1 The Plus Project

As you may know we have some pretty big plans for these Tuts+ sites. While today they are humble little tutorial blogs, we’ve thought for some time that it would be cool to build an entire platform for education. We’re going to call that platform Plus. You’ll know Plus content as our premium content, but no longer.
Our premium content is now ‘Premium’ (go figure!) and Plus is the brand for the educational platform we’re building, which, just like Psdtuts+, will be completely free for the most part.

With Tuts+ well established now, we’ve finally begun work on the project! We’ve acquired the domain Plus.org which will be the home of the new platform (yay for our first four letter domain!) We’ve also brought over our resident code genius Ryan Allen (who built our ActiveDen platform all by himself back in 2006) to team up with Tuts+ developer extraordinaire Fred Wu and kick ass front-end guru Derek Herman. And Skellie and I have been busy spec’ing out the plans for the new site, and it’s pretty, damn cool if I do say so myself!

Right now the Tuts+ sites are fairly passive, but we’d like to get the whole community involved in writing, teaching, answering questions and generally learning. The new Plus.org platform promises to incorporate all that plus some nifty ideas we’ve taken from gaming to come together into a social education platform.

It’s going to take a long time and we’re going to roll it all out in pieces over the next 2 years. We’re super excited about it all, and I hope I’ll have more updates in the coming months!

2 Creative Sessions and Mobiletuts+

While Plus.org will take a long time, we do have some new goodies coming much sooner including Creative Sessions which is being built now, and also Mobiletuts+ which will be all about mobile development!

3 Server Update

About a week and a half ago we had some major problems with our servers. I’m happy to say that we’ve now completely resolved these issues by moving hosts and reengineering our hosting setup completely from scratch. The new setup is much quicker and has a much greater capacity for growth, so fingers crossed, that will be the last server outage for a long time to come!

4 The Redesign

The new theme has a few neat features you may want to check out including:

• Basix!
  While Tuts+ has always been known for intermediate to advanced level content, we’ve been thinking it’d be good to separate out tutorials and articles better suited to people just getting started. So we’ve created the Basix tag for quick browsing. You’ll find it in the top menu, and expect to see more Basix content soon as we beef up our library of novice-friendly content.
• Easy access to Videos, Tips and Premium Posts
  We’ve also started tagging videos, tips and Premium membership posts so that along with Basix content you can quickly find what you’re after. We’re generally going to be working to clean up our category/tagging across the network in the coming months to get it more standardized.
• Tutorial Details on Posts
  We’re also going to start standardizing all tutorials to have a "Tutorial Details" section at the top with difficulty and other pertinent details. Eventually we’ll get all the archives updated … but with over 2000 tutorials, that will take a while!
• Bigger, more readable content area
  We’ve expanded the site to be optimized for bigger 1280px wide screens, with a bit of JavaScript to resize for smaller resolutions. This has given us the space to clean up the content area to be a bit bigger and more readable generally.
• Latest Creattica content for inspiration
  We’ve also started porting over the latest Creattica content into our sidebars. There’s actually a redesign of Creattica coming in the next few weeks and we’ll be expanding the gallery to cover even more types of inspiration. The new sidebar widget will give even more exposure to those talented creatives on Creattica!
• General UI Improvements
  Most of the improvements on the new design are small, subtle improvements such as a reduction in the number of clicks needed to browse categories, a clearer search field, faster loading pages and generally cleaner, more optimized code.

One change that we have also made is to remove the community link feed. Over the years this was a great way to get exposure to community links, but unfortunately was also home to a lot of spam. So with this iteration we’ve left it behind.

Also at the moment sites with Flickr groups don’t have it showing, but don’t worry that’ll be back. There’s just a problem with our Flickr plugin at the moment!!

There are still some more tweaks to do to the new design and a lot of post formatting to do to get our archives matching up with the new theme. But for all intents and purposes the new theme is now alive and well! Enjoy!

For the last couple of weeks Michael’s been working alongside me and is doing a fantastic job, confirming the adage that two loaves are better than one..

Meet Michael Williams

An Englishman (a gentleman?), a freelancer, a cook, but crucially; a Flash developer. Michael has been using Flash since version 5, though began seriously developing with it from CS3 onwards. Before that his programming experience lay within the server-side realms of ASP and C#, but these days he enjoys nothing more than developing Flash Games whilst teaching others how to do the same. He believes that games are a strong context for learning programming and maths.

You can visit his blog to dive into his AS3 tuts for beginners, see his work on flashgamelicense.com and follow his ramblings on twitter (@MichaelJW). You can also expect more great tutorials from him on Activetuts+!

27 Free Christmas Illustrations

The best thing about the holiday season is getting presents, so we asked the very talented Kai Loon to put together a special set of completely free illustrations to give away. The set includes 27 illustrations to mix and match with everything you need to make cards and promotions. Download the set for free, to use in personal or commercial projects.

Seasonal Files!

Around this time of year you often find yourself in need of some creative assets themed for Christmas, new year and the holidays! We’ve assembled some of the best seasonal files from around the Envato Marketplaces into 5 great collections:

1. Top Holiday Flash Files
2. Christmas & Holiday Music
3. Seasonal Vectors and Graphics
4. Holiday Themed Motion Graphics
5. Seasonal Email Templates

$7000 of Giveaways over 24 Days on AppStorm

Enjoy apps? Well our two App review blogs – Mac.AppStorm and Web.AppStorm – are running giveaways every single day for 24 days leading up to Christmas! It’s a total of 138 licenses worth over $7000 up for grabs, and David’s even thrown in a few free AppStorm holiday wallpapers! And if you enjoy AppStorm, look out for our third AppStorm site which is due to launch right after the giveaways, along with a redesign and a hub site at AppStorm.net!

Winter of WordPress

Selling WordPress themes has rapidly turned into a cottage industry allowing web designers and developers everywhere to earn a steady stream of income ranging from hundreds to many thousands of dollars a month. Because the quiet winter months are one of the best times to invest some time theming we’ve put together a little showcase site called Winter of WordPress to tell you all about the opportunities in WP theming!

96 Tuts+ Giveaways + Wallpaper + Caricatures

For 12 days starting on December 21st, Tuts+ is going to be hosting a massive set of 96 giveaways across all 8 Tuts+ sites including pillows, books, Amazon vouchers and Plus memberships. On New Year’s Day there will also be a special 2010 wallpaper by James White and our very own Ian Yates is putting together caricatures of the entire Tuts+ team

Special Edition Comics Plus ThinkGeek Giveaways

Over on our work blogs FreelanceSwitch and WorkAwesome we’re celebrating the holiday season with ThinkGeek and Marketcircle giveaways along with our annual NC Winter’s FreelanceFreedom and Memo:random special comic strips!

Happy New Year from Envato!

So keep an eye out for it all happening across the Envato network throughout December! And from all of us here at Envato, have a lovely holiday season and a happy new year!

Last week Adobe asked us to change our name and URL so that it would no longer contain the term ‘Flash’, which is a registered trademark of Adobe. We know that the success of our sites is about the community and content, not the names. So here at Envato HQ we’ve been busy thinking up new names and we think we’ve found a great new home for both our marketplace and our Tuts+ blog on Flash.

As of today the two sites now live at ActiveDen and Activetuts+.

The new names amend the use of the word Flash, open us up for adding other technologies and are short and memorable! To kick off the new names I thought I’d round up a few of the best tutorials and items on the sites:

Kick Ass Flash Files – ActiveDen

Without a doubt the leading marketplace for Flash files, ActiveDen has some really popular files. Here are a few of the latest:

More Popular Items on ActiveDen

Killer Flash Tutorials – Activetuts+

Though it’s one of our newer Tuts+ sites, Activetuts+ is already brim full of quality Adobe Flash, ActionScript, Air and Flex tutorials and gaining momentum with every passing week. Here’s a few of the standout tutorials:

1. Build a Fluid Website Layout
   A fluid web layout uses 100% width (and height) of the browser, floating all the contained elements into certain positions. This is opposed to fix-width layout where contents remain fixed no matter what the browser size is…

2. Create an Attractive Digital Clock in Flash
   ActionScript 3.0 is a very powerful language, capable of creating anything from simple and light utilities to full-featured desktop applications…

3. Build a Mini Golf Game with ActionScript 3.0
   In this tutorial I´ll show you how to create nice Mini Golf Game with ActionScript 3.0. We´ll work with Event Handlers, Functions and also the Timer Object which is a really cool feature in AS3…

4. Build a Dynamic Flash Gallery with Slider Control
   In this tutorial, we’ll create a gallery which displays all image files in a given directory. A slider is used to browse easily through the images…

5. Create a Shuffle Gallery in Flash Using XML and ActionScript 3.0
   In this tutorial I’ll explain how to access and use the Display List whilst creating an XML based image gallery with ActionScript 3.0 …

6. Create a Glowin Mouse Trailer in Flash
   Mouse Trailers are objects which follow the mouse cursor as you move it. In this tutorial, I’ll help you create a blue and shiny mouse trailer using ActionScript 3.0 …

More Flash Tutorials on Activetuts+

More About The Change

You can read more about the change on the ActiveDen Blog or on TechCrunch. There’s also a super long discussion thread on the ActiveDen Forums.

I’d also like to take a moment to say thanks to everyone for helping us with the transition and supporting FlashDen through three years of amazing growth and community, here’s to many more as ActiveDen!

New Logos

Our marketplaces were looking a bit tired in the visual department. After all, these are sites by a company whose middle name is ‘web design’! So we set about reinventing the wheel with a whole new look, starting from the top with new logos. The illustrations were updated by the super talented Kai Loon and we are usung the wonderful open source font MgOpen Modata…

New Interface

Interface builds don’t get much more complicated, detailed and spectacularly difficult than the new Envato Marketplace design. Fortunately our marketplace front-end dev is Stuart Richardson, a web developer who laughs at problems that make other web developers cry in desperation.

Stu has built a massive interface complete with menus that give us space to grow, a grid view/list view browse, a better site switcher to flick between the five marketplaces, a slick new look and feel and a wildly improved interface. It is easily the biggest, hardest, and I believe best set of websites we’ve built to date …

New Look’n'Feel

Our new look and feel doesn’t stop at the interface either. Thanks to the always talented Derek Herman and my new design wingman here at Envato – Rod Blackney – we have new blog designs, a new marketplace wiki, new Twitter backgrounds, new PollDaddy skins, new badges, a ton of new banners, new Envato Mail and a brand spanking new audio player (courtesy of Lance Snider)!

Also a big thanks to Liam Mckay, Aaron Lynch and Kai Loon who all helped me with concept designs for the new marketplace look and feel. I needed help giving the sites a fresh look, and these three guys delivered!

Features, Features, Features!

… In 1972, a crack commando unit of programmers was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Melbourne underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as ruby developers. If you have a site, if no-one else can build it, and if you can find them, well you still can’t hire the A-Team – because we already did.

And thank goodness for that, because for 3 months our crack ruby devs John, Erin, James, and Clinton have been pulling 10-14 hours shifts, coming in on weekends and doing whatever it takes to make the marketplaces … awesome! Here’s what they built …

1. Follow Authors

A little beta feature we’ve added is the ability to follow authors (yes, inspired by Twitter!) and view their latest files on your homepage. If it works well we hope to do much more with this baby!

2. Huge Forum Improvements

We’ve brought an all-new UI including first reply and last reply, better styles in the posts, email updates from forum threads, the ability to see threads and posts by a user, and a new recent threads sidebar. And we’ve hooked up the marketplace blogs and forums so you can chat about blog posts on the forums as well as see the latest news and announcements from inside the community!

3. Author Dashboard

If you’re one of our thousands of talented authors, you’ll appreciate the new Author Dashboard featuring latest comments, useful links, upload queue information, and latest author-only announcements!

4. Search Within, Search by Tags, Search by Attributes

We have been working hard to improve our search and packaged in with the launch are the ability to search within categories, portfolios, collections, search by tags, search by attributes, search users, search the wiki from support and many other search improvements!

5. File Types, Tags and More Item Page Improvements

Item pages are the core of our marketplaces, so we spent a lot of time making them more awesome. We’ve got a new audio player, inline video players for smaller videos, a "More Items By" section for authors to show off other items, a "File Types Included" area which we’re building icons into and enhancements to comments, tags and attributes!

6. Improved Extended Licensing System

Marketplace Manager Cyan has been working hard to improve our licensing system on the marketplaces and today we introduce our new Regular and Extended options allowing usage in all types of projects at more affordable rates. She has also written out plenty of helpful explanations of how and when to use different licenses in our marketplace wiki.

7. Collection Browsing, Rating and ‘Related Items by’

We’ve been slowly making collections more and more important. In this release you can now browse all public collections, as well as rate them! We’re now using collections to provide buyers with a way to find related items by showing top rated collections containing an item right on the item page!

8. New Wiki Housing Much More Information

Today also sees the launch of our new marketplace wiki at Wiki.Envato.com. It contains tons of articles, tips and FAQs about the marketplaces and gives us a storehouse to build a comprehensive knowledgebase about how to get the most out of the marketplaces!

9. Flourishes

… And there’s so much more! From multiple weekly features on the homepage to new smileys, a better rating widget to username checks on the sign up page, process bars to guide you through processes like signup and depositing to fields to allow users to show off social network profiles, more RSS feeds to Facebook pages, and lots of little features, flourishes and fixes!

Goodies #1 – Free Web Icon Set by TurboMilk

To help celebrate the launch we have a couple of goodies to giveaway. First up is a free set of 25 web icons in 3 sizes created by Eugene Artsebasov and the illustrious Turbomilk team!

Check them out over at GraphicRiver…

Goodies #2 – Marketplace Wallpapers

While the marketplaces are all clean lines and fresh highlights, we wanted to work in a bit of grunge for the blog designs. So Rod put together these super cool wallpapers which we reused in our Twitter and Blog designs. Grab one for your desktop…

What’s Next?

With the structure all in place we’re going to be working on tightening up the new layouts as well as fixing any little bugs (report any you see here). But more importantly we’re working on some big features to improve buying: shopping carts, and one-off purchases (so you don’t need to go through the deposit process).

We’re also going to be releasing not 1, not 2 … but 3 new marketplaces by the end of the year. Beginning with 3dOcean – our marketplace for 3d models, textures and all things three dimensional. Look out for that in October!

In the meantime on behalf of everyone on the team, we hope you enjoy the new design as much as we did building it!

1. ‘Existing member’ category

2. ‘New member’ category

WINNER: Alexandru Negru

Congratulations guys! Here’s what you’ve won:

If You Didn’t Win…

Don’t worry! There will be plenty of other awesome giveaways on the Tuts+ network in the coming months. We hope you enjoyed participating in Envato’s Birthday Celebrations and give a heartfelt thanks for going Plus and helping Tuts+ to be awesome!

We hope Tuts+ will continue to give you the skills that help you love what you’re doing and maybe earn some money doing it

All this before the end of September

We’re on a bit of a roll at the moment, what with the birthday celebrations, the launch of the new Envato.com website, lots and lots of recent upgrades to our server infrastructure and the launch of Phototuts+ … but it doesn’t stop there. Nope, in the next 6 weeks we have a rather huge amount of stuff planned which in turn means we’re all going to be working some serious overtime! Here’s what’s coming before the end of September:

• Plus coming to Aetuts+
  Since its inception Aetuts+ has been flying along. Now Skellie and new editor Adam Everett Miller are going to be taking things up a notch with the addition of bonus Plus content for members of our $9 a month Plus program.

• Email Templates coming to ThemeForest
  If you’ve ever designed HTML emails you know how painful it can be even with programs like Litmus. But soon you’ll be able to pick up affordable, high quality newsletter and email templates over at ThemeForest!

• Brand New "How to Be Awesome at Work" blog … a
  One of our most enduringly popular sites is FreelanceSwitch a site to make you better at freelancing. Well we’ve been thinking, what about everyone else – they probably want to be awesome too! So we’re launching a brand new blog called WorkAwesome.com. FreelanceSwitch editor Joel Falconer is at the helm and is compiling content for the new site for its imminent launch.

• 2 New AppStorm sites about Web Apps and Air Apps
  In 2009 thousands of Mac software junkies have discovered our little Mac Apps blog – Mac.AppStorm well we’re expanding out into two new areas – Web Apps and Adobe Air Apps. Look out for the first of these next week!

• The BIG one … Envato Marketplace Redesign
  This has been in development for almost three months now and finally the new marketplace design is approaching readiness. It’s a total overhaul of the look and is packed with all sorts of features, including forum improvements, interface improvements, author following, and much, much more. It’s going to be massive!

So look out for all this and more! It’s going to be a big couple of months!

Envato’s Birthday is over for this year, so the Tuts+ Birthday Bundle is no longer available. If you’ve come late to the party and are desperate for the files, you’ll get access to all of them (and hundreds more!) when you join our Plus program for just $9.

Recently our awesome Tuts+ interviewer Emil asked if I minded being video interviewed with some questions put forward by the Psdtuts+ readers. Since no-one really wants to see my enormous head on screen for too long a period of time, I asked my lovely wife and partner in crime Cyan if she’d be in on the interview and we thought we’d put up the video to help celebrate 3 years of Envato.

The Interview

So without further ado, if you’ve ever wondered about how Envato started or about who we are, I hope you enjoy this little interview of us!

Don’t like Blip.tv? View the interview on
YouTube as individual questions

Here’s to Another 3 Years!

It’s kinda hard to believe it’s been three years already! I still think of us as a startup. I can’t stress enough how thankful we are for all the readers, users, authors, buyers, and staff who have helped us these last three years. Something that’s really come home to me since we started Envato is that you don’t build great companies without lots and lots of great people. From all the positive comments we get, the good natured communities that have grown around our sites, the amazing files that get sold on our marketplaces and the kick-ass tutorials that people contribute to our blogs. I know I have a tendency of overusing the word awesome and I am guilty of typing far too many exclamation marks in my day, but hey what else can I say … it’s pretty awesome!!!

So enjoy the rest of our celebrations. I’ll be back tomorrow with some announcements of upcoming Envato sites that we’ll be releasing in the forthcoming weeks, so stay tuned!

Don’t Forget …

Meanwhiles there’s lots happening during this birthday celebration, so don’t forget to check out:

1. $300 of Files for Just $20!
   If you haven’t already taken advantage of this amazing deal, head over and grab it while it lasts! You won’t find better value anywhere! Get All The Details

2. Tuts+ iMac Giveaways & Bonus Tutorials
   The iMac giveaways are now well underway on Tuts+ and tomorrow there’ll be a whole stack of free tutorials and source files in the Tuts+ Bundle.

3. FreelanceSwitch Birthday Giveaways
   There’s Job Board subscriptions, Pixelmator, Billings, ForkLift, Freshbooks Shuttlebus subscriptions and copies of Rockstar Freelancer all up for grabs! Get all the details