also have the option to do both, put your concept on public display and invite outside reviewers.

In my opinion, the world has changed. The way we communicate with the users is different. It is more direct and transparent. This also can be the key of success for any modern businesses. Company started to care about their user’s feeling while user’s started to demand something with quality.

A little about myself, I recently involved myself more into user experience design. It is a totally different area compare to plain web design. It makes me feel I am more close to a user rather than a designer. Majority of the users more care about the usability compare to the design. It’s extremely important to get honest feedback from the actual users and to know what they really want. So, I think ConceptFeedback can be a great place for us to improve and get closer to the community.

Why I Create This While I Can Download Others?

I am so stubborn, I don’t want to follow others! ( just kidding ). I notice that most of the CSS Grid System have lots of extra classes of elements. It is good and handy but is it really useful for your project? So, I try to create a very simple CSS Grid System just for blog or small website. So, this can be a little different from what you see in other popular framework. You can find all popular css grid system from the Grid System Generator.

Introduction

MyCSS Grid System is using the maximum of 960px width. It comes with the most common layout proportion for blogs and creative web sites. It is also using the best divine proportion in web design. This may not that useful compare to those well built css grid system but I think it somehow do the job.

How It Works?

In the download files, there are:

• index.html
• grid.css
• format.css

You can start coding your project by including the grid.css.

Codes Preview

The grid.css, I am using my name as the first and the last div (Easy to remember, every time you use this system, you will remember my name! Hehe.. So, the first div from the left has a class name “kai”, the last div on the right will has a class name “loon”. So, “kailoon to complete the work!”.

* { /* CSS reset, you can replace with your own css reset codes*/
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
}

.b1 { width: 640px; }
.b2 { width: 300px; }
.b1 .b1 { width: 310px; }
.g1 { width: 580px; }
.g2 { width: 360px; }
.g1 .g1 { width: 280px; }
.g2 .g2 { width: 170px; }

.col {
	float: left;
	margin: 0 10px;
	display: inline;
}

.box {
	margin: 0 auto 20px;
	width: 960px;
}

.kai { /* The first left component*/
	margin-left: 0;
}

.loon { /* The last right component*/
	margin-right: 0;
}

.clearfix:after {
	clear: both;
	content: ' ';
	display: block;
	font-size: 0;
	line-height: 0;
	visibility: hidden;
	width: 0;
	height: 0;
}

.clearfix {
	display: inline-block;
}

* html .clearfix {
	height: 1%;
}

.clearfix {
	display: block;
}

The HTML:

<div class="box clearfix">
		<h1>960px - Normal Blog Layout</h1>
		<p>960px</p>
</div>

<div class="box clearfix">
	<div class="col b1 kai">
		<p>640px</p>
	</div>
	<div class="col b2 loon">
		<p>300px</p>
	</div>
</div>

<div class="box clearfix">
	<div class="col b1 kai">
		<div class="col b1 kai">
			<p>310px</p>
		</div>
		<div class="col b1 loon">
			<p>310px</p>
		</div>
	</div>
	<div class="col b2 loon">
		<p>300px</p>
	</div>
</div>

<div class="box clearfix">
	<h1>960px - Golden Divine Proportion Layout</h1>
	<p>960px - The Golden Divine</p>
</div>

<div class="box clearfix">
	<div class="col g1 kai">
			<p>580px</p>
	</div>
	<div class="col g2 loon">
			<p>360px</p>
	</div>
</div>	

<div class="box">
	<div class="col g1 kai">
			<div class="col g1 kai">
				<p>280px</p>
			</div>
			<div class="col g1 loon">
				<p>280px</p>
			</div>
	</div>
	<div class="col g2 loon">
			<div class="col g2 kai">
				<p>170px</p>
			</div>
			<div class="col g2 loon">
				<p>170px</p>
			</div>
	</div>
</div>

Conclusion and Download

It is simple and easy to use as it is very specific. The CSS file size is extremely small, only 778 bytes!. You can preview the demo here. If you have any questions or you find any bugs or you have any suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment. If you find this useful, let me see how / where you implement it. Thanks!

Winners

• John

  I run a freelancing business, and it’s quite difficult t keep track of everything, and keep organized. Let alone, guarantee my customers an honest price. If I could better track time, and be more productive, I would be more able to help serve my clients to the best of my ability. After all, in this economic downturn everyone needs to save money wherever possible.

• Matthew Craig

  As a freelance designer I would use the software to manage my time effectively, bill clients correctly and accordingly, and get feedback as to how I am doing during certain projects and what I can improve on.

• Sam

  For calculating time and amount to bill my clients.

  I have had a lots of difficulties cause of not calculating time for particular work. As the software itself says user friendly interface
  , flexible timer and able to produce invoices thats what I want on a time tracking and billing s/w application.

The winners will receive their prizes soon via email from the sponsor. Thank you everyone who participated.

This theme comes has 6 awesome colors ready for you to choose. You can also switch the sidebar position from right to left with only one single click. You also able to switch sidebar position from right to left or the other way round.

It also provide a highly demand user link feed to allow your reader to submit news, example http://psd.tutsplus.com/ and http://kailoon.com. My WordPress provide up to 9 ad slot for your needs. Include a leaderboard, 2 rectangle ad and 6 small (125px) ads.

Features:

• 6 Colors
• Feedburner Integration
• Powerful Theme Option Page
• User Link Feed Ready
• Able to switch sidebar position by a single click
• Auto image resizing
• Flickr Showcase
• Wp-navi and breadcrumb integrated
• Ad Management System
• Social Linking (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.)
• Modern footer display
• Smooth tabbing system
• SuperFish for dropdown menu ( Both pages and Categories )
• Unique author and search result page
• Unique threaded comment styling
• Trackbacks and comment separated
• 2 Column Tabless (CSS Layout)
• Sidebar Widget Ready
• Gravatar ready
• Valid CSS and XHTML
• Browser compatibility: All Major Browsers
• Related Posts
• Popular Posts
• SEO Friendly
• Print Ready
• Many more!

The Idea

This is purely inspired by TUTs sites and CNET. I try to make it direct, simple, clean and effective. You can check out the demo too.

About the sponsor

Fanurio is a time tracking and billing software application, highly appreciated by freelancers for its intuitive interface, flexible timer and ability to produce detailed invoices.

Whether you need to round time, use multiple currencies or create invoices with your own layout, Fanurio has the right tools to help you get paid.

Features:

• Track time with little effort
• Analyze your performance
• Get paid for all your work
• Runs on multiple platforms

Comment To Win

• Leave a comment.
• Stated “why the application (prize) would be useful to you“.
• The most convincing posters should get the free licenses.

Terms

• Contest end on 30th April.
• Prizes will be delivered directly from the sponsor, so, please comment using your contactable Email address.

Have fun!

• Drew Douglass – 1000 free standard size business cards.

  I would use the business cards to further brand and promote my name as a freelance copywriter and php/wordpress freelancer. Thanks for running this contest, good luck to all!

• Mario Awad – 1 free 18×24 canvas print.

  I’m currently considering freelancing software development… those cards would come in handy… good luck everyone

The winners will be contacted by the sponsor very soon. Thank you everyone who participated. Don’t give up, we will have another giveaway soon!

Winners

• Heather Flyte

  I think this theme is exactly what our magazine site needs. It’s got all the features, from clean ad-placement to easy navigation between features. I think it will really help in the redesign.

• Aaron

  Like: I’ve been waiting a long time for someone to design a template that looks similar to the Tuts web designs (aka PSDtuts, Nettuts, etc); the our magazine theme looks quite similar to what I want. A+ design in my opinion.

  Usage: I’d use this theme as a starting point for my iphone game review blog/site. It’s got everything I need built right in to the default layout – video, blog, and flickr rss in the sidebar.

  Thanks and good luck with the contest!

The winners will receive their prizes soon via email. Thank you everyone who participated. Don’t give up, we will have another giveaway soon!

Update: Contest closed

Our Magazine come in 2 colors

• White-Gold (default)
• Black-Red

Features

• FEATURED UP TO 7 CATEGORIES:
• Slider headline. Optional to be semi-auto or fully control.
• 4 categories under tabbing.
• Video category.
• 1 Blog alike display category.

• AUTOMATIC IMAGE RESIZING:
• Automatic thumbnail resizing for headline, blog posts and posts listing.
• Using WordPress Media Upload (Strongly recommended) or custome field ( priority to be displayed ).

• POWERFUL THEME OPTION:
• Select the theme color.
• Easy to select featured categories for each section.
• Disable / Enabled categories to be displayed in front page.
• Feedburner feed replacement and optional to display in text.

• USER LINK FEED:
• Easy to setup your own user link feed page.
• Example http://psd.tutsplus.com/ and http://kailoon.com

• UNIQUE ARCHIVES PAGE TEMPLATE:
• Using accordian:
• http://themetation.com/demo/magazine/archives/

• FLEXIBILITY AND FUNCTIONS:
• Almost every elements in front page can be disable or enable.
• Headline, Blog alike and Video category are excluded in recent post section in front page.

• MORE FEATURES:
• Smooth dropdown menu (Category)
• Easy to navigate page menu
• Threaded comment ( up to level 3) and paged comments supported.
• Unique design for comment area.
• Comments and tracbacks separation using tabbing.
• Integrated wp-navi and breadcrumb.
• Widget ready.
• Flickr ( Download plugin to make it works).

Requirements:

• Required php5 and curl enable (for the feed count).

Rules

• Leave only 1 comment here about how are you going to use this theme and what make you love this theme.
• Please post only one comment per person, duplicated comments will be deleted and void.
• Comment box will be accepted until 18^th March 2009, and we’ll randomly generate 2 winners.
• Winners will be contacted via email, so, please leave your comment with your contactable email address.

The Artwork

The Products

Something about our sponsor

UPrinting is a very professional online printing company that you can both get your designs printed, including canvas prints. They are fast in delivery. They are not only doing business card printing, but also covers postcards, brochures, labels and stickers and a lot more. Check out their website see the wide range of products they covered.

If you are going to kick start your own business, you will not want to miss this chance! Business card is a very important marketing tools for all of us.

How to win your free business cards?

Leave a comment at the end of the blog post, describing what you would use the free business cards and/or canvas print for.

• Please post only one comment per person, duplicated comments will be deleted and void.
• Comment box will be accepted until 31^st March, and we’ll randomly generate 2 winners.
• Winners will be contacted via email, so, please leave your comment with your contactable email address.
• Winners in the United States and Canada qualify for free shipping. Shipping fees will apply to winners outside these areas.

Prize

• 1000 free standard size business cards for one reader
• 1 free 18×24 canvas print for one reader

You can choose from any of their stocks for these items.

Know the market

It is always a good practice to do some research before doing something. Don’t wait, browse through the ThemeForest categories and check out what is available. You can see the design trend, buyers’ preferences and how the items are being priced. There is always a reason why an item can be the top seller in a short period of time. If you couldn’t find the reason, why not purchase it and have a look by yourself? See for yourself the reason why the item is a top seller.

Below are the top selling items from each category.

WordPress

PSD Templates

Site Templates

Know the market

Make sure you read the guidelines before submitting any files. This will reduce the chances of you having to re-upload your items again after being rejected by the reviewer.
Take WordPress as an example, you need to include WordPress default CSS for the images. You are not allowed to include any plugins within the download but you can provide a link for download from the original source.

Take a look at this help file template

Know your expertise

This is common, do whatever you are good at. For example, if you are not good in jQuery, do not implement that. I am not stopping your desire to enhance your Template. Normally, people will read tutorials and learn the basics. Some of them will download the source files and edit. I am not saying that this is bad. But, imagine a scenario where a customer requests some modifications due to their site setting? Are you sure that you will be able to handle those requests if you have limited knowledge in the required fields. Definitely it will be easier if you recommend another developer to him.

Besides, try to use your strength and fully implement your forte into the template. If you are a talented designer, try to do your best and create something that is really visually awesome. Functions are not everything but your template have to be very attractive and not forgetting the usability and UI.

Niche or general

I will go for niche. The question is how narrow is it. Take a portfolio wordpress theme for example. There are a lot of portfolio themes available in ThemeForest. Some of them are performing very well. Their common attributes are a design that is awesome; ease of focus and easy to navigate. Priority is design, the interface.

A portfolio site must be good looking, attractive and able to attract the user to continue browsing. Secondly, it must be focus oriented. Your portfolio showcase is the one that needs the most attention. Finally, equally important is the ease of navigation and of course the ease in contacting the owner.

Maybe you will go for a more general approach, a personal blog or a magazine. This is also good if your theme can be used for various types of sites. Indirectly, your target user groups will be bigger.

Test your work

Please do not directly upload your item right after completion. I suggest you to recheck it in different browsers, test it in offline and also online environments. I strongly recommend that every author need to set up a demo site for their item.

This is optional, try to validate your works with CSS and XHTML validations (except PSD Template). This is will absolutely increase the value of your work not only in the eye of a reviewer but also in the potential buyers.

Files included

In ThemeForest, they request different files in different categories. But all of them require a good help file.

Ready for support

In addition, always be ready in providing good supports to your customers.

References

After all, I hope this article can let you know what you need to prepare before submitting to ThemeForest. Besides, there are a series of interviews of ThemeForest Top Sellers ( authors ). You also can read some tips from them and try to make some money from the amazing marketplace. Finally, I hope this article can help you. Thanks!

To Display Feedburner Subscriber Count In Text

Copy paste the following code into your template, replace feedburner-id with your Feedbuner username.

//get cool feedburner count
$whaturl="http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburner-id";

//Initialize the Curl session
$ch = curl_init();

//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

//Set the URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);

//Execute the fetch
$data = curl_exec($ch);

//Close the connection
curl_close($ch);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];
//end get cool feedburner count

Paste this anywhere you want and it’ll display a Feedburner subscriber count in text.

echo $fb;

To Display Feed Counter For Google FeedProxy In Text

Use the previous code. Change this:

$whaturl="http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburner-id";

Into This:

$whaturl="https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburner-id";

Full Code:

//get cool feedburner count
$whaturl="https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburner-id"; 

//Initialize the Curl session
$ch = curl_init();

//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

//Set the URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);

//Execute the fetch
$data = curl_exec($ch);

//Close the connection
curl_close($ch);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];
//end get cool feedburner count

WordPress 2.7

For anyone who want to modify their theme to compatible with 2.7. You can take a look at my recently tutorial. It shows you how to separate comments and trackbacks in WordPress 2.6 and 2.7.

Interview

There is a new section added too. I will periodically invite some very talented designers to have an interview here. Feel free to leave your comment here and tell us what you want to know from someone. I will try my best to contact the person and conduct the interview.

Currently, we already have our first candidate – Bel Koo from dream-design. Feel free to check out her portfolio site and all of her art work!