Today, Friday the 13th of May 2011, at 13:00 I finally opened up the WonderThemes WordPress theme marketplace for open registration, yey!

Shipping my first major product

Over the past 12 months I’ve worked on WonderThemes in my free time so this is a major project to finally push into the real world. I really should be ready to party right now but over the past couple of days I’ve pulled far too many late night sessions leaving me a little drained and run-down but inside I’m dancing!!!

There were times when I didn’t think the project would ever be finished. The evolution of the site from its original conception to final product is quite a story, one I may tell one day, but not today, today I’m just glad its launched and SO happy everything has come together.

The summer of ’09

WonderThemes may seem like a new project as I’ve kept it under wraps for quite some time but its rooted WAY back in the summer of 2009 at my first ever WordCamp. In fact some of the illustration work like the mascot and landscape images were finalised way back in June last year – its taken that long to knit the other pieces together.

Under the bonnet

The entire system is built on a WordPress Multisite configuration hosted by the great guys at Site5 with a heavily modified e-Commernce package origionally develped by WPMUDev.

The bulk of the design and build work was done by yours truly with more specialised tasks such as the e-Commerce modifications and PayPal and the forum integration being farmed out a few valuable freelance consultants.

I’ve kept everything inside the WordPress-sphere where possible, even using the current version of the buggy/temperamental bbPress system for our support forums (thankfully the new more stable plug-in version is out soon).

In fact, and this is not a moan – just a fact, one of the major cause of delay was the constant upgrades to the WordPress core and the changes we had to keep up with. When I started building WonderThemes WPMU was still a separate product which I had little to no experience with and keeping track on top of this and its merger into the WordPress core was one of the major learning curves in the project development.

The hundreds of dedicated core contributors who develop WordPress deserve a lot of gratitude for their silent work on this project and I suspect many others.

BIG thanks to

Other than the vast team of WordPress developers I have a lot of people to thank for helping out on WonderThemes and also inspiring me to continue when I almost gave up:

Jonny Allbut – for being an inspiration to continue and a great sounding post. Jonny is the lead developer of the Wonderflux WordPress theme framework and my partner in the WonderThemes project. Although he has taken a back seat up to now we plan to move forward with some cool in-house themes as soon as the dust has settled.

Lee Willis – for developing the impossible and going the extra mile. Lee is the brains behind all of the e-Commerce and PayPal modifications in the WonderThemes system and a true gent.

Scott Jackson – for making my vision a reality. Scott is an expert illustrator and did the artwork on the WonderThemes site as well as my own avatar on this site.

Ryan Imel at WPCandy – for the extra push. Ryan has featured our little site a few times on WPCandy and its been a big boost to the project. His little unexpected kicks like featuring us in Theme Madness really helped.

Jordan Hatch – for giving a 2nd opinion. Jordan helped out with our support forum integration and is also stepping forward to be one of our first support team when the site matures. He’s done similar work before for WooThemes and is an expert coder and WordCamper.

The wife, AKA Mrs Jones (no website available) – for putting up with me without really knowing why. My wife doesn’t really understand the WonderThemes project, all she knows is I’ve been working hard and doing a lot of late nights and she’s been very understanding. She lets me know when its 2am and time for bed, she lets me know that I worked last weekend so this weekend I should have a couple of days off and she lets me know that even if nothing comes from all of this work everything will be OK. Out of everyone I thank her the most (sorry guys!).

If I’ve missed anyone, sorry, its been a rough week!

I love ideas. I come up with them all the time because its an addictive process. Coming up with new ideas makes me feel good, great in fact – its a wonderful release to take a few days or even weeks maturing an idea from early sketches and concepts into a plan to make the idea happen.

In this video Scott Belsky details exactly why this addiction is a trap. Most ideas never get to the ‘plan’ stage never mind the ‘doing’ stage. My vast collection of  notepads, journals, post-its and emails are testament to that.

The fact is that as enjoyable and addictive as the idea generation process is it kills productivity and sucks time. When it comes down to it, idea generation is simply another form of procrastination that eventually leads to ‘idea fatigue’.

Idea fatigue is like a bad hangover and is incredibly damaging to a creative mind because it can make the process of maturing new ideas feel cynical and painful.

So the next time a new ides springs to mind don’t throw everything at it. Simply make a note of it, jot down the key points and concepts and get back to work.