The Cloisters

Due to some quirks at the Official WordPress Theme Directory not all of my themes will be submitted there. Some (mostly new ones) will be available for download from my account at 4shared.com and all the old themes (up to Quietly Simple) are still at the Theme Directory.

I would advise you to ONLY download from the link you’ll find on either this site or the link on our support forums. That is to ensure that you get a clean copy without sponsored/spam links or any other nasty stuff that some people add to themes before they redistribute them.

Okay folks, we’ve got a new support forum here to make things easier for everyone with all questions & answers in one central location. Not to mention that I’ll be better able to keep track of who needs help. I’ve closed the comments on the posts and also request that you don’t email support questions to me. Some valid comments have been getting sent to the spam folder and I find that I’m missing some people’s requests. Hopefully this will clear that up.

You can find the forum here and there is also a link in the top navigation bar.

So please post theme related issues only to the forum as I will no longer be answering support request emails.

I appreciate your cooperation with this change.

I added a couple more links to the “Educational Links” section here at the site from HTML Dog. They cover the basics of html and css are give you a good idea of how things work. Check them out – CSS Beginner Tutorial and HTML Beginner Tutorial.

So The Cloisters is a year old now and we’re doing pretty well! We released our first theme, Maiden Voyage (very fitting name) on August 1, 2008. Here’s to many more happy and productive years!

So WordPress 2.8 has been released and from playing around with the development versions it really seems pretty awesome. I did notice that they deprecated the author functions which is a bit of a problem as I’ve used those function in my themes (the Author Info page, Bio blocks, etc). So that means I need to do some upgrading for my themes. I’m not sure of the extent of what needs to be done yet but will get going on those upgrades asap.

As far as I can tell, besides that author thing, the themes do work in 2.8 so keep that in mind if you upgrade to 2.8. I’ll keep everyone updated on my progress with the upgrades so keep checking back here.

Discuss this on our forum…

The spam around here is really starting to increase and the spam blocker is picking it up (which is GOOD!) but unfortunately I’ve caught some legitimate comments and questions in there also (which is NOT GOOD!). I try to go through all the spam and let the good comments through but do occasionally miss some.

So I’m posting this to say that if you have a legitimate question or comment on one of the themes and you don’t see it show up it’s not because I don’t want to hear from you, it’s just a mixup. Try using the contact form to get your question to me instead.

Hi Guys,

I get many requests for help (both here on the site and in emails) with my themes and I do my best to answer them all, but with a full time job and other life issues to deal with I can’t always get to them in a timely manner so I’m asking you for a little help. Here are a few things you can do before requesting support:

1. Read through the comments in your particular themes thread or even the other theme’s threads. Your question may have already been answered.

2. If your layout is broken and you are using plugins, look to them first. Try deactivating them to see if the issue goes away. If it does then reactivate them one by one to see which one is causing the conflict. And if it is a plugin causing the problem, check with the plugin’s author…I know nothing about plugins.

3. If you recently downloaded the theme and it’s messed up, it could be that the download was corrupt. Try re-downloading and reinstalling.

4. Check on the Codex and the WP forums, many times a problem isn’t with the theme but with the theme not doing what you want due to WP limitations.

5. This is very important…always include a link to your site. If I can’t see what’s going on I can’t help. If your site is not yet public and you don’t want to include the link in the comments you can always email it to me.

Doing these things first could save us all a lot of time and help make things go more smoothly.

Thanks,
Mina

So there was a bug in the State Of Mind theme that caused the menu bar to go all off kilter. The cause was an issue with the different way that navigation is handled between wp 2.6 and wp 2.7. The good news is that it’s fixed and an updated version is, as of today now available for download from the Theme Directory. So if you have the old version (1.1) and you’re having this problem, download the new version (1.2) for the fix.

I’ve come across a few sites out there that are offering a couple of my themes for download. I would advise that you download any of my themes ONLY from the official Wordpress Theme Directory accessible either by clicking the link here or following the links in my theme’s posts at this site. Some (no not all) of those unofficial sites are adding malicious code and/or sponsored links to the themes and that is not something I want to be associated with.

So yeah, we’ve got a new look here. It was time and I figured that since I spend a lot of time making themes for other people’s site I may as well make on just for this site. I’ll probably do a little tinkering here and there because I’m never satisfied. As of this time I don’t have any plans to release this publicly but I might just do that sometime in the future. Let me know what you think!