Along with the WP Paintbrush upgrade are some child theme upgrades too. So make sure you upgrade your child themes at the same time … http://wppaintbrush.com/themes/

Head on over to the download page to check out the new version of WP Paintbrush!

Read more about the new theme on the WP Paintbrush Magazine theme page.

Screenshot of the WP Paintbrush Magazine theme

We only have one child theme available at the moment, but we will be adding more over time. Check out the WP Paintbrush 2011 child theme to try the first one out.

Regular themes admin page in WordPress, demonstrating the new child theme functionality for WP Paintbrush.

Re-editing old designs

The new child themes can be edited individually. When you change to another child theme, edit that, then go back to the original child theme, the design you were working on will still be available. Previously changing back to the original design you had been working on would wipe all of your changes. Of course it is possible that you may wish to reset the theme back to the original design, you can do this by using the “Reset” feature found under the “Appearance” menu in your WordPress admin panel. This allows you to take the individual child theme back to it’s original design.

Exporting child themes

We will have an export tool for creating your own WP Paintbrush child themes available within the next week.

The following bugs were fixed for this release.

1. The header and footer area was sporadically disappearing on changing designs
2. Individual designs could not be edited and stored for later use
3. The default tags sidebar widget was not loading correctly
4. The button for closing the front-end editor was sometimes malfunctioning
5. Fixes relating to extending the theme via plugins

Our first magazine style child theme for WP Paintbrush will be available soon. We’re very excited about it and hope you will be too!

The software we’re using to handle the auto-update functionality is available for download too if anyone is interested.  It is called the “PixoPoint Auto-update plugin“.

The WP Paintbrush Fonts plugin administration page.

We also have a paid upgrade plugin coming soon called “Paintbrush Fonts Pro” which provides even more font options than our free plugin. We are happy to hand out free copies to anyone who is happy to report any bugs they may come across in the initial beta version.

This release includes a huge number of improvements. We had received a significant amount of feedback on the initial and so have been writing code furiously to include all of the improvements requested. Many of the changes in this version aren’t noticeable on the front-end, but will have significant improvements in the future as they open things up to make it more easily extended via plugins, child themes and translations.

Below is a run-down on the major changes completed for this version of WP Paintbrush.

1. “Module” system created for extrapolating out theme specific code into a plugin style format, to make it easier to extrapolate code out into new plugins if necessary
2. Colour picker altererd to work with plugins
3. Blank out option for added fpr colour pickers
4. Code for menus converted into a system easily utilized by plugins
5. 2011 design bugs fixed
6. “Add CSS” option added to front-end editor
7. Spinning beach ball feature was added to “publish” and “save” buttons to make it clear when something is happening behind the scenes
8. “Editor pane loading” message was added
9. Close [X] button was modified to shut down the editor entirely (use button at bottom of screen to relaunch it)
10. ?wppb_editor=on redirect now works as expected
11. Sub-tabber for “Extras” section was added
12. Styling was improved for the number sliders
13. Built-in features were moved into modules where appropriate
14. Uploading files was moved to the image picker
15. Theme inspiration notice now stays in place on saving/publishing
16. Theme is now internationalised ready for translation strings
17. All WP_DEBUG errors have been fixed
18. Frontend editor tabs have been reordered
19. If external API check fails, a sensible message is now provided
20. A dialog error box now appears when AJAX calls fail
21. Anything which triggers a page reload on click now opens a dialog box
22. Pages are now redirected via jQuery instead of via meta redirects
23. Heading colour pickers were fixed
24. Classes were changed to ID’s in JavaScript where appropriate
25. eval() use was removed
26. Flawed settings in built in designs was fixed
27. Support for child themes was added (more info. including an example will be coming at a later date)
28. screenshot.png file was added
29. Files with DOS line-endings were converted to their Unix equivalents (needed for anyone wanting to use the theme via SVN)

For those of you interested in the latest bleeding edge version of WP Paintbrush, you can now check it out at our new Git repository. Please note that this version may not be stable and could potentially break many things as we are constantly working on it. We don’t recommend using the bleeding edge version on a live site.

1. Search box bug in Coraline design fixed
2. Some CSS and JS bugs in sidebar alignments fixed
3. Unneeded loading of external jQuery UI dependencies was removed
4. Remove unneeded CSS from style.css file
5. Moved JS from inline to external file
6. Move “open me” CSS from inline to external file
7. Load process of javascript files to improve performance changed
8. Hooks added in to ensure better extensibility for plugins

Head on over to the download page to check it out!

Changes for beta 9

1. The colour palette dialog box size was corrected
2. The HTML5 shiv was loading on administration pages
3. Designer CSS file drastically reduced in size to improve editor load times
4. designer.js file drastically reduced in size to improve editor load times
5. “Click this” link was restyled and text changed to “Open layout editor”