Let me set one thing straight before I get into Affiliate Theme from UBD. I’m biased but I think FlexSqueeze is better.

Ok, now that that’s out of the way, let me tell you about this new affiliate marketing WordPress theme from the masters of blog design down at Unique Blog Design. I have to be a little bit biased towards my own theme obviously, but UBD has done a good job of creating an affiliate marketing theme with the features most bloggers need to quickly launch affiliate sites using our favorite blogging platform, WordPress. UBD is renown for their clean design and really great visuals, and Affiliate Theme is no different from their work for the likes of Shawn Collins, Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker and John Chow.

You can see their theme options panel here, which is a work of art in itself (note to self: make my options panel prettier). You can control your basic blog settings such as the background images, background color and page layout as well as some typography settings for your headlines and body fonts. Read the rest of this entry

FlexSqueeze, the newest theme in the Flexibility series of WordPress themes has just been launched! FlexSqueeze is built around an enhanced version of Flexibility 2 and includes a host of additional features that are geared toward the affiliate marketer. Easily create professional squeeze pages from within WordPress and use the included sales page content and graphics to improve your conversion rate. Read the rest of this entry

That’s right, all your requests have been answered!  I’m coding a really cool affiliate marketing squeeze page function into the theme over the next few days.  You’ll be able to independently control the squeeze page settings from the control panel. So if you blog is normally 920 pixels wide with a sidebar, you can make your squeeze page 660 pixels wide and obviously not have a sidebar.

I’m making the navigation and header optional as well as the footer info.  You’ll be able to strip out every element of the page and also use a custom header image for your squeeze page.  I’m also going to code in a bunch of squeeze page elements like I styled in this HTML affiliate marketing template I created awhile back. So you’ll not only be able to eliminate the sidebar, but you’ll also be able to have all the cool squeeze page elements pre-styled for you.

Can’t wait?  I know… it’s going to be cool.  If you have any feature requests, get them in now.

I was troubleshooting a user’s blog yesterday and today, trying to find out why the theme preview showed a white page with unstyled text. It’s simply how the blog looks without a CSS stylesheet attached, but I wanted to pinpoint the problem. He was using 2.7.1 and I had a test installation on 2.7 that I wanted to upgrade to see if that was an issue. It wasn’t, but I ended up fragging my test WordPress install and had to reinstall it manually.

After uploading the files, setting up the database and running through the setup, I went to preview Flexibility 2 and got the dreaded white page in the preview window. Now I had two blogs that were not working correctly so I spent the better part of a day jumping between them and uninstalling/reinstalling both manually and with Fantastico.  I ended up fixing my install, but not the other one.  I’m checking to see what host he’s with, because I will recommend that nobody host with that company. The entire WordPress install was unwritable, you couldn’t use the theme editor without changing file permissions and even a permalinks change required manual editing of the .htaccess file.  What a joke.

Anyway, here’s the point of my post.  On my test blog, I took a look at the error log for the server and saw an error that read like this: [Wed Feb 18 17:21:24 2009] [error] [client 24.223.106.130] SoftException in Application.cpp:544: Directory “/home/maximuma/public_html/wp-content” is writeable by group

Obviously the server didn’t like the permissions that were set for the folder so I changed the permissions on the file to 755 and went back and previewed the theme again.  It worked like a charm. So if you preview the theme and you don’t get the stylesheet to link, take a look at your error log for your server and see if you have a permission issue on a file or folder.

2/20/09 Addendum: Also double check your folder structure of your theme.  I’ve had several people say they couldn’t get the theme to display (just the white, unstyled page) and their WordPress folder hierarchy looked something like this:  www/home/wp-content/themes/flexibility2/flexibility2/

This structure has one too many flexibility2 folders in it.  Make sure you only have one flexibility2 folder in the wp-content folder.  The zip file has one flexibility2 folder in it, so don’t add another one.  Just unzip and upload the flexibility2 folder via FTP.

I just uploaded an updated version of the theme. There was an issue when using a static front page the theme wouldn’t disable the feature section when ‘no’ was selected. There was another issue where if you had a static front page, but had your blog posts specified on another page, the feature section would show up on both pages. This has now been fixed so the feature section can be removed from static front pages and when the ‘home page only’ option is chosen for display of the feature section, it does not display on the blog posts page.