There you have it! As promised the new thaslayer.com is live and kickin’ it! The new theme’s name is Evolution 3. (Evolution was the older theme’s 1st version, and Evolution 2 was the 2nd version of the older theme). Speaking of the old theme: i will give it to Tim of Freeky8.com

As you can notice it got a whole new look, but i kept the overall brown color, and added some very very nifty features. More than 9 cool addons were created specially for this new theme and to make my life a lot easier. Don’t believe me? Check the new features:

1. Author management. Admins can choose which author’s name and description appears on the front page(bottom right corner) and the author can set his own picture, name and description.
2. Dynamic image resizing. That the small thumbs you see are automatically grabbed from the images inserted in the post and for every size a new thumb is generated.(uber sexy stuff).
3. Ad management platform. This platform contains top header ad, box ad, sidebar ads. I can choose to set an image or use code(adsense for example as an ad.
4. Sexy featured category display. You already saw this didn’t you? It’s a small custom javascript written by my colleague, mbogdan.
5. Latest releases display. The part under the menu shows the latest theme and plugin releases. A thumb of each post is displayed and if you hover it title appears “pushing” the intro title up.
6. Category order. Admins can set which categories appear on main page and in what order. They can also exclude categories from appearing on main page.
7. YouTube video display. I just have to enter the YouTube URL and the video will be replaced with the video i desire.
8. Flickr stream management tool which allows me to display my flickr stream.
9. Super cool admin panel made for the theme (<3 mbogdan).

There are other smaller addons, but there’s nothing special about them worth to point them out.

I did the design about a month ago on a friday night when inspiration hit me on the head. I gave the design to mbogdan the next day and since than till last-last sunday he’s been working a little and stalling it. But eh, we finally got it done.

As you can see in the bottom part we will create a poll plugin(which btw will be released for free), and there are still some minor changes we have to do.

The sexiest part of the whole design is the comment page. I really like how it turned out, and as you can notice i moved the comment post box above all comments and sepparated comment from trackbacks(mixed up they were annoying). To see the comments page at glance check out the Custom widgets v1.0 release post (it has lots of comments).

As usual, if you have any suggestions or feedback please post them and they WILL be considered.

I will get back to the regular-basis blogging soon, but before i do i still have otehr work to finish + exams.

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