All Development Projects

I have been involved in the WordPress world since 2009 and I have had more projects to my credit than a typical hobbyist could be expected to have. They are at different levels of activity:

Active Development

  • Photonic – This has been my favourite project for quite some time now. It is probably the most comprehensive gallery plugin as well as the most comprehensive lightbox plugin in both, the free and the commercial space.

    You can download Photonic directly from WordPress.

  • Kon-Tiki – This is a small theme I have been developing for a while now. It is currently only available to me as I haven’t released it publicly yet, and to be honest, I don’t know if I ever will. Unlike my previous theme Suffusion, Kon-Tiki takes a minimalist approach to design and functionality, so it is never going to have the versatility of Suffusion. It will be augmented with a “Survival Kit” plugin though that will let you add things that are generally plugin-territory, or are not essential for running the theme.

    A preliminary version can be seen on my personal page.

Passive Development

  • FontMeister – At the time that FontMeister was written Google Fonts was considerably smaller, and there was no easy way to integrate external fonts on your website. FontMeister bridged this gap and let you pull fonts from Google, Typekit and Font Squirrel to your website. However, with Google Fonts becoming the primary source for free fonts and with every theme including its fonts, the relevance of FontMeister has gone down. You can still use it if you are looking to integrate with Font Squirrel though.

    You can download FontMeister directly from WordPress.

  • Xylo – Xylo may be considered a fork of SyntaxHighlighter Evolved. It takes the strengths of SyntaxHighlighter Evolved and marries them to Google’s Code Prettify script. The result is a lightweight syntax highlighting script. This is in passive development, but is used extensively on this site, notably on almost every documentation page for Photonic.

Retired

  • Suffusion – Most people in the WP space know me not for Photonic but for Suffusion. Suffusion was a theme written when WP had no concept of things that seem so commonplace now – menus, featured images, custom post types, a customizer and blocks. By offering all such capabilities (and advanced capabilities like mega menus) all for free straight out of the box Suffusion remained a trendsetter for a long time. Heck! When Suffusion had all these features WP’s default theme was Kubrick and there was no Theme Review Team! But as WP core gradually started catching up, having the cutting-edge features in Suffusion became counter-productive, both, to me as a developer having to maintain backward-compatibility, and to sites by adding load to them.

    The axe finally fell when a theme reviewer pulled Suffusion from the repository and listed Customizer integration as a requirement to get it relisted. And that is when I retired the theme.

    Users can still download it from GitHub, but I don’t provide any support for it.

    Suffusion has some add-ons that are retired but can be downloaded regardless. Again, I have discontinued support for each of these:

I am passionate about my work – just look at my support history on wordpress.org or on the erstwhile Suffusion forum. My work is of exceptional quality – both Photonic and Suffusion have been favourites with users for a long time. However, I am also purely a hobbyist – I do all of this for fun, when I can spare some time from my strenuous day job. So please don’t reach out to me to see if I am available for customizing something – even if I had the inclination to support such requests, I wouldn’t have the bandwidth.