Introducing Uno Urban

Months ago, I started develop my own blog theme for Ghost and I did it open source under the name of Uno Zen.

I named it Uno Zen because it’s based on another theme created by a designer called Uno. Instead of creating my theme from zero, I decided to use Uno as scaffold, I refactored it and I created my own version.

Nodaways Uno Zen is near to 500 stars on GitHub, ~400 commits and ~60 releases. The theme is broadly used around the world, and it has thousands of downloads. Not bad, right?.

Actually, since I started this project, I learned a lot about developing under the Open Source’s umbrella, and that’s great. But what I learned the most is how to create a community of close people interested in the good health of a project.

Although it has been hard (I think is a question of attitude that you show continously your interest in other’s opinion: the way you reply issues, how you make releases announcements, how the documentation is presented, etc). The community can improve a LOT the project.

Now is moment to talk about the future; I want introduce 🎉 Uno Urban 🎉.

Uno Urban is what you are seeing. It’s this blog you’re now reading. Uno Urban is similar to Uno Zen, but slightly different. It’s sexy and you know it.

Uno Urban’s codebase (3.x) is a natural evolution of Uno Zen’s (2.x). I detected a set of premium improvements around Uno Zen, and I decided to develop it under a new namespace.

Two things about that.

First, Uno Zen, will continue free and Open Source forever, so don’t worry.

Second, I want to explain what premium means to me. For the customer’s side, it means a higher quality product. In the developer side (me), it means that I need to put more effort in preparing every single new feature.

I love work in this project, but I have a lot of projects that need my attention, so I decided release this new iteration as digital product (with a good set of basic premium features, good documentation and tech support) and, if exists enough people interest in, develop the rest of features because people is paying my time for do that. I think that is a total win win.

Uno Urban costs $5, that is more or less the price you pay for a McMenu. It’s looks clean, with a excelent perfomance and with a release every week 😁.