Konstantin Kovshenin, talented WordPress developer and Chief Technical Officer at Frumatic, recently joined us on WordCast Conversations to discuss his work with robotics and his passion for WordPress, WordPress Plugins, APIs, and the WordPress Community he hopes to ignite in Russia.
A WordPress fan and web developer for over five years, Kovshenin thrives within the code of the web, but he’s also fascinated by the social web, the marketing, mashups, and social network development.
March heralds the launch of free WordPress theme Minimal Georgia, Konstantin’s first foray into the WordPress themes arena, giving him the title of theme wrangler. Noteworthy is Konstantin’s revealation of the process to getting his theme added to the WordPress Themes directory from the making of Minimal Georgia to the WordPress theme submission and reviewing process.
On his foray into the WordPress theme arena:
It all started back in January this year, when I decided to create a theme for the community. I’m not the best web designer around, but for a minute I did fall in love with Georgia (the typeface), and I always loved less graphics and more information. So I fired up Adobe Illustrator and started sketching. After a couple of days the homepage was complete, and this time I didn’t really ask for comments on design, because I knew it would slow down the whole process.
On knowing your target:
I fired up my code editor and started slicing the whole thing into XHTML. Now here’s a caveat here — if your final destination is WordPress, then keep that in mind at the very very beginning, since you might have to redo some stuff after implementing WordPress’ features.
On reviewing WordPress themes:
Joining the Reviewers Team is simple, just a matter of getting your environment setup (4 – 6 minutes) and grabbing a theme for review. The most interesting and valuable part is not that you’re helping out the community, but that you’re learning yourself. I personally reviewed a little less than 20 themes (and still counting) but I learned so much about them and the best practices of developing them, the Settings API, coding standards, and damn I learned two functions i had no clue about (checked() and selected()) – hope that doesn’t make me a rookie.
View live demo of Minimal Georgia or download Minimal Georgia for free.
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Konstantin Kovshenin… the modern day renaissance man?