Was wondering what the status of zpMasonry is? The maintainers site has been 'under maintenance' for a while and I can't get my hands on a copy that works with the latest ZP? Can we get an update on when the site will be back online and when we can get an updated version of this awesome theme?? thanks!

http://www.oswebcreations.com/plugins/site_upgrade/closed.htm

@gjr has stopped development/support of the zpmasonry, zpfocus and zpminimal themes.
For the time being @acrylian has made them compatible with 1.4.5
You can find them here:
https://github.com/acrylian/gjr_themes

You'll have to download the entire repository first via the "Download ZIP" button (on the bottom right) and then pick what you need.

I hope to have the site open in a few days by this weekend, is my goal... Sorry, I am not updating the themes you mention. I have found that spreading myself thin with my limited time by trying to maintain numerous themes and plugins has prevented me from sharing NEW Zenphoto work that I like to create and share with the community. I have been working on a new theme that I will focus on, I think you all will like it. It combines a lot of the great features of previous themes into one with many options plus a lot of new stuff. Oh and it is all responsive, mobile ready. Release coming soon!

Sounds great, good to here you are still with us! I absolutely understand the time problem. We might put the old themes to our "unsupported" archive repository as we do with lot older stuff or abandoned 3rd party ones. So nothing gets lost in case someone wants to take something as a base or so.

You inspired me to get it done, site is open with first release of zpbase. I will try to get to archiving old files into one package for downloading as you say.

http://oswebcreations.com

I would really again like to suggest you get a bit into GitHub (I am by no means an expert yet but for general usage it is enough) and put your theme on GitHub. That way we more easily could help to keep it current regarding bugs on updates like with the other ones (those were not major things either).

That would be a good place for the old ones as well :-)

And the most important: Nice clean theme. Btw, if you use CombiNews on the news page, best start to rethink as the CombiNews feature will get deprecated with 1.4.6.

Now I only need time to do the themes I want to do for quite esome time…

Another great theme @gjr. Thanks!

Made already some screenshots and will add an theme entry for it sometime tomorrow.

@fretzl thanks!
@acrylian thanks, and yes I have checked out git multiple times as everytime I try to submit something you suggest. It just doesn't jive with my workflow.

" Btw, if you use CombiNews on the news page, best start to rethink as the CombiNews feature will get deprecated with 1.4.6."

sucks as I just spent a lot of time incorporating combinews....

are you replacing combinews with something?

Sorry about that, but you will appreciate that it is not straight forward. Instead we have provided a way to automatically post news articles about newly published albums and images.

Probably should have done this sooner, but sometimes the over-complexity of things goes over our heads.

Well depending on my time to examine this new approach, my new theme may be short lived, lol...

At least it had one version....

j/k sure to get it working if needed.

thanks for the great theme gjr! Thanks for your contributions to the zen photo community.

@gjr: GitHub takes quite a bit to get into as all version control does. But the benefit would really be more contribution and easier maintainance of your themes. Ask us if you need help. You don't need to use all bells and whistles at all for "simpler "things like themes.

The CombiNews is technically problematic and a pain to maintain for internal reasons. SInce the gallery is primarily the file system but news are not. Therefore there is a lot of stuff going on there that is outside our internal object model programming so always needs extra maintaincance. Here we have the time issue you encounter with your theme as well.

I am too a bit sad that the feature is thrown out as I did make it because it is useful. But I was convinced that it technically causes constant issues when we change things.

The new way is just a plugin that creates articles from gallery items. Not full ones but rather thumbs that point to them. You can always re-create the combined RSS feed by using the mergedRSS plugin.

Actually I find Git more difficult to maintain themes with my workflow, guess I can't learn new tricks!

Will take a look at the new "combinews" system/plugin. Indeed a shame. With the old Combinews Zenphoto could actually function like a photoblog if wanted.

I won't try to convince as it is not that straightforward (well, it's a coder tool after all :-)).

You could do a photoblog with a dynamic album as well. One of the themes I didn't get to finish yet as mentioned above… new year, new plans…

There is really no external difference with the new method. It is just that the photo blog items are "real" news items not ones that have to be concocted each time you request the list of news articles.

So for theme designers there is no special consideration. If the user activates the plugin the articles exist and are treated normally by the theme. Thus no "if combinews ..." code needed anywhere.

Actually there is quite a difference for theme designers regading CombiNews, although an advanced one. The former "fake" CombiNews items were not real but were the objects of the gallery item chosen.

So you had a lot more flexible possible control about what to display how. You could use the full set of object methodes on each if needed to create your onw custom display. That is possibly what gjr did (haven't looked at the theme itself yet).