When the premium WordPress themes market began to form towards the end of 2007, the entire idea was to provide a customized theme for an affordable price. The targeted audience was to fill the needs of serious bloggers and small businesses.

You may have also noticed that most premium WordPress themes offer a developers license (or multi-use license). This is because these themes were designed with developers in mind. Developers get the basic skeleton of a developed theme making it easy for them to hack the code and stylesheet to give their clients a custom look.

Yesterday I found a nice post over at WPZoom designed to showcase some premium WordPress themes that have been hacked to provide a custom look for the website. In fact, most you won’t recognize when lined up with the original premium theme template!

I think this post did a great job of not just showing some great designs, but also supporting the whole concept of the original intention of the premium themes market.

Hack WordPress was one of only 3-4 “WordPress” niche blogs that existed prior to the creation of the Premium WordPress themes market. As I sit back and reflect on the early days of the premium WordPress themes market, when Solostream’s themes were first being converted to premium, and Revolution was being launched, each existing WordPress blog was faced with a choice. Do we promote these themes? After all, WordPress was founded on open source, and each of us (WordPress founders, plugin/theme authors, and WordPress bloggers) were contributing our time and energy to improving the WordPress community without any compensation. Should these people be paid for what we do for free?

Some blogs ending up promoting them, while other blogs did not. I personally ended up making the decision that I would promote premium themes on this blog because I felt that they would help improve WordPress, and to this day I really think that they really have. Many of these authors are making so much money that they are able to make (and support) their themes as a full time job, which I think is pretty sweet. It also comes with a lot of responsibility, and the money allows these authors to truly focus, innovate, and make their themes more advanced, which advances WordPress as a whole. The bar gets set and all new themes are measured against them. It forces continued functionality and innovation. I truly believe that if the ability to monetize these themes didn’t exist for most of these authors, the quality of themes out there would be much lower because it wouldn’t be worth their time to try to raise the bar. Would we even have CMS themes for WordPress yet?

We also need to remember that this isn’t really any different than doing custom WordPress themes for people (such as Unique Blog Designs).  Premium WordPress themes have made it so people can afford a custom quality theme (in most cases) from an affordable price for a blogger or small business.  People with high income blogs can still afford to get there theme custom made.

One point I would also like to make is that I do think that people with WordPress blogs have an obligation to only promote products they do use or would use if the need for it presented itself. I’ve always made sure to be selective and only promote themes or plugins that I felt were truly of premium quality. I also try to only promote ones that are well supported by their authors. I can think of at least 20 that I’ve chosen not to promote here because of a number of reasons (invalid code, I felt wasn’t premium quality, etc.).

Anyway, regardless of my opinion of them, over the last 8 months premium WordPress themes have really found a home in the WordPress community, and I’ve even noticed that blogs have been created strictly for the purpose of promoting these themes. From the people I’ve talked to, the opinions of this market are mixed.

One person firmly against the premium themes market as a whole is Justin Tadlock, who recently wrote a post titled Screw the WordPress Themes Market. Justin is someone that I’ve been following for quite awhile now and have a huge respect for his opinions on all things WordPress. He releases a lot of great free WordPress themes, free WordPress plugins, and also blogs regularly about WordPress. Here is an excerpt from his post:

WordPress was built from a community of people willing to share freely. Yes, even themes. What? Yes, themes were free at one point. Good Great themes were free at one point.

I’m not going to beat around the bush here — stop releasing pay-for-use themes.

Sure, there’s a market there, but I don’t want to see every single mediocre theme have a price tag attached to it. Just because it’s a magazine-type theme doesn’t mean it’s a premium theme, or that it’s worth some form of funds anyway.

If you’re going to release a theme and call it premium, then you need to — in the words of a high school cheerleader — “bring it.”

I don’t have a problem with people releasing themes for money. It’s something I’ve considered on several occasions. What I do have a problem with is users getting screwed out of $100, $50, or even $30 because they bought a theme that’s mediocre at best, a theme that has invalid code, or don’t get the support they need for using the theme.

Reading Justin’s post actually reminded me of what I was saying when I wrote the post Premium WordPress Theme Responsibilities a couple months ago. To many people are releasing average themes and charging for them.

It seems everyone has an opinion about premium themes, and I’d love to hear yours. What is your opinion of premium WordPress themes?

With many of the top theme designers switching their focus to creating and selling premium WordPress themes, it is always good to see some premium quality WordPress themes being released for free.

Today’s theme is called WP Freemium, and it was originally created by Ptah Dunbar for BloggingTips.com. It looks like due to some complications, BloggingTips.com decided to go another route so Ptah has made this theme available for anyone for free.

Here are the advertised features:

• Valid xHTML Strict 1.0 / CSS
• Code is well commented for the non technical savvy
• Sidebar Widgets enabled
• Custom Front Page with 3 featuring articles
• By default - 6 advertisement spots on all pages
• Gravatars highly Supported for Comments, Author Profiles and Author Posts.
• Author Byline + Promotion on single pages
• Author Profiles feature prominent image of the author with bio, contact details and more
• Image Gallery Support
• Print Stylesheet is included.
• Favicon + iPhone Webclip icon Ready
• SEO Optimized title tags and headers
• 404 Error Page notifies admin each time someone stumbles across a broken link so they can fix it.

I was unable to find a demo, so here are some screenshots provided by the author:

Homepage

Single Page

Author Bio

Author Page

I really like how this theme was setup for a blog that has multiple authors, making it a great free option for anyone starting a multi-author WordPress blog.

If you’d like to get a copy for your WordPress blog, click over to get WP Freemium.

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?

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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