We are very happy to welcome Gabfire Themes on board as a Bronze Sponsor. Gabfire Themes is a distinguished design and development studio providing simplified and sophisticated WordPress themes for Web Publishers. They have been extremely generous in sponsoring one free theme for each attendee.
Tell us a bit about your business. How do you use WordPress?
Gabfire Themes was founded in 2008 by Mehmet Ozekinci and Charlie Patel. Since then, Gabfire Themes has grown substantially year after year. We’re a small team, with Mehmet based in Europe, and me (Charlie) splitting time between NYC and world travels.
Gabfire themes are professionally designed with a focus on functionality rather than excessive design. The simplicity of our themes along with relevant features is evidenced across our site and within our own ecosystem. Our niche is in the online newspaper / magazine themes space, and we’ve helped some large sites get established. It’s great to see our themes being used by popular sites across the web and around the world. That’s what so great about WordPress – it allows people to create awesome sites quite easily no matter where they are located.
As theme developers, we use WordPress for everything. In fact, there’s not a single site or aspect to our business that is not WordPress-related. Moreover, our friends, colleagues, and clients use WordPress, so this is the chatter all day, every day.
Why WordPress?
We love WordPress, the WordPress community, & WordCamps. With so many people using WordPress on the net, it’s really a no-brainer for us to bring more creative themes to the market for the growing community. Additionally, we know several core contributors and members of the widespread WordPress community. It’s probably the most active group and quite possibly the most interesting. So it’s not surprising that we haven’t seen any need to venture away from WordPress. It keeps us plenty busy!
Why did you decide to get involved and sponsor WordCamp Cape Town 2011?
WordPress is the foundation of our business. We’re lucky to have it readily available, constantly evolving, and would love to see it progress even further. We plan on increasing our involvement with WordPress-related activities such as WordCamps, WordPress Meetups, and more. By supporting the community in any way possible, we’re adding more fuel to the WordPress fire. Contributions, sponsorships, and other forms of support will only enhance the features available in WordPress which in turn helps users and providers. WordCamp CapeTown 2011 is another extension towards promoting WordPress so we are delighted to be a sponsor.
What are your thoughts on the WordPress community as a whole? And the South African WP community?
I truly believe WordPress has not only the largest community of users and supporters, but the most active as well. When a large percentage of the entire internet (approx. 15% by some estimates) is using a single open-source platform for their sites, it’s evidence the community is really driving such growth. And we see it everyday over the web, social media outlets, meetups, and WordCamps. With WordPress constantly evolving, the industry changing, and new products / features being introduced, WordPress and the community is getting more exciting and creative.
What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Cape Town?
Unfortunately, our schedules and locations did not allow us to attend WordCamp Cape Town. So we thought sponsoring the event was the next best thing to being in beautiful Cape Town in person.
Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?
There’s really so many and I could make an entire list. Off the top of my head, our inspiration comes from the core WP contributors, other designers, and theme shops. We love what everyone is producing and how everyone in the community is raising the quality standards. From WordPress.com to Woo Themes, to sites like WPCandy, inspiration is everywhere. Compare all of the long-standing community members and you can see their development progression over the last few years.
What is the most exciting improvement to WordPress that you have noticed in the last year?
Personally, the most exciting improvement was the release of WP 3.2 not so much for any new features, but more for its focus on updating the core. WP 3.2 dropped support for IE 6 (about time!), focused on performance (improving load time), and updated to more current versions of PHP and MySQL. It’s great to see the WP team focused on improving the foundation rather than just adding new features with each release.
Where do you see WordPress 2 years from now?
I just love seeing WordPress evolve. Two years is a long time in the online world, so a lot can happen. In my opinion, we’ll see a more seamless integration of other WordPress products into the core platform. For example, I think WordPress is going to ramp up the features, integration, and ease of use for such add-ons as BuddyPress and BBPress. It’s already taken steps in that direction, and with the WP team working on these products, expect to see some really cool things in this regard.
Secondly, Custom Post Types are still not as widely utilized as I had expected. My guess is that the community will see creative updates / frameworks / and packages leveraging Custom Post types in the near future. As more developers and users get comfortable with this feature, more innovative plugins, themes, and products will be arriving in the market.
Overall, the WordPress ecosystem will continue to grow. And that’s a great thing for all of us!
Professionally designed Gabfire themes are really useful for wordpress developer.