I state two things:

• The need is great
• The time is right

Although iThemes has been in the premium WordPress plugin for almost a year now with our Billboard ad plugin, we will be officially launching a dedicated WordPress plugin store later this month under the new PluginBuddy.com brand.

Dustin Bolton, our newest team member, will be driving this project. He brings a wealth of experience to the table and we’re THRILLED to be announcing the first plugins very, very soon.

You’ll want to be sure and signup for the email launch newsletter as well as follow PluginBuddy on Twitter.

In the meantime, check out the background of why we’re launching PluginBuddy at my blog here.

The Style Manager beta version is available in your member’s only account as a standalone plugin for Builder right now. Log in and you can download it instantly.

Here’s what Chris said in the Builder forum to announce it:

I’m proud to announce that a beta version of the Style Manager for Builder has finally been released. Rather than packaging this directly into Builder, the Style Manager is a separate plugin that will need to be installed and activated on your site. You can now download the plugin from your members page.

Please be advised that this is a very early beta release and that it should not be considered stable enough to use on client or production sites. For support issues and questions, please use the new Style Manager-specific forum.

I have a large set of improvements to make to the plugin, so it is definitely in a very early stage of development. I’d love to hear your feedback on what you like and dislike about the plugin and what you would like to see added.

Also, here’s an in-depth video overview of the Style Manager by one of our Builder community members.

Client communication, your development workflow, getting paid, keeping things on schedule and juggling several projects and clients at the same time are all vital skills to being a successful freelance web designer.

With that, WebDesign.com is pleased to offer an in-depth workshop on project management for web design Friday, Feb. 26 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. CENTRAL standard time.

Check out the Project Management Workshop details at WebDesign.com

Here is a preview of the Bubble set:

Here is a preview of the Gears set:

WordPress Codex

If you are a WordPress developer, a WordPress site designer, or just want to get a better understanding of how WordPress themes work, you should get very familiar with the WordPress Codex. It is a one-stop resource for articles and technical documents about WordPress, themes, and plugins. If WordPress does it, there is at least a primer about the topic on the Codex.

If you build WordPress sites, do yourself a favor and read at least one article a day on the Codex. The knowledge you gain will quickly translate into better sites.

Here are a few gems to get you started:

• Stepping Into Templates – A great article about how theme template files are used.
• The Loop in Action – Detailed article about The Loop, how it works, and how to modify it.
• Template Hierarchy – What each of a theme’s template files are used for and when they are used.
• Template Tags – These functions are used to add content to templates.

Grep

Just as I would never want to do HTML or CSS development without Firebug, I never want to do any type of coding without Grep.

Grep is incredibly simple, but what it offers is priceless. This tool allows me to search through tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of code in seconds.

Why would I want to search through all this code you might wonder. While the documentation found in the Codex is great, over my time working with WordPress, I found that the Codex can often be out-of-date, resulting in missing or invalid documentation about different functions. In addition, some functions are so complex, that documentation simply can’t adequately describe how to use the function. So, I use Grep to quickly locate where function declarations are so I can read exactly how the function works.

For example, imagine that I want to read up on how the the_content works. I can use the following Grep command from inside the WordPress file directory:

grep -r 'function the_content(' *

This will quickly tell me that the function declaration is in the wp-includes/post-template.php file. Looking at the function declaration, I can quickly see that another function, get_the_content, does most of the work for this function and that the content is filtered through the the_content filter before being printed. This information could greatly help me now that I know it.

I go into more detail on using Grep in a post I did on my personal blog a while back. Read my grep – Why I Love Linux post for more depth on the topic.

As for getting Grep on your system, all Apple and Linux OS’s will already have Grep. This means that your Linux-based hosting environments will have the grep command available for use via an SSH connection. As for Windows, you can find details on getting Grep here.

The rules are simple:

1. Create a Builder Child-Theme – Be as creative as you can. Don’t forget to take advantage of the hooks you can find in the Builder Codex.
2. Release it to the community for free download – You can post your child-theme in the forum, here.
3. All submissions must be received by Monday, March 1, 2010 at 9 a.m. Central Standard Time.

Pretty simple if you ask me. The best part? The winner will receive a Kindle from Amazon.com!!!

We can’t wait to see what the Builder community come up with. Get started today, and post your link in the forum as soon as it is ready so we can start checking them out.

Sure, you can have ugly html and still have a beautiful site. But what about when you find your footer crammed up into your sidebar? Now you have to hunt through the code, counting the number of </div> you have. With a little bit of extra work when you set it all up, you will have no problem finding out where that end tag is missing.

Here is an example of what I mean:

Where is the error in this code?
<div>
<p>This is some random text
</p>
<div>
<a href="http://example.com">Link Text Here
</a>
</div>

This is a really short example, but it will still probably take you a few minutes to figure out what is missing. Translate that to a whole page-template of html. It could take your a very long time to track down the problem.

Here is the right way:
<div>
>---<p>This is some random text</p>
>---<div>
>--->---<a href="http://example.com">Link Text Here</a>
>---</div>

For clarity, >---- represents a tab. This way, you can clearly see where the issue is: The first div that was opened is not closed. Now I can easily correct it like this:

<div>
>---<p>This is some random text</p>
>---<div>
>--->---<a href="http://example.com">Link Text Here</a>
>---</div>
</div>

A good rule of thumb that I use is that if you didn’t close the tag on the line above, tab in once. If you are closing a tag, move back one tab. This allows opening tags and closing tags to be easily identifiable in the same vertical column.

Here’s some footage of the weekend as well as some feedback from attendees about what they learned and how they would rate the first Bootcamp.

Here’s a quick video from the first day of our theme Bootcamp in Dallas, TX.