(Disclaimer: Images in this post are not screenshots of DW’s new theme!)
From a Devil’s Workshop to many Devils’ Workshop (community blog), DW’s every aspect has been changed in last 2 years except it’s theme!
Now after 18 months, we are here with a fresh new theme to accommodate our growing community’s needs. After tremendous feedback from you guys, we faced a hard-time finalizing list of features that final theme will have.
Below are the some suggestions from you that were of tremendous help to us. Its not possible to list more than 100 comments/mails/suggestions here. Rest assured we read each of them and followed below with some of our own keeping in mind every aspect of DW.
- Changing “Devils Workshop” to “Devils’ Workshop” was the most valuable suggestion by Saeed and well explained later by Varun Agarwal.
- Gautam asked to include social media/share icons, comment threading and some graphics.
- Ajax, jquery inclusion and copyright updates was proposed by AKM .
- Arjun S Kumar suggested to include threaded comments, magazine style layout, graphical effect .
- New logo design was sent by Sridhar Iyer and we grateful for it. He also supported to get the magazine style layout and gradient blue-white color that we have used in this new theme.
- SmashinGeeks asked to change the logo and the footer design.
- S.Pradeep Kumar supported our decision to keep the old color scheme for the new theme.
- There were a number of suggestion made by Rakesh Waghela @Webiyo.com . Some of them were to include categories in the header, improvisation of the comment input box and comments section, include striking content in footer, include more related content in the sidebar and to lay more stress on community building.
About new theme…
New themes color scheme may not be new to you but we were not running after colors. The goal was to design a theme which will take community spirit of Devils’ Workshop to the new level. Some new enhancements added are…
- There were more than 100 categories which are reduced to 10-15 now. That too with category icons and nicely designed category pages.
- Home-page now has a slider which displays 10 recently featured posts.
- Commenting now has inline-replies enabled. Also comments are threaded now.
- Comment form now has those HTML formatting buttons.
- Single posts now have prominent social-sharing buttons.
- Author info box on single posts now supports Twitter handle. Just add your twitter-name to your DW profile.
- Related posts now shown with thumbnails on single-post pages.
- Sidebar now have recent-posts, popular-posts and entire blog-network’s recent posts in tabbed manner.
- Performance-wise all small images and icons that are part of theme are now displayed using CSS-Sprite.
- Contact-form added in footer, so that you can contact us from every-page on DW!
Credits…
Its our readers who decided for most part what should go online. Rest, almost every rtCamper here contributed codes, plugins and feedback during month-long development of this theme.
Vivek Jain and Saorabh Kumar took lots of efforts in finding and fixing bugs in various browsers. Still, if you find any bugs or issues, please let us know.
New theme looks awesome guys!
Congrats to entire rtCamp team for desigining such a wonderful and easy to navigate theme. The new theme really looks awesome.
I am accessing it through Firefox 3.6 and its working competely fine for me.
Very Very Pretty Theme. I love the concept of CSS Sprites. Very Impressive..
New theme looks fantastic guys, good job.
Hi, your new design is simply awesome. Thanks for considering my tip, by the way.
Once again, the design is simply great!
Why does bold-ing, italic-ing and all in comments box reflect in the contact form below (and not in the comments)?
Thanks Saeed.
Its fixed now.
Sorry Rahul, but the formatting doesn’t seen to be made in the right place…
Not fix still linking with the contact form textarea
Sorry guys. We removed that contact form.
Actually issue was fixed but we are getting way too many unwanted emails from there.
It was abused too much.
Our congratulations to the whole team, new theme is looking damn good.
Okay. Let me have the pleasure to comment from the new comment box!
The new DW:
Looks –> Awesome!
Functionality –> Better
Contact from on footer –> Great Idea
Hover Style Images on Footer –> Sometimes, don’t load for me (chrome)
Less Categories –> Good for readers.
New Logo –> umm, ok!
Overall –> 9.9/10
so, cheers! And congo to each and every member of rtCamps
Thanks Rishabh for detailed feedback.
Theme is very good. Congrats
Most of the links on your homepage and page-2 etc have become nofollow. You risk getting your pages deindexed on google.
I will check this and let u know. Thanks.
I like the new ‘Sharing’ bar below the post. Nested commenting is nice but the gravatar should have been on the left. The logo still feels generic.
This was my opinion. Rest is okay.
We designed comment area like 8-10 times and moving logos on left worked like charm!
Thanks for taking a note of it.
Hey Rahul,
Happy Holi and Good Luck to DW Team.
The theme looks great and gives peace to eyes while browsing, thanks for the credits
Best Regards
Sridhar
Wow..!!
Cool and stunning work..
Awesome work. I very much liked the comment section.
Congrats guyz for the new theme …
the theme is really a clean n fresh,
a little debugging:
just add margin-left:-4px; to the message box in the footer in order to fix this issue http://twitpic.com/15tqv4
and as posted by Saeed above the formatting is still triggered to the contact message box and not to the comment form
Thanks for CSS bro.
But we had to remov contact form from footer as it was being abused very heavily.
I don’t see any Pingback shown with comments or anywhere else on the posts page…
Have you intentionally removed them??
as i don’t think that removing Pingback is a better idea as many of your posts are very informative and some people might want to give u a Pingback …
Pingbacks were removed intentionally for sometime last year. In this theme, it is missing accidentally. Will be added soon.
Devils Workshop is looking awesome in this new Design. Nice Effort made by DW Team. Great Work …
I’m really impressed with the new theme. Its really superb !!!
Keep it up guys
Great theme! Love it!
The theme is awesome ! Good Work DW !
Looks impressive and smooth navigation and also very fast loading when compared to other heavy sites!!
keep growing guys and following you guys from the begining!!
Thanks Sreejesh, good to know the themes been upto expectation to someone who’s been following us since the begining.
Wow !! i like this new design . No offence but i really hated the previous design , was so outdated
Awesome clean design
The comment section is super cool, now I can enjoy more while replying to comments of my posts
Bro! Your theme gets squeezed if I try to open DW in Opera 10.51.. Please fix it. (I have captured and uploaded its image too – have a look – http://bit.ly/b6IyUl)