The Frugal Skin Store Is Finally Here, Along With Frugal Version 3.25
Hey guys, it’s finally here! The Frugal Skin Store that I’ve been talking about for the past few weeks is up-and-running and ready to help you make your Frugal powered websites super slick, or clean, or however you’d like them to look. 
There are only 7 skins available at the moment, but more are coming very soon!
Frugal 3.25 is also here. I’ve added some very useful new options like new location options for the Navbar and Feature Boxes, new Static Homepage Layout Options, Category Navbar Right options (ie. RSS | Email, Twitter, Search, etc..), FULL design control for Captions, independent styling for the Wordpress ‘Pages’ widget, and more!
So check out the video to see what I’ve been up to with Frugal and then get your butt over to the Frugal Skin Store and see some of the possibilities that await!! (NOTE: All Skins are 20% off until March 1st!)
If you haven’t yet purchased Frugal you can do so HERE. Otherwise you can just login to the Frugal Forum and you’ll find version 3.25 available in the download section at the bottom of the forum homepage along with instructions for upgrading.
Eric Hamm
Introducing frugal Version 3.2: Making Coding Your Wordpress Theme A Thing of The Past
I’m very happy to introduce you to frugal 3.2. Below you will find all the information you need to know about how frugal 3.2 is taking do-it-yourself web design to a whole new level!
Introduction Into A Whole New Level of Website Control:
Here you will see some of the awesome new features in frugal 3.2. Just a few include:
- Full Import/Export control over your many frugal settings. Now, creating a complete backup and restoring that backup to your frugal websites is as easy as a few mouse clicks. Transferring a site is a breeze and implementing custom designs (skins) is now incredibly simple! (For more info into how this option works you can check out THIS VIDEO)
- Built-In Image Uploader. No longer do you need to use an FTP program to upload custom images to your frugal website. Just browse and then upload the images directly to a frugal uploads directory on your server. You then have the ability to rename or delete the image. It’s super simple and amazingly useful when custom designing your frugal site.
- Full Background Control. Before you just had the ability to change the background colors of most any element on your frugal website. But now you have FULL control! Change the type (like horizontal and/or vertical repeating image, static image, color only, transparent, etc..) and, if using an image option, you can specify the image name to be used in that background area. This, with the new Image Upload option, now gives frugal users a whole new level of design control!
- Thumbnails, Thumbnails, Thumbnails! With the latest Image Thumbnail feature in Wordpress 2.9 you can now easily add thumbnails to your post excerpts. With frugal 3.2 you now have full control over how these thumbnails display. Change they way they are re-sized and cropped, their alignment, dimensions and even complete border options. And turn them on or off at will.
- SKINS!! Both free and Premium skins are and will be available to make creating awesome designs with frugal super easy!
- Some Option Refinement. I not only re-organized the frugal options pages to make it easier to maneuver around to the different settings, but I completely re-built the way frugal interacts with the Wordpress database. It’s much more efficient, but it does require that you use a simple plugin (that I created) to upgrade from a previous version of frugal. No need for new installs, but just a heads up if you are upgrading. (For more information on how to upgrade to frugal 3.2 check out THIS VIDEO)
- Miscellaneous additions and adjustments. I made a few subtle changes like adding independent H1 and H2 font control for your content headings and providing alignment options for logos (both image and text), where before you just had padding to play with.
Preview of The Premium Skins (Coming Soon!!)
Click the image below to check out a demo of a Premium frugal Skin that will be available soon:
If you have any questions or feedback you’d like to give or if you’re a developer or designer who might be interested in creating skins for frugal and making some extra cash (as well as sharing your design skills with the frugal community) you can contact me any time.
Eric Hamm
Your 2010 Toolbox For Building An Online Business, Blog, Community And Presence
NOTE: This is an extension of a post that began here… 2010: A New Economy, A New Marketplace And A Need For A Presence Online
In 2010 we will no doubt see an even stronger push for both a business and personal presence online. In our new economy we have little choice but to stake our claim online or face being left behind by the rest of the business world. As you’ve already read in the linked post from above, our recent economic woes have pushed forward this natural shift to an online marketplace and a thriving Internet community. With ‘09 we were faced with the shock of this shift, but in 2010 we are poised for prosperity if we have the right tools in our arsenal.
Starting with the basics and then moving to more advanced advice, I’d like to share with you the tools I have found to be invaluable as I’ve made my move online. Starting from scratch in the summer of ‘08 and making a full time living online less than a year later, I used these tools to help turn a dream of greater independence into a reality. So I hope you find this information useful as you too pursue your online endeavors. Read more »
The Ultimate Guide To Finding Answers To Wordpress Questions
Wordpress is no doubt an amazing website and blogging platform. Not only is it well coded, well supported, very user-friendly, (SEO) Search Engine Optimized and super flexible, it’s totally free! With an ever growing community of users, Wordpress is quickly becoming one of the fastest growing Do-It-Yourself website programs out there. Yet, just like any piece of software, there is always going to be a need for good documentation and tutorials to help us, as users, figure out how to make Wordpress do what we want and need it to do to achieve our online goals. Read more »
Introducing frugal Version 3.1 (3.0 Has Been Refined Even More)
I know it has only been barely two weeks since I launched 3.0, but I really wanted to quickly follow up with a further refined version to make frugal as rock solid as possible. This is certainly not a complete re-design like 3.0 was, but more a more refined version that has a few bugs worked out and a few more awesome features that I think you’ll really like!
First, I just want you guys to know that I truly listen to your requests. frugal is YOUR theme and I want to do everything I can to make it the best it can be FOR YOU! So per request of a few frugal users I created a basic frugal Theme Handbook to help you get started with your frugal theme. It does everything from fully introduce you to me and this awesome, to give you an overview of the makeup of frugal and it’s many options and features. Read more »
Fun With Borders And The frugal Wordpress Theme
There’s no doubt that the frugal Wordpress theme is packed with some awesome ‘no coding necessary’ features. One of these super useful design options is that of the many robust border options.
In the following video I showcase some of these border options and share a few tricks that you can use to uniquely design your Wordpress website to stand out from the crowd. Enjoy!
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video.
How I Re-Designed frugalTheme.com In A Matter of Minutes With frugal 3.0
frugal (version 3.0) offers its users SO MUCH control over almost every aspect of their site’s look, feel and function that little, to ZERO coding is necessary. To give an example of this I’ve created a video that shows how I re-designed this very website, changing its look from the stock design to its current look, in only a matter of minutes and with absolutely ZERO CODING.
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video.
frugal 3.0 Is Here and…WOW, This Thing Is Freaking Awesome!!
Let me just cut to the chase and tell you that I’ve taken all that made frugal Premium awesome and all that made frugal Professional awesome and molded them together to make one AMAZING THEME! But it’s not just the two themes combined. It’s SO much more!
So yes, frugal Premium and frugal Professional are no more. Don’t worry, I’m still supporting them, but this theme is now just frugal and I think you’ll be happy to call it your own. Read more »
Diagrams of Hook Locations In The frugal Wordpress Theme
GoalieDave67 was kind enough to create and share some detailed diagrams to help better illustrate the frugal hook locations. Currently available in frugal Professional, extensive hook locations provide the Wordpress theme user the ability to create and insert custom functions pretty much anywhere into their theme. Read more »
A Simple Guide To frugal Widgets
Click on Image for FULL size
Wordpress widgets are great tools as they allow easy integration of custom content to the different areas of your Wordpress website or blog. Whether you’re adding a pre-made feature like a ‘Popular Posts’ widget or a custom ‘Text’ widget where you add your own content, you’ll quickly come to appreciate the power that comes with a highly widgetized Wordpress theme.
The frugal Wordpress Theme comes packed with an abundance of widgets that allow the use full control over the content on their Wordpress site. From the highly customizable static homepage to the multiple site wide feature sections, sidebars and banner section, frugal offers a full plate of widgetized goodies.
Some may find it a bit daunting, though, to determine where each widget section points to. Though these widgets are descriptively marked, their abundance can make things a bit confusing. So I’ve created a simple diagram (we’re talking Microsoft Paint kind of simple ) of the many different widget sections in frugal to help make working with these widgets a bit more effortless.
I hope you find it useful and please feel free to comment below if you have any questions or ideas you’d like to add.
Eric Hamm
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