Tag Archives: WordPress

Equilibria, a Multi-Purpose Business WordPress Theme

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Another happy day at ColorLabs. We just launched Equilibria, our first multi-purpose WordPress theme, which is mainly targeted to business users who put their corporate blogs at the frontline of their businesses. It comes with 5 different color schemes, 3 types of landing pages, a pack of page templates and more features are coming. You can read several posts written by members of ColorLabs team, here and here.

Here’s a screenshot of the theme and you can read more about it here and see the live demo here.

Purchase nowLive demo

What’s in the name?

From this point below, I will be going to bore you to death but let me try so I know how bad it would be. If you’re looking to know more about the features of this theme. Please read this post instead. If you’re willing to read a bit about chemistry and science stuff, you may proceed.

Equilibria (or equilibrium) is the condition of a system in which competing influences are balanced. Equilibria comes with several types of landing pages (business, blog and portfolio) to balance all sources of influences a website might have, hence the name. I could have come with any name, you know, but again I always find it exciting to take names from my parallel world and use them for names of WordPress themes.

I believe you studied chemistry some years back? In a chemical reaction, chemical equilibrium is the state in which the concentrations of the reactants and products have not yet changed with time. Usually, this state results when the forward reaction proceeds at the same rate as the reverse reaction. Interesting, huh? In a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, there are no net flows of matter or of energy, no phase changes, and no unbalanced potentials (or driving forces), within the system.

I know you’re all confused, puzzled and bewildered but bear with me. I’m going to give you one simple, real-life example. Have you ever seen water boiling? It’s a perfect example of a system (water) that attempts to reach equilibrium. A certain amount of water (in the liquid phase) are turning into vapour while a certain amount of water vapour are also turning into liquid. The controlling factor is simply the heat that we’re adding to the system. If it could be maintained at a constant level, the phase changes would happen at a same rate and the system would be in a perfect equilibrium. This is called VLE (vapour-liquid equilibrium).

How to purchase the theme?

If you like the feel of it or simply want to cherish the engineering philosophy behind the name and want to have it on your blog, simply go to Equilibria‘s page at ColorLabs or click the buttons below and they’ll take you there. Currently ColorLabs has a 30% off offer for all themes so now is the right time to have this theme. The code is EA628 and will be valid until 24 July 2011.

Purchase nowLive demo

Additional skin for Arthemia Premium, your voices have been heard!

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Arthemia Premium has been around ColorLabs for a while now, rocking the top players of magazine style premium WordPress theme, and it’s only grown and become bigger and bigger. We have continually updated it to fix bugs and make it work with the latest WordPress versions, as we do with all our themes.

Along the road we have been receiving popular response from users of Arthemia Premium, that they love to have more white space in their beloved theme. So, one day we wondered, why don’t we provide an additional skin for Arthemia Premium so our premium users get to choose?

Say hello to Blue Accent – a clean additional skin for Arthemia Premium. Continue reading →

Wireline, a Premium WordPress Theme from ColorLabs

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ColorLabs launched a new premium theme last month but we’re so busy that we didn’t have the time to blog about this. The good thing is that Anita Pravitasari, the new ColorLabs community manager (her title sounds so cool in this geeky world of WordPress business, to be honest) came to the rescue and finally blogged about that. You can read her post here. She’ll be busy managing the ColorLabs community from now on, so thank God that’s one check-mark off my daily routines. Also, don’t forget to check out the profiles of Firman Firdaus and Rio Purnomo, our new web designer and web developer. Pretty kicking, huh?

Let’s stand out

Wireline has this shiny, oh-so-2011, modern look and is packed with cool animations like featured posts slideshow, scrollable popular posts and jQuery-powered drop-down navigation menu. There are 5 color schemes available so it’s just so unlikely that your favourite colour isn’t there. And if you’re into the geeky side of web development, it might worth telling that ColorLabs incorporate some HTML5 and CSS3 stuff into it.

Have a look at this top-to-middle screenshot of Wireline, this one is the brown one:

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Wireline comes with 5 alternative color schemes: red, green, blue, brown and black. Read up on the specs of the theme, view the demo and then give us a little feedback love. If you want to get more technical details on the theme itself, please head to ColorLabs‘ website because what you’re about to read below might not interest you at all.

What kind of name is Wireline?

So here’s the thing about being both an engineer and a web developer: you get to pick odd-sounding names taken from your parallel world. I named one of my themes ‘Platformate‘ back in 2008. Platformate stands for platinum reformate. In plain English, platinum reforming is the re-arrangement of some sort of chemical compounds, which in this case are the carbon chains in crude oil, using some sort of accelerator, which in this case is platinum. Reformate is the product of the process. Confused? Okay, try this one: it’s LIKE (note that) turning Premium into Pertamax so Pertamina can get more money. That’s NOT exactly the case (hence the capitalised LIKE) but hopefully you get the idea. It’s one of the cool chemical engineering stuff.

What about Wireline? In case you don’t know, the oil and gas industry is pretty dodgy. If there had to be the most superstitious and prophetic engineering on earth, that’d be petroleum engineering. Let me tell you something: A one-pixel discprepancy on a visual design can actually irritate my eyes and the creative side of my brain could instantaneously combust. In petroleum engineering, I’d have to be satisfied with 30% of uncertainties in my engineering estimation. If we’re talking about a 960-pixel wide web site, that error is equivalent to 288 pixels, about the size of a sidebar.

Wireline is a cabling technology where a current is sent to downhole logging tools in oil well exploration and completions. Petroleum engineers send logging tools into oil wells so they get to understand the characteristic of the sedimentology underneath in order to ‘guesstimate’ everything. This practice, and in fact it’s pretty cool, is called Wireline. In simple terms, engineers send a line of wire into the well, hence Wireline.

How to purchase this theme?

If you like the feel of it or simply want to cherish the engineering philosophy behind the name and want to have it on your blog, simply go to Wireline‘s page at ColorLabs or click the buttons below and they’ll take you there. Currently ColorLabs has a 30% off offer for all themes so now is the right time to have this theme. The code is EA628 and will be valid until 24 July 2011.

Purchase nowLive demo

ColorLabs Has Just Got a Facelift

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After having been more than 2 years in business, ColorLabs finally gets its second facelift. The site is now fairly simpler and shows a lot of whitespace which makes reading much more enjoyable. It is also in so many ways more integrated so users will find it easier to explore.

First-Time Installation Service

Okay, this is something that is completely new at ColorLabs and we bet you’re going to love this. Each purchase now includes a free, optional first-time installation and configuration service and we promise to make your web site ready in 24 hours. Not only is this so great and helpful for you all, this also cuts the number of technical issues raised in our support systems, which in turn will let us focus more on designing new products for you. To opt-in, you need to submit a request to the Resolution Center and we’ll get down to business in a snap.

Support Systems

We also have just upgraded our support systems. We now have the Resolution Center, a member-restricted area where you can get one-to-one assistance from our dedicated support agents. This system is very secure and you can safely provide us with your WordPress and FTP accounts details if need be. This simplifies matters significantly and you will get your technical issues resolved more quickly.

Additionally, we will have the Discussion Forum, another member-restricted area where you can interact with other members and share your experience using our products. Here, you can find awesome mods that somebody else has done to our themes and discuss how to get them. We will closely monitor this forum as sometimes users raise technical issues which should have been posted to the Resolution Center. This forum is not yet online and we will tell you more about this after. At the moment you will still get forwarded to the current User Forum.

Theme Licensing

All our products are now licensed under GNU General Public License. We simply want to comply with WordPress, the publishing platform that we love so much, and we hope this change will benefit you in so many ways.

What next?

We are still cooking so many things here at ColorLabs. We are trying to focus more on publishing tutorials for you and providing a better customer service. We also have some cool themes waiting to be released and we bet they simply can’t wait to see you. And last thing, we are now recruiting. If you have a passion for design, do drop us a line. You might be the one we have been looking for.

Follow us on Twitter! (@colorlabs)

I’ve Been to WordCamp Indonesia 2009

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wordcamp_indonesiaLast Saturday and Sunday (17-18 January 2009), I attended an amazing event called “WordCamp Indonesia 2009″, the 1st Annual Conference for WordPress Enthusiasts, which was held at Erasmus Huis, the Netherland Embassy, Jakarta. I have been waiting to attend this event to thank Matt Mullenweg personally for creating such a wonderful blogging platform: WordPress. I was so fortunate that I finally got the chance to meet him, thank him, and luckily be one of the panelist on a talk show about WordPress Business Forum with him.

WordCamp Indonesia 2009 was held in Erasmus Huis, the office of the embassy of The Netherlands for Indonesia. The conference itself was held inside an auditorium, attended by approximately 150 attendees, including developers, designers, bloggers, sponsors, and media representatives. It’s totally my rough guess, I didn’t check the guest list thoroughly.

It was clear to see that they who attended this event really appreciate the development of WordPress and seemed curious about how it all started, the mastermind behind it, and everything related to it including the codes, the plugins, the themes, the user interface, and everything. Everyone seemed so passionate to be there, them who are newbie users and even them the PHP/CSS freaks. A blogger community (Anging Mamiri) even tried so hard coming all the way from Makassar to attend this event.

wordcamp_indonesia_1

The first day was started with an opening speech by Valent Mustamin, the organizer, and Matt Mullenweg. We then continued with a presentation by Nanda Ivens, a representative from IndoPacific Edelman, who told us some interesting facts about the digital influence in the current society. There was also a WordPress Free Forum, a talk show that discussed about WordPress from the user’s point of view. Ryan Koesuma, a friend from Bandung Blog Village is one of the panelist there.

It’s Romi Satria Wahono who started the second day. He gave us some valuable insights about personal branding. In the afternoon, Nukman Luthfie from Virtual Consulting presented us a hilarious presentation about himself, wrapped with an elegant topic: Corporate Blogging. Hahaha. And the funny thing with these two guys is that both of them acted as if they were the “fairest among us all”. No wonder they succeeded well in building personal and corporate brand.

wordcamp_indonesia_2

Anyway, I was lucky enough to join a talk show with a topic: WordPress Business Forum, that was held just before the lunch on the second day. The talk show was moderated by Deden Purnamahadi, and Matt Mullenweg was the main panelists, accompanied by Nadiah Alwi and me.

Just before the end of the second day, there was a presentation from the finalists of Paperless Mading Competition (Mading Online Bandung Blog Vaganza 2008): SMUN 20 Bandung, SMKN 4 Bandung, and SMKN Informatika Bandung. One of the team presented a wonderful idea relating WordPress to paperless school magazine: “Using WordPress for school magazines means helping the world to survive from the Global Warming.”

These are some screen shots of their wonderful works. They are using WordPress MU and the Arthemia Premium theme.

smkn4

smun20

smkninformatika

Bottomline, it was such a once in a lifetime experience to meet wonderful guys there. I saw famous people like Enda Nasution, Ndoro Kakung, Christian Sugiono, and of course Matt Mullenweg. I met new friends: Simon Lim, Septi Yulia Sari, Cynthia Rahayu, Erick Mainaky, and many others.

I totally look forward to attending WordCamp Indonesia 2010. And I can’t stop thinking: he is only 25-year-old, he didn’t finish his degree at his university, but he was named to be the 16th most important people on the Web by PC World. Amazing, huh?