Category: Announcement

Official them.es news channel with product updates.

  • Support Theme available for purchase

    Are you managing an online community around a 🏢 business, ⚽ hobby or 🎀 cause where users can discuss topics with others – like we did here on this site you’re browsing right now? Are you in technical evaluation phase or unhappy with your current implementation? And is WordPress your go-to tool?

    Look no further, because we’re now selling a slick, flexible and well-crafted WordPress Theme for this very purpose.

    Purchase the Support Community Theme

    What you’ll get…

    • them.es Support is a Block Theme powered by WordPress 6.5+ making use of the new Interactivity API, so all the standard features from WordPress, like enhanced query pagination, posts, comments, user profiles, categories, tags are available out of the box
    • Convenient Community and effective User management features
      • Users can Mark topics as (un)resolved
      • Users can Like posts/comments
      • Users can Report posts/comments for admin review
      • Users can Search with an autocomplete feature
      • @user mentions
      • Unresolved topics widget
      • Markdown syntax
      • Users can upload an Avatar
      • Users can request a data export from the profile
      • Frontend editing experience powered by the new Interactivity API
    • The design with two built-in styles (Light/Dark) can be fully customized in the Site Editor
    • Alternatively it can be extended with a Child Theme, like we did here by integrating a unique design and adding several internal add-ons like a file uploader or widgets connecting to external services or APIs
    • All customers purchasing a license will get continuous Support with future updates

    How to purchase…

    How to customize…

    • Smaller adjustments like style updates, adding a custom webfont or editing existing templates can be performed directly in the Site Editor
    • For deeper modifications or if the code needs to be extended with new features, it’s recommended to develop a Child Theme or a Plugin

    It would be great to have your interest and we’re confident that you and your Community will love working with this Theme.

    Feel free to ask any (presale) questions in the comments section below.


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  • Another Billy (Pro) Release

    We’re keeping a good pace and just released v1.9.0 of our free and v1.5.0 v1.5.1 of our premium billing and project management plugin for WordPress.

    Finally a highly requested feature – the ability to send invoices and quotes as email attachments via a webform – has been implemented in the Pro version. Default values like email subject and email body can be defined globally. But it’s also possible to add a personal touch to the email and change the values individually per post.

    As a consequence this makes sharelinks more or less obsolete and we decided to deprecate this feature without hard feelings. Password protected sharelinks lacked some important abilities (like downloading PDFs) and according to our knowledge and feedback from the community they were not used very often. In the end the email webforms are more convenient and even more secure because no passwords need to be sent to customers in cleartext anymore.

    Existing links will continue to work for the time being but it will not be possible to create new sharelinks anymore.

    Incorporating e-invoices is another important milestone in this release. Although PDF invoices are just fine if both contracting parties agreed on accepting them, the future belongs to transmitting documents in an electronic data interchange format. Heads up: E-invoices may even be required by law in your country sooner or later in a B2B or B2G context…

    That’s why Billy invoices can now also be generated in the UBL XML format which is an open standard for electronic business documents. This feature is optional, needs to be explicitly enabled in the Customizer and has been marked as “beta”. Your help in testing the implementation is more than welcome.

    Please be informed that an upgrade to at least WordPress v6.5 is mandatory if you want to use all new features as we developed with state-of-the-art technology like the Interactivity API to give you the look and feel you deserve. Falling back to an old approach was a no go. So if you’re still on an old WordPress version you can update the plugin but won’t be able to benefit from some of the cool new stuff.

    Meanwhile WordPress is already in the 6.6 prerelease phase and since we thoroughly tested Billy with the current beta version, no compatibility issues are expected when WordPress 6.6 gets released in less than a month.


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  • New Billy (Pro) Release

    Billy – our Billing suite for WordPress – has received some useful updates in the latest release and even comes with new premium features in the Pro version.

    Quote numbers can now be auto-incremented, similar to invoices. This is optional and the old default “Ymd” number format is still available. An useful addition to invoice and quote number prefixes are the placeholder variables {YEAR}, {MONTH} and {DAY} which means that you are now able to define number formats like INV-2024-05-13-12345678910 or similar.

    A highly requested feature was having a fully customizable PDF footer layout. That’s why a reusable block pattern, similar to the PDF header, has been added in the block editor.

    In addition, the PDF table output has been improved and inner borders are now enabled by default. Note that in the Pro version the PDF styles (of the table design and even more) can still be modified using custom CSS.

    Speaking about the Billy Pro add-on. This release has received a major upgrade with two completely new enhancements and is available for all existing customers, having a lifetime license, with no additional costs. And best of all, the price for new users has not been raised.

    After you update the plugin you’ll get cool project management features like checklists in Kanban-style boards and a simple time tracking tool.

    By ensuring a smooth workflow and using a modular approach with full WordPress block editor compatibility, the editing experience should be an easy ride.

    With the addition of two new Billy admin pages, the time had come to restructure and combine all pages in a single dashboard menu in order to keep the WordPress admin sidebar tidy.

    An important advice as this can’t be said often enough: Your WordPress data will never leave your server and guarding against data corruption, breach or loss should be a matter of course. That’s even more important after Billy’s evolvement to a full project management suite.

    First of all it’s vital to care about your site’s health and keep your system up-to-date. In addition a proper backup strategy should not be neglected – and in this case the WordPress ecosystem can provide lots of mature backup and restoration solutions that get the job done easily.

    When was the last time you reviewed and improved this process?

    Many thanks 👋 to the engaged community for the valuable feedback that initiated the work on some of these features und bug fixes. There are still some requests and ideas in the pipeline, so stay tuned for more!


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      Today we’ve published Billy Pro v1.4.1. This follow-up release allows you to add due dates to To do checklists and highlights tasks that are overdue.

      Additional admin columns in the Time tracking and To do posts overview now show relevant information outside the edit mode.

      Furthermore a bug that didn’t prevent the creation of share links although the setting was unchecked, has been fixed.

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  • 25,000

    The new year starts great! A major milestone has been reached – our Bootstrap Starter Theme for WordPress was downloaded for the 25,000th time 🤩. Actually the number of websites out in the wild, using this theme as the foundation, may be even higher because we can’t measure 1:1 duplications and direct downloads from GitHub.

    It’s very pleasant to see how one of our first OpenSource products evolved over time, with important quality improvements from contributors, valuable feedback from users and last but not least by looking at the numerous likes from stargazers. All the kudos we received prove that democracy, exchange and teamwork are still relevant today in a world (wide web) that’s transforming continuously.

    THANK YOU to all friends, collaborators and developers (of underlying dependencies*) who made this possible!

    * WordPress, Bootstrap, SASS, LESS, Webpack, Gulp, Grunt, NPM, etc.

    WordPress is the leading web publishing platform standing for stability, reliability and sustainability, and celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript frameworks for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.

    them.es Bootstrap Starter Theme for WordPress combines the best of both worlds. Stay tuned for more because all in all it feels like the journey has only just begun…


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  • Billy has been refactored

    Our WordPress invoicing plugin Billy and its companion Billy Pro have been refactored and finally make use of the Block API v2, resulting in a lighter DOM tree and an overall improved editor load time. Full backwards compatibility has been considered but if you’re using Billy Pro, it’s strongly advised to keep both plugins in sync and update each to the latest version.

    In addition, the Pro add-on received new features for contacts. The contact selector in the post template has been rebuilt with an improved combobox selector and should help you finding the right contact quicker and easier. Furthermore it’s possible to upload a photo or logo to contacts for better identification.

    In the edit post screen, invoices and quotes with status “overdue” and “pending” now show an eye-catching icon, indicating that the due date has been passed.

    All in all we’re confident that this new release makes Billy (Pro) one of the best invoicing products currently available on the market – in particular for freelancers and small companies that are looking for a simple and uncomplicated solution with zero dependencies.

    Did you know that the integration of this plugin in an existing WordPress website is a no-brainer and that you have total privacy control over your invoicing as no data every leaves the server or is shared with third-parties?


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  • New Forum 🎉

    We’re happy to announce that our Support Forum has been relaunched with a custom-built Theme based on our FSE Starter Block Theme (OpenSource, GPL2+).

    Why the change?

    When them.es/Support went live in 2015, we decided to set it up with the (now deprecated) P2 “Breathe” Theme and its companion, the o2 Plugin.

    All in all it worked very well for years and we even managed to extend it according to our needs by using a Child theme. But recently the efforts to ensure compatibility with the latest WordPress and PHP versions have become quite a burden. Monkey patches 🙈 had to be applied to work around issues — and this is bad practice for obvious reasons.

    Also, relying on code that is not maintained anymore was a no-go.

    While evaluating existing Forum plugins and similar solutions it soon turned out that they all lack important features and could not be customized in a way that was satisfying. Putting the code base again in a dependence on third-party software with an unclear future was another no-go.

    So we decided to go all-in and to develop our own tailored Support Theme. Thanks to the Gutenberg plugin and its new Interactivity API which currently is in active development, all requirements could be fulfilled without compromise.

    What changed?

    From a user-perspective not much changed at all, as all previous features like Search autocomplete, Frontend posting, File uploading and Marking requests as resolved, have been incorporated.

    Besides the new foundation which reduced the code footprint to an absolute minimum, we polished the design a bit and added a better UX with interactive elements.

    Furthermore users now can format their posts with basic Markdown syntax, if needed.

    As a nice side effect the overall page loading performance has improved a lot.

    Of course a re-release that makes use of a newish approach with bleeding-edge features may contain bugs and we kindly ask everyone to consider this site “Beta” for the time being. It’s quite possible that things get out of order or even break.

    If you notice some hiccups or errors, please let us know, by commenting below, so that we can fix it. And if you miss something essential, we always keep the door open for feature-requests. Please mention why you are requesting it and what problem it may solve.

    Hopefully you like the new Support Forum as much as we do.


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  • 20 years WordPress

    Today our favorite CMS celebrates its 20th anniversary 🎉. A special website dedicated to this event has been established by the WordPress team:

    What started as a way to make a better blogging experience has grown into a vibrant open source project that powers an ever-growing percentage of the world’s websites.

    https://wp20.wordpress.net

    Let’s commemorate some historic milestones, the WordPress project passed within two decades:

    May 2003: WordPress 0.7 – The first release

    January 2004: WordPress 1.0

    May 2004: Support for plugins

    August 2006: The first WordCamp has been organized

    December 2008: Automatic upgrades with a single click

    June 2010: Multisite functionality

    October 2013: Automatic maintenance and security background updates

    December 2015: The WP-API has been integrated

    December 2018: A new block-based Editor

    July 2021: theme.json

    January 2022: Full Site Editing


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  • <i> Toolbar for WordPress

    Our latest WordPress Plugin Directory addition integrates the awesome Bootstrap Icons (MIT) library in the WordPress rich-text toolbar without requiring any coding experience. Just the way it should be.

    • 1300+ pixel perfect webfont icons
    • Small filesize
    • Easy WYSIWYG integration: No Shortcodes!
    • Privacy by design: No CDN hosted files!
    • Autofilter

    You can download it from the WordPress Plugin Directory:

    Of course <i> Toolbar makes a great addition to our Bootstrap Starter Theme but since the Bootstrap library is not required and the plugin has no dependencies it will work with any other theme like our Material Starter Theme and our Full Site Editing Starter Theme.


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  • Emoji Picker for WordPress

    A working and maintained Emoji Picker Plugin has been brought back to WordPress. Easily add Emojis from any rich-text block like Paragraphs, Headings, Lists, etc. without leaving the Editor.

    Emojis are pictograms used in instant messengers, forums and web pages to reflect emotions. They have become so popular that Oxford Dictionaries has named “😂” word of the year 2015.

    Nowadays all browsers and operating systems support the Emoji characters. When picking your Emojis from the Emoji Toolbar they will be added in raw format so no images are loaded on the frontend.


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  • them.es Full Site Editing Starter Theme released

    Block based Themes are coming to WordPress sooner or later and we just published the first “beta” release of our Full Site Editing Starter Theme.

    If you see yourself as an early adopter who likes to get his/her hands dirty feel free to generate a copy via the Theme Generator: https://them.es/starter-fse

    them.es Full Site Editing

    The source code is licensed under GPLv2 and has been published on GitHub.

    Full Site Editing is a collection of features that allow to fully customize a WordPress site via a new site editor. Overall the Full Site Editing experience using block based Themes looks promising and already works pretty well but you need to be aware that not all features are final and that bugs will appear during development.

    Now a 100% (!) PageSpeed score is achievable with WordPress. Even on Mobile.

    At the current state (WordPress version <5.9) this Starter Theme is not recommended for production sites. Please use it at your own risk and provide technical feedback to the Gutenberg team if possible!

    One more thing: Block based features are still in development and have not yet been fully integrated in WordPress core. In order to enable the Site editor you need to install the Gutenberg Plugin on your site.

    Update: In the meantime WordPress supports Block themes in Core and it’s safe to develop websites using the FSE Starter Theme.


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