Today marks the first day of my employment as a Theme Wrangler with Automattic and it feels great. I’m more than excited to finally let you know what I’ve been up to for the last little bit.
What can I say besides awesome, awesome, awesome? The enormous opportunity for learning and improvement; all the super-talented, friendly people; the chance to work on so many really, really cool projects—it’s almost unbelievable. This is a dream job for me.
So, yes, really excited. To say the least. And I don’t want to say too much right now so I’m going to keep this short. Though I imagine you have one very big question you’d like me to get to.
What’s Going To Happen To ThemeShaper?
Only exciting stuff.
First of all, I’m excited to officially announce that all the commercial Thematic Child Themes I’ve created are now free to download without charge.
Go download them, have fun with them, and make something really cool.
Now, this’ll be a big change for ThemeShaper but here’s an even bigger one: ThemeShaper isn’t just my blog anymore.
This is going to be awesome.
ThemeShaper will become a public-facing blog for the Theme Team now assembling at Automattic. A place where we can help provide the best possible experience for everyone involved in WordPress theming; from the noobiest of beginners to the most powerful of WordPress wizards.
Or like I said above, this is going to be awesome.
Stay tuned to the ThemeShaper blog for more updates. And if you’ve got some ideas for what you’d like to see here I’d love to hear them. Let me know what you think in the comments.
ThemeShaper 
117 responses
Congratulations! Looks like our choice of thematic as a standard framework for all our sites turned out to be a good one after all
Ian, that is awesome. Congratulations!
I just recently found ThemeShaper and Themehybrid and am in awe over all the great stuff you and Justin create and share with us. I am really excited to see what will come out of this.
Now, if Automattic would also manage to get Justin Tadlock on board, competitors might as well bow down and join forces with you… Competing would be futile.
Congrats once again to both you and Automattic!
Hi Ian (and Chris) I’m new here and to WordPress but plan to create a Web2 site based on WordPress shortly. it will include user created blogs and blog posts so i was looking at WordPressmu with Buddypress and was looking for a suitable theme or framework and found your site.
I am wondering if i should now wait until WordPress 3.0 is available and if i should build on Thematic or start no with WordPressmu/Buddypress and a thematic child theme such as Buddymatic. Problem is there are so many choices out there i am now completely overwhelmed with information (theme) overload.
Any suggestions for a WordPress newbie like me? I’ve taken so long to find you that waiting a bit longer for the ultimate platform/framework won’t be an issue.
In the meantime, i’ll add my congratulations to your appointment at Automattic. Great!
[…] I’ve never been a fan of either Kubrick’s look or code, but I must say Twenty Ten is genuinely a great base theme to use for all your WordPress projects, especially when working with Child Themes. Sure it’s not as advanced as say Thematic, but it does produce powerful semantic html and is in general very well SEO optimized. No surprise there because Ian Stewart, the creator of Thematic, was also the one who inspired Twenty Ten with his theme called Kirby, and recently joined Automattic as a Theme Wrangler. […]
Ian ~ bit late I know, but I just wanted to say… Automattic made a very wise choice, as I’ve never really enjoyed working with frameworks or other themes as much as yours. Congratulations.
Ian.
I missed the public announcement!!
So, my belated congrats, mate.
I’m sure you’re now well and truly leaving your mark at Automattic and I look forward to seeing more and more of the fruits of your labours.
The WordPress community is all the better for your appointment!
All the best.
-Alister
Congratulations! thnks for giving away the themes!!
Congratulations.
The wordpress community is thrilled to bits. People like you are needed to take the WordPress platform further.
Pali Madra
Congratulations! Looking forward to great things to come from this site. It has become such a great resource, and your thematic theme is the basis of all the WP sites I’m building now. You deserve all good things that come your way!
glad you made it to Automattic maybe Justin should also be there on that Theme Team you were talking about,
and hey Ian thanks buddy for making those themes free/ open source was looking forward to the Acamas theme for a long time ( ever since it came into the inception, i think) 🙂
received word from wordpress.com team today about a comment i wrote at your wordpress.com blog post about the Theme Team asking if you were now a part of Automattic they sent me a link to tis post glad to know it
Love both Hybrid by Tadlock and Thematic by you hoping more from you soon!
Congratulations!
They need folks like you and Justin!
hey Ian, the themes show templates missing or some stylesheet missing. this is happening with all the the four themes i downloaded
Travailler
Acamas
Thematic Power Blog
Thematic Feature Site
could you fix those?
thanks
got it right i hadn’t installed thematic (forgot) i believed it was in my themes directory
well Acamas and others use templates from thematic so the messages of missing template files and stylesheets,
Read that highlighted in yellow box saying Acamas is a themelet
Thanks Ian for these themes!
Good work!
so is Justin a freelancer yet or has he joined Automattic too?
Thanks a lot all your good work with thematic and also with the twenty ten theme which I like very much. I can’t get it to work with WordPress 2.9.2 and wonder if this is by design – of course I understand it’s created for 3.0 – or if it’s an error or the fault of a widget or plugin….
yeah i copied the twenty ten from svn repository http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/ but it doesn’t work with 2.9, earlier on i tried using the one from wordpress 3.0 alpha release that didn’t work out!
i wonder if they are using 3.0 at wordpress.com!
and Ian i am facing problems despite having Thematic, Acamas, Thematic Power Blog, Thematic Feature Site in same folder, Acamas is supposed to use template files from thematic but things aren’t working out acamas just wouldn’t activate neither the others except for thematic itself!
i am using buddypress, and wordpress MU
don’t think that should have any impact!
at one of my standard wordpress installs acamas did activate but at MU it isn’t just happening
Congratulations on the new job Ian! You have landed the dream job. By the way I really like your work.
[…] Ian Stewart Joins Automattic […]