We’re so excited to announce the release of PhotoPressPro Platinum3! This update adds quite a few features that have been on our wishlist for a while. Read on for the details!

What’s New?

• Sidebar! We’ve had tons of requests to add a widget-ready sidebar to the blog theme, to place things like advertisements or custom menus. We’ve resisted up till now, but without any real reason. Now, you can add a Sidebar to your entire site, or just to particular pages. Go to Layout > Pages to set it up. When creating or editing a page, you can now set the “Page Template” to Page w/ Sidebar, or Posts Page w/ Sidebar. Or, if you choose to add a Sidebar to your entire site, you can create pages with a “Full Width” page template to hide the sidebar on those pages. Then, go to Appearance > Widgets and drag some widgets to any of the 4 new Sidebar widget areas.
• Insert All Images, Insert Slideshow buttons. W00T!?! Yep, this means BULK IMAGE POSTING, baby. Simply upload your images as you always have, but instead of clicking “Insert into Post” on every..single..danged..image… you can now click the brand new “Insert All Images” button to throw all your uploaded images to the post editor, ninja-style, or the or “Insert Slideshow” button to add the shortcode for you.
• AJAX Commenting. Inline commenting has always been built-in, but a page refresh was required to post your comment. That is no longer the case! (If you are currently using the Ajaxed WordPress plugin, this will probably conflict with it, and you may have to deactivate the plugin. If you have any issues with the built-in Ajax comments, or just think they aren’t as cool as I’m making them out to be, well fine then. You can turn them off on the Layout > Comments page.)
• Page templates. In addition to the Sidebar and Full-Width page templates, we added an Archives template. You can now create an “Archives” (or “Sitemap”) page that lists all of your posts and pages by category, tag, year, month, or whatever you select on the Layout > Pages > Archives section. To add an Archives page, simply create a new page, choose the “Archives” page template, and Publish.
• CSS3 Text Shadows. Add a soft glow, dropshadow, or letterpress effect to any text on your blog. Used correctly, this can give a very professional effect to your text. But, different effects can look pretty bad with certain combinations of text color and backgrounds, so beware. Oh, and these will not work on any version of Internet Explorer.
• Footer title fonts. You can now change the font for the Footer titles, along with the Post titles, and Sidebar titles. Headings need not be the same!
• Improved Line Height. Before now, the line height for the post content and the menu were based on the font size. Now, they are fixed to 150% of the text height, for much improved readability.
• Less Naughty CSS for Contact Forms. Some of the CSS we applied to the comment forms were inadvertently applied to contact forms as well, usually to an ugly result. This has been fixed, so plugins with styled forms like cForms will look as they should.
• Fixed compatibility with SEO plugins. A while back, we added the option to set custom <title> tags on posts and pages. But, we inadvertently broke the title functionality on some SEO plugins such as All-In-One SEO. Those should now be working correctly – email us if you have any issues with SEO plugins.
• Floating Icons you can actually use. The my.php file must still be edited, but you can turn it on or off under Other > Floating Icons. Plus, no renaming of files is necessary! Simply edit the my.php file in the WordPress theme editor under Appearance > Editor and add your own links.

Oh, one more thing – a great new default look, inspired by the default WordPress theme. Check it out at the demo.

We’re pretty happy with the way things turned out. Love something about the new look? Hate something even more? Let us know in the comments. The new Ajax comments.

Hello again folks! Back so soon, you ask? Yes, yes, well.. we thought a few of you might want to upload images again.

Many of you reported issues with uploading images.. no error message, everything looked fine, but the image just didn’t upload. But then, most of you had no problems at all.

It turns out that a security setting was added to PHP versions 5.2.12 and later called max_file_uploads. This setting is defaulted to 20, to guard against bots attempting to overload the server with uploads.

Ok, well, we’re only uploading 1 file at a time, right? So, no problem. Right?

Wrong.

PHP counts empty file upload fields as uploads. This means on servers with default PHP settings, a web app cannot allow more that 20 file input fields in one form. We have a few more than that.

Fortunately, my years of rigorous Google Fu training placed me at this blog post by a similarly frustrated Drew McLellan. He offered up a nifty jQuery-based workaround that keeps any empty file input fields from getting to the PHP side by disabling them.

Thank you so much, Drew. Now I can enjoy my birthday.

Introducing the Platinum2 WordPress theme from PhotoPressPro! We’re a little loopy around here, so bear with us… the lack of sleep and gross over-indulgement in coffee and donuts, combined with the joy of releasing our best product to date (we think), is a little overwhelming. (Lawdy, I need to finish this here blog post, I’m getting the vapors!)

The main focus of this release was a major cleanup of the PPP Platinum2 Control Panel. We put a ton of thought into laying out the options in a way that is natural to the design process; for example, most people start with a logo or header image, so we made that the very first tab. Several options were rearranged, but current users will notice that most options are just the same, although some are much prettier. (Current users should also notice that we’ve dropped support for the Flashfader plugin. If you must have it, email us for instructions on getting it back. Current users will also notice that this is a free update from the Platinum theme, but it will need to be installed like a new theme.)

We’ve listed a quick rundown on the new Control Panel features below. Also, check out the video walkthroughs on the support page.

• Tab Management. The tab you’re currently viewing gets saved when you Save Changes or upload a file. No more hunting down where you left off. Yay!
• Improved Snapshots. Snapshot name is now saved with your settings, so it never gets out of date.
• Revamped Notifications. Non-essential messages fade away. Important messages are highlighted.
• 5 Default Snapshots. 5 totally different looks to use as inspiration, or as starting points for your new blog design.
• Header Image now in the PPP Control Panel. You no longer need to go to a separate page to upload your custom header. Now it’s nicely integrated into the Control Panel, under Layout > Header. The Header Slideshow was also moved to this tab.
• Like I said, much prettier. Hey, we think so. Let us know what you think!

What else is new?

So glad you asked! (We love inquisitive people!)

• WordPress 3.0 Menus. The most exciting new feature of WordPress 3.0 is fully supported. You can create menus and add them to your Dropdown Menu as widgets, or create your entire menu in the fantastic WordPress menu editor.
• Upload a Favicon. Adding a favicon to your blog could not be easier. Just upload a small, square image and the theme will handle the rest.
• Comments customizations. You can now change the width of your comments area, as well as the comment form colors and borders.
• Show/Hide Footer. One of the most frequently requested features. Flick the switch to turn off the footer widgets completely.
• RSS Subscribe Link. Another oft-requested feature. Enter a text link or choose one of the included RSS icons to give your visitors easy access to your RSS feed. The link will be added to the very end of your menu. (If you don’t much care for the icons, check out the next feature.
• PPP Simple Link widget: Enter an Image URL. Instead of a boring old text link, why not use a slick, glossy icon, or a fancy rotating blinking GIF you made in PhotoShop 6? The possibilities are endless. Just upload the file somewhere on the web and paste the file URL into the Image URL field.
• Custom CSS code, right in the control panel. Custom CSS has always been possible by creating a file called my.css in the theme folder. You can still do this, but you can also enter Custom CSS in a new tab on the PPP Control Panel, on the Other page. This code will override anything in my.css (as far as CSS allows, of course).
• my.php So, you’re looking for something cool to add to your blog, and you run across a great tutorial that involves adding code to your theme’s functions.php file. You add the code, and it works perfectly. Then you get an email from us, maybe this very email, and you update your theme, just as you should. You refresh your blog, and the cool new feature you so proudly coded, is gone. That’s because your functions.php file was overwritten by the theme update. Don’t worry, my.php is here for you! Just create a my.php file in your theme directory, and paste in the code that formerly belonged to functions.php. The next time you update, copy the my.php file from the old folder to the new one, and you’re golden.
• Custom Post and Browser titles. This feature will evolve in the future, but it’s pretty cool now. You can change the title that shows up in your browser window for each post and page. You can also change the post or page title that is displayed to your readers.
• Random slideshow now more random. Really? More random? Well, kinda. We used to start with the first image every time, but now that too is left to happenstance.
• Bonus! Floating social icons. This is less of a "feature", and more of a demo of what you can do with my.php and my.css. Rename the included my.css.sample and my.php.sample files to my.php and my.css and check out some floating bookmarks! Remember to edit the links in the my.php file to link to your own pages. (Awesome icons are from Smashing Magazine and Oliver Twardowski.)
• A lot more. Future updates will be more frequent. Then maybe I’ll remember all the changes by the time I update this readme file.