Over the last three days we’ve been steadily rolling out a new Tuts+ theme across all 8 sites. The new design is a refinement more than a big change, with lots of little improvements in usability and more suited to big screens. Read on to learn more about the redesign and lots of news about Plus!
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!
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wow. I can imagine what plus.org cost you!
Like I said on twitter, I love the new improvements to the design. Some great improvements and I am intrigued by the Creative Sessions you mentioned.
Keep up the awesome work. You’re an inspiration to guys like me who are wanting to follow in your footsteps and build a network of sites and make a living doing it.
What! You like the new theme! I loved the old theme. You should have an option to change back to the old theme. And where is the beautiful huge footer! I loved that! Please Please! PLEASE bring it back.
And the listing of the post is mest up.
I love the new designs—crisp and clean and still very Envato-looking :-D Would you mind sharing a bit more about the hosting architecture and who you went with?
The new theme looks nice… but I think its pretty slow… ;)
Flow, we have been hard at work with many major improvements to speed up the sites, can you please be more specific as to what the problem is your currently having? I would love to hear more of a description that “it’s pretty slow” so I can try and fix the underlying problem. Thanks for the heads up in advance, it’s important to me that the site is loading fast and available to as many users as possible and we want your experience on the Tuts+ network to be awesome!
Cheers,
Derek
Looking good guys – can’t wait to see what you do with Plus.org! Your sites have always been an absolute design inspiration :)
OMG! I’m excited for all the things that you guys are going to roll out in the next few months. Also The new Tuts+ redesign is amazing! Awesome work!!
Beautiful redesign! Will the pricing still be the same for “Premium” access as opposed to “Plus”.
Awesome Collis! Creative Sessions sounds really interesting.
Also, all the little additions that you have added definitely just makes the TUTS+ sites even better. Great job all around Envato team!
I like the new one. Great Envato
great looking redesign. Sad to see the Community Feed go, but everything is looking great!
Awesome!! I really like the new design!
Keep it up!!
Yes!
Looks awesome! Normally I don’t like wide designs but you have done a great job. It’s ver refreshing with loads of red and the colorful “other sites” section.
The theme also has a smaller version when your browser is not able to support the wide one. Try making your browser smaller and you’ll see what I mean.
Cheers!
I’m a little confused… Is the paid plus member ship going away?
Hey David, we’re just renaming it to Premium that’s all :-) Because we want to use the word “Plus” for our top level domain soon, so it’d get pretty confusing otherwise.
Falling in love with it :)
My only complainant would be that the new layout doesn’t emphasis the “About the author” section, as much as the previous layout.
Apart from that, Great work!
Unfortunately, in order to support the previous themes “About the Author” section we were doing some WP practices that I consider a no-no, and in the spirit of correcting while updating, we settled on the current style over bad practices.
Cheers!
OK update. I do have some issues though, which I hope you take as positive criticism:
I don’t like how everything thing is big and chunky. The layout could seriously be streamlined so I can see the information without scrolling down 20 pages. Along with this, the article title doesn’t need to be ridiculously large.
I’m still waiting for the day that this site logs me in automatically. It is really annoying to read an old article, find out it requires plus membership, be redirected to a login page, then try to find the same article in the plus content section. When any other modern webpage would keep track of me being logged in and provide a direct download link in the article to the plus content instead of making me search for it. The entire plus section of the site is generally useless.
It would also be nice to be able to selectively hide articles that I’ve already read or have no interest in reading.
How come when I go to psd.tutsplus.com there is no dashboard link at the top? I have this ‘Other Plus Sites …’ section, but it’s duplicate links from the top, and is an eyesore.
The Home page is filled with old articles that don’t have thumbnail images… The premium section doesn’t have thumbs either.
I would also highly recommend redesigning the dashboard to be better organized and remove the ridiculously large header that takes up half the window. Again, the majority of the information on this site could be presented in a much cleaner, streamlined fashion.
Looks good, although I’m getting a scrollbar in Firefox 3.6 on my 13″ MacBook Pro (1280×800), the scrollbar is allowing only very minimal scrolling (window maximized). I don’t get the scrolly if I use Safari 4.04.
the new layout is good! but i feel the rounded corner hover in main navigation is not a match with the layout ! a bit old!
but overall pretty good effort! good luck!
good work !
IT’S MASSIVE!!!!!!!!
Hey. The site looks neat, great interface. But I have one problem. The design doesn’t work with other browsers like Opera Web Browser. It works great with IE and Firefox, but I use Opera more cause I don’t have Firefox (haha). I hope this get’s fix. Thanks. :)
Uh really? Looks just fine in Opera to me.
I like the new one. very useful to me…
Very nice, clean redesing Collis.
I would have loved to see google custom search, the wordpress search doesn’t seem to be effective enough when you have so many articles.
BTW, I’m not able to see any images and in some pages the stylesheet is not loading…
fails in opera…
I loved old one, and I like this new one :) ….always innovative, we learn much from you Envato
Love the refresh. It feels much more open and makes the content easier to read. I’m also looking forward to some of the new updates. It seems like everything you all roll out is amazing. Keep rockin it!
It’s Super., Envato rocks! BTW Is it just me, not seeing some of post images??
The new Designs are Awesome! Nice work guys
Hey guys!
I really like the realign and I also can’t wait for mobiletuts! Great!
its look really nice! great job on the redesign and I will be coming back.
I can’t see a stylesheet at all :/ Just a unstyled page of text and images.
Is it just me that has the problem where images load really slow if at all?
I really like the idea of expanding tutsplus to a web school. Keep it up!
One word … Beautiful :D
Love the new layout, always love how Envato plan what they want and do it! Im amazed how the community has grown.
I look forward to the future of Envato :)
I’m really looking forward to Mobiletuts+
I don’t know if it’s just me, but Creatica said it had a server issue and across all tutplus sites, some of the thumbnails won’t load. Also, vectortuts has no layout for me, just all text. Is this my issue or server issues? ive never had this problem before.
Hi Collis. Like the redesign.
One question though. In this educational section, I take it that you will be selling them per course (similar to lynda.com). What does this mean for the authors? Will there be a royalty for each purchase made or do you plan on keeping it at a flat $150 for any submission – educational, plus or otherwise?
Well, new design seems to be cool and convenient, but most pics in tutorials, news, articles and so on are not shown. check them out.
Just wanted to let you know that your tutorial images are not showing up on Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4 on Macs.
Great design as always, however no images are loading for me now…
Ugh, I can’t get this site to load properly at all, now no CSS is loading.
Loving the clean crisp lines of the new design. Great work, makes an already fantastic site just that much better.
Finally! I was waiting this for months. Nice redesign guys. Keep it up.
Honestly I don’t like this layout as much as the last… and the last one I didn’t like as much as the pre-Envato layout.. Not really digging everything being bigger and more spaced out. It seriously looks like the content is tailored towards the visually impaired. On my 15″ MBP (1440×900) everything’s crazy huge. One post is like my friggin’ entire screen. And navigation doesn’t really feel as natural as it used to. I also miss the pseudo-hidden funny quotes… Overall it feels like two steps backwards design wise. On the bright side I guess the UI tweaks are nice though.
Why doesnt the tutsplus.com webpages work properly? Pictures are missing and the layout gets crazy. Sorry my english isnt so good but perhaps someone knows whats going on? tutsplus worked just fine until yesterday but not anymore…I use the latest version of explorer and so on :) so its not my pc I think.
that’s right. it gets crazy like if the css file is missing.. :s
fantastic!
from this morning i don’t see the images which supports the tutorials
all my expirience to revolve the problem not give me any solutions
what may i do?
Nice redesign. Less is more. But the fact that Basix Tuts are rolling in is a little bit “meh”.
Keep on goin, you guys at evanto are rocking. :)
The design doesn’t work with Firefox and Internet Explorer (both last version)
I hope the broblem will be fix ,as soon as possible
I LIKE VERY MACH THIS SITE SO…. PLEASE do Something
wow, when I read the word ‘Redesign’ I got excited at a slick new interface.
I didn’t realise it would involve removing every last bit of styling from the site.
pretty unconventional step to take, be interesting to see how it goes down with people…
I guess they designed this theme for the practically blind… everything is HUGE!
Congrats on the new things happening around the tuts sites..I had seen the layout change originally on vector tuts and wondered when it would transfer over..definitely looking forward to contributing to the new tuts :)
Why is the site sooooo slow lately?