On Saturday, Sitsari Kitisakkul told me his concept GOT.IT – a social customer loyalty app to replace paper punch cards and plastic membership cards – was selected and asked me to join his team as a UI designer to take on the design of the iPhone application.

Here’s what I have designed for my team (click to enlarge):

Application points of differenciation:

• Combine punch cards and membership cards into a single platform
• Social aspects to increase usage and retention (gifting friends, integration with facebook, Got.it point system to complement vendors own loyalty programs)
• Location based vendor discovery
• Provide analytics and consumer behavior data to vendors/merchants
• First mover in Thailand.

After two days of hard work and an incredible team work, we had to pitch our product and show the demo in only 5 minutes. This is a very short amount of time to convince the judges.

But finally, after two hours and final judges’ deliberation we won 1st runner up (behind ChatterBox) and a prize of 100,000 Thai Bahts (about US$3,000). Yeaaahh! Unfortunately, I had to leave the event early and could not be there on stage with the rest of the team to celebrate.

The team is committed to complete this project and release the app on the Apple Store later next year. Stay stunned!

If you are new to this blog, the Gorilla Project is an opensource project created by Chris and myself to overcome common issues encountered by a single WordPress theme designer. Our goal is to build a large community of WordPress designers and developers to collaborate together to build FREE Premium WordPress themes, maintain and upgrade the themes to the latest WordPress version, fix bugs, make the themes cross browser and cross OS platform compatible,offer support to users (forum), write tutorials, create a theme framework to speed up themes development, write an extensive documentation (Wiki) for WordPress developers willing to create a theme for the Gorilla Project.

“WPSynergy” in place of “The Gorilla Project”

First of all, after we discovered someone else was using a similar name for his Premium WordPress themes site, we renamed “The Gorilla Project” to “WPSynergy” – even though Matt Mullenweg told us not to on our Google groups. The new name was proposed by Jeffro from WordPress Tavern with the following definition:

Synergy: The enhanced result of two or more people, groups or
organizations working together. In other words, one and one equals
three! It comes from the Greek “synergia,” which means joint work and
cooperative action. The word is used quite often to mean that
combining forces produces a better product.

This was clearly in line with our project so we decided to go for it.

Logo

Logo design followed a long process and after many concepts and feedbacks on Conceptshare, a few votes from the WordPress community and a few other modifications, we finally got our final logo (below). I hope you like it.

Logo, as all of our free themes, is released under a GPL2 license. Illustrator source file can be downloaded here. As usual, feel free to download it, modify it and upload the new version if you don’t like the one you see here.

SVN, Trac, dev site, mailing list

To be more productive while developing our opensource wordpress themes, we created an infrastructure on Chris’ server:

• http://dev.wpsynergy.org/: P2 WordPress theme for any discussion related to development. If you want to Join our team start by creating an account there.
• http://bugs.wpsynergy.org/: Trac to keep track of our themes and report bugs
• http://svn.wpsynergy.org/: SVN for our themes repository
• http://groups.google.com/group/wpsynergy: our mailing list on Google Groups.
  (Register if you want to be part of this mailing list)

On my server – which will host the themes, demos and forum – we installed WordPress MU for the theme demos and BBpress as our support forum.

Our themes

We are actively working on PigNews. You can follow the progress here (please, note we didn’t fix IE6′s bugs yet). However, mostly because of a lack of time and a low involvement from the WordPress community, we are striving to finish the theme. We hope more designers and developers will join our effort after we released a few themes and complete the official site at http://wpsynergy.org.

Pignews color schemes:

If you want to help us develop Pignews, grab the files from the SVN trunk. (If you are new to SVN, start by downloading Tortoise.) (To make a SVN update or commit, you will have to request a password from Chris to access SVN. His email is chris[a-t]wpsynergy {d-o-t}org.)

Other themes to be part of WPSynergy

• OneRoom
• Synjob

How can you help us?

Once again, we are asking for help from the WordPress community. If you are a designer or developer, there’s many way to be involved in this project. As a designer, we need you to create stunning themes, design mascots, logos, icons… As a developer, we need you to enhance our themes with options page, add AJAX effects, configure servers, develop our Options theme Framework… and we need everyone to spread the word (on twitter, Facebook, on your blog…) to move this project forward and take it to the next level.

Thanks to everyone for supporting us and a special thanks to Matt Mullenweg for his support since the beginning of this project. We really appreciate.

While it is really great to have so many people contributing to it, there’s some limitations when it comes to free WordPress themes created by individuals:

• They have real difficulties to keep their themes up to date with the latest WordPress releases.
• Their themes are not always cross browsers and cross platforms.
• Their support is limited.
• They usually don’t have all the skills needed to make a Premium Theme.
• After a while, they might completely cease to maintain their themes because of lack of time or boredom.
• As themes are updated by authors, upgrading will usually mean losing any custom styles you’ve added.
• Many themes are offered as “one size fits all”, and can only be customized with knowledge of HTML/CSS.

Here comes the Gorilla Project WPSynergy Project, an opensource project created by Chris and I to overcome these common issues. Our goal is to build a large community of WordPress designers and developers to:

• Collaborate together to build FREE Premium WordPress themes. Some companies (Woothemes, ithemes…) offer excellent premium WordPress themes but you have to pay for it!
  (“A premium theme refers to themes that have more quality in terms of design, or maybe layouts (magazine, grid, showcase, etc) that differs them from the majority free themes. It’s also fair to label them as themes that allows you to do more customization, or even displays content in a different formats” – Hongkiat)
• Maintain and upgrade the themes to support the latest versions of WordPress.
• Fix bugs.
• Make the themes cross browser and cross OS platform.
• Offer support to users (forum).
• Write tutorials.
• Create a theme framework to speed up themes development.
• Write an extensive documentation (Wiki) for WordPress developers willing to create a theme for the Gorilla WPSynergy Project.

We need your help!

The gorilla project WPSynergy Project is going to be a huge and exciting project but we need your help to make it successful. Here’s how you can contribute:

• Designers, we need your talents to design stunning themes, icons, mascots in Photoshop, Fireworks or any other image editor. We have a number of theme designs planned, but it would be nice to have an extra hand in the future.
• Front end developers, we need you to code the theme in valid (X)HTML/CSS.
• Back end developers, right now, Chris is looking for PHP developers to help develop the “Gorilla Theme Options Framework” (GTOF) SYNTOF (WPSynergy Theme Options Framework) which we will be uses as the main framework for our themes. But we are also looking for contributers to other back end development projects – options pages, widgets, plugins…you name it!
• Blog Owners, a section at wpgorilla.org wpsynergy.org will be created for you to report bugs, suggest improvements and new ideas…
• Readers (yes, you too can help!), we need you to spread the word! Tweet it! Digg it! Stumble it! Talk about it on your blog. Help us grow this new community and make this project a reality and you will soon be able to download premium WordPress themes for free!

Ready to help?

If you are ready to help, you can contact us at joinus {a t} wpgorilla {d o t} o r g joinus {a t} wpsynergy {d o t} o r g or head to Launchpad our DEV site and pick a project. We are just starting out so you are not going to find much there at the moment but you can be the first one to propose a new project or you can help us develop the “Gorilla Theme Options Framework” (GTOF) SYNTOF till completion – anyone interested in finding out more can email chris {at} wpgorilla {dot} org chris {at} wpsynergy {dot} org for more information.

If you need help with Launchpad, read this »

Pignews theme – our first theme to be part of this project – is going to be on hold until we finish Gorilla Theme Options Framework (GTOF) SYNTOF but in the meantime you can review the concepts on Flickr and give us your feedback.

All the themes created by the Gorilla WPSynergy community will be hosted at www.wpgorilla.org www.wpsynergy.org. The site is under construction at the moment (see screenshot below). If you want to help me with the development of this site, contact me at jeremie {a-t} wpgorilla {d-o-t} org jeremie {a-t} wpsynergy {d-o-t} org. The fastest we build this site and the fastest we will be able to release free premium themes there.

Benefits of this project

If you run a WordPress blog, the benefits are quite obvious: you will be able to download free Premium WordPress themes and plugins developed and maintained by a large community of WordPress developers.

If you are a designer or developer (or both!), you will be able to work with various professionals, make contacts, learn new ways to build a WordPress theme and hopefully make WordPress a better CMS. We plan to create a page on WPGorilla.org WPSynergy.org to list our most active team members with a bio and a link to their site.

In the end, everyone will benefit from this project… so don’t forget to spread the word!

Links

Official Site: http://wpgorilla.org/

Projects:https://launchpad.net/~wpgorilla

Theme Concepts: http://www.flickr.com/groups/wpgorilla/

Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/wpgorilla

UPDATE:

Official Site: http://wpsynergy.org/

SVN:SVN

TRAC: Bugs

Discussions: Dev Site

I will try to code the site and complete the work this week if I have time. In the meantime, you can preview it on Deviantart and give me your feedbacks there or on this page. At this stage, I will not make any big modification in the theme.

What’s next?

As many people requested it, next step will be to upgrade my WP themes (Yoghourt & NightTransition) for WordPress 2.7+. I will do them one at a time, starting with Yoghourt.

Many people also asked me to upgrade LightForm. I am sorry to inform you that will not be possible unless someone wants to contribute to this project or want to make a donation. I went into full time freelancing just recently and if I want to make a living by the end of the year I will have to work really hard. That means less time for me to work on open source projects. I hope you understand.

If you accept to contribute or donate, I will be very happy to put your name and url somewhere on my freebies page for example.

I have been very busy the last few weeks cleaning the flat, paying bills and saying goodbye to all of my friends and I had no time to write any post for January. I am afraid you will have to wait almost one month before you can read something new on this blog, though I will try to write one in France if I can.

So happy holydays and all the best for 2009.

This is a screenshot of Web-Kreation v1:

… and now a screenshot of Web-Kreation v2:

As you can see, Web-Kreation v2 design is not significantly different from the old version but I cared about little details that makes a website look great. The new site was entirely built with WordPress and I made extensive use of the great Mootools 1.2 (AJAX) framework for the effects.

Now, anyone can register to this site (click “login” on the upper right corner of this site) and as I am writing, already 4 people have registered after only a few hours.

The “Download” page was renamed “Freebies” and redesigned to accommodate more free WordPress themes, Web templates, Forms… in a near future. Yes, more freebies! And maybe I will allow users to submit their own WordPress themes or scripts to this page. I didn’t take a decision yet. What do you think?

I have also done a big tidy up on this site to improve loading time and fixed some bugs in my “freebies” scripts, especially wp-yoghourt, my free WordPress theme.

And now what?

So, next steps will be to complete this site, validate and release “NightTransition”, my second WordPress Theme (Done!), write some tutorials and create more freebies (especially WP themes). So stay tuned!

And you know what?

My WordPress theme Yoghourt is on the list! What a surprise!

I have always been a big fan of SmashingMagazine. Their articles are always excellent. I would have never believed that one day I would be on their site.

Anyway, I invite you to visit this post. The themes listed there are really “excellent” and FREE so, even if you don’t like mine, I am sure you will find one for your blog.

The Article: 100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes