WPSynergy.org - Opensource WordPress Themes

Remember my post “Annoucement: The Gorilla Project Coming Soon!“? Almost three months past and I didn t give any news (at all) on this blog since then. An important work load and some health problems kept me away from this project until recently.

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.

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