Although the premium WordPress theme market has only been around for a little over 6 months now, there have already been several trends that have shown up. Each time a new premium theme author steps forward, they innovate and push the other authors to keep up and continue to improve their existing themes. This is why many of the top authors are regularly updating their existing themes to keep up with the competition.

In the end, the consumers are the ones that win, because they are getting better themes and a larger variety of themes to choose from when they go to make a purchase. So, what is the next trend we can expect with premium WordPress themes?

One thing I would like to see, though it is actually very basic, is that each theme including a print stylesheet. This of course is a separate stylesheet that is used when someone goes to print a website page. For example, one of the sites I run publishes a lot of recipes (1-2 per day). I needed a good print stylesheet so our readers can print our pages and have them display the recipe correctly on the page.

I’ll admit I’ve seen a couple premium themes that offer this, but a majority still do not. I personally believe the more you can do to make your theme appeal to more people, the more success a premium theme author will find. I believe a paying customer should expect things like multiple stylesheets available, multiple page and post layouts, an options panel. The more flexible it is, the better.

Hopefully we’ll start to see more and more of the print stylesheet showing up in the coming months. In the meantime, what trends would you like to see with the next generation premium WordPress themes?

If you ever visit our actual website, you’ve probably noticed the “Print This” button that we display below each post.  Depending on the type of website or blog you are running, having a button like this may be a good fit for your blog.  I’ve found it to be good to have this button available to readers for any type of website that offers tutorials, recipes, guides, or pretty much anything that might require a visitor to print something you’ve written.

If you think you’d like to offer your readers the option to print something on your blog, here is the code I use on my blogs (uses Javascript):

<a href="javascript:window.print()" rel="nofollow">Print This!</a></span>

It prints the page you are on, so it is probably best to use it mostly on post and pages.  If you place it on the blog’s homepage, it will print the entire homepage, not just that post. 

This guest post was written by Jean-Baptiste Jung, who maintains a blog (written in French) that covers WordPress. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

Inspired by the well-known Mimbo theme by Darren Hoyt, OpenBook is a free Magazine style Wordpress theme, which doesn’t require you to manually edit a file.

I first realeased this theme in January, but at this time it was only available in French. So it is the very first English version.

Download OpenBook

Download OpenBook 2.2 Wordpress Theme: zip archive

If you’re looking for a live demo, check out my personnal blog which uses this theme.

OpenBook Features

Here’s what you can expect in OpenBook theme:

• Magazine-style homepage, including 2 columns and SmoothGallery for your featured posts.
• 100% Gravatar compatible.
• Custom fields to insert images on the homepage gallery, on homepage posts and in categories posts.
• Magazine-style dropdown-menu for your categories.
• Not manual editing required. After installing the theme, you’ll find an OpenBook tab under Design, where you can set up the options for the theme, including featured posts, featured category, blog logo, number of posts to display on the gallery, categories to display on the blog homepage…
• If you hate Internet Explorer 6 as I do, you’ll probably be happy: OpenBook have an option which litteraly crash IE6 if checked. If unchecked, IE6 will not crash and people who (still) use it will see your blog just as other users.
• Compatible with Firefox 2, Firefox 3 beta, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 6. (OpenBook is also probably compatible with other browsers like Konqueror, I just haven’t tested it myself)
• Widget-ready sidebar
• SEO-friendly titles
• Page templates for Links and Archives
• Compatible with Wordpress 2.3 to 2.5.1

Installing OpenBook

OpenBook install is like installing any Wordpress theme: Unzip the archive, and upload the openbook22-en directory into the wp-content/themes of your Wordpress install.

Then, go to your WP administration panel, Design » Theme and select OpenBook.

Now, you should go to Design » OpenBook and fill the various fields:

• Your blog logo url
• ID of your featured category
• Number of posts to display in SmoothGallery.
• IDs of categories to display on the homepage.
• If you want to make any IE6 crash, just check the related checkbox.
• Number of posts to display on the homepage, by category

Configuring SmoothGallery

SmoothGallery is a very pretty mootools script by Jonathan Schemoul which display posts along with big images. In order to configure it, you must create a new category (In this exemple, we’ll call it featured) and report its ID to Design » OpenBook.

When you want to show a particular post in the SmoothGallery, just edit the post and check the featured category. Of course, you can add the post to other categories as well.

Now, you should define an image that will display in SmoothGallery. Juste create a custom field, give it featuredimg as key and your image url as value. Once saved, the post will be displayed in SmoothGallery.

The ideal SmoothGallery image size is 600*250 pixels. You can use different size, but the image will be cropped or will not fill all the available space.

Using custom fields to display images in posts

As I said above, it is possible to assign one or more image(s) to a post. Theses images will be displayed on the homepage, or in categories pages, depending of the custom field used.

Here’s the custom fields keys, and the place where the images will be displayed.

• featuredimg » The image will be displayed in SmoothGallery (Only if the related post is in the featured category)
• Image » The image will be displayed along with its related post, on the homepage.
• catimage » The image will be displayed in category pages. Ideal size is 125*125 pixels.

Please note

The OpenBook theme is (and will stay) 100% free. I also try to always help people who use it as much as I can. The only thing that I’m asking, is that you leave my link on the theme footer. Thanks in advance

Edit on July 3, 2008: I just wrote a simple tutorial for modifying OpenBook color scheme. You can read it here.

Friday we took a look at a large variety of news and magazine premium WordPress themes, and yesterday we took a look at small business premium WordPress themes. Today I wanted to cover my favorite type of premium WordPress theme, this time focusing specifically on the premium blog WordPress themes.

When the premium WordPress market was originally formed, pretty much every theme was focused specifically on behaving like a content management system. There were some great themes released, but it always surprised me that there didn’t seem to be any real premium blog themes for sale. Fortunately in the six months since then a few nice premium blog themes have been released and they really do a great job of taking your blog to the next level.

I expect this area of the premium WordPress market to continue to grow, so this post will probably receive a lot of updates over the coming months. Enjoy!

Blubs Theme

• Clean and Elegant Design
• 2 columns flexible layout
• Navigation Dropdown Menu
• Widgets ready on sidebar
• Serach bar at the top
• Ready for125px and 250px ads integration
• Separated comments/trackbacks
• Built-in gravatars in comment section
• Print.css stylesheet
• Author Profiles & Archives
• Clean & valid codes - XHTML 1.0 Strict + CSS 2.1
• Cross browser compatible - tested on IE/Win, Opera, Firefox, Safari/Win.

Single-Use ($49.95), Multiple-Use ($99.00)

Source/Demo | Purchase

Omni theme

Single-Use ($79.95, Multiple-Use ($199.99), 4-1 Pack ($299.95)

Source/Demo | Purchase

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Yesterday we took a look at some of the best news and magazine premium WordPress themes.   Today I wanted to take a look at another area of the premium WordPress themes market, this time focusing on the themes being designed specifically for small businesses in mind. 

Some small business premium WordPress themes are created with very specific businesses in mind, while most can easily be adapted to just about any small business that needs a content management system or business blog setup.    I’ve attempted to feature all types of small business themes below.

Revolution Pro Business Theme

• Featured homepage with section for recent company news
• Featured section page with area to focus on latest blog posts
• Blog sidebar to accommodate 125×125 advertising banners
• eNews & Updates section configurable with Feedburner
• Google AdSense integration in between posts and comments
• Section, Archive, Blog page templates

Single-Use ($79.95), Multiple-Use ($199.95)

Source/Demo | Purchase

Essence Theme (6 Color Combinations to Choose From)

• 7 inside page layouts
• Elegant look and feel of traditional website
• Static home page
• Integrated blog templates
• Two header options: Text or graphic

Single-Use ($79.95), Multiple-Use ($249.95)

Source/Demo | Purchase

[Continue Reading...]

Do you find you switch WordPress themes a lot?  If you do, Chris Pearson has taken the time to write a great post about using WordPress functions to ease the transition between themes.   The idea is to put all your design elements in one file and then move the file over to your new theme every time you switch, saving you the time of re-coding the specific elements you like to see in your blog’s theme.  

In his post, Chris provides the functions file to get you started, teaches you how to write your own functions, and then explains how to activate and use your new functions. 

I personally have used a functions file on some of my themes, but for me it hasn’t really saved much time.  That is probably because I’ve always prefered to hack my existing theme when I want to see changes, rather than to switch to a completely new theme.   For people that switch themes a lot, a user functions file is definitely something you should consider doing.