Are you someone who enjoys crawling and participating on forums?   Based upon feedback from our readers, many of you are.   To tell you the truth, if it is a topic I am passionate about (like WordPress), I am too!

With that said, it is my pleasure to announce that the WordPress Forums are now live.  WPForums.com was built to be an unofficial WordPress forum and to support the WordPress community in a variety of ways.   There is a little of everything!

As of launch, here are the forums we already have available:

• WordPress Discussions - Here we have forums setup to discuss WordPress News, beta releases and release candidates.
• WordPress Support - I often get support questions on old posts in our archives and find it difficult to keep up.   Now people can post their questions in the appropriate forum here and solicit input from the WordPress community!   When you ask a question, the post is moved to the top, making it easier and much quicker to get feedback from other WPForums.com users!   Current forums include getting setup on WordPress, troubleshooting WordPress, WordPress hacks and tutorials, and a discussion of other WordPress resources.
• WordPress Themes - Here we’ve got a separate forum for sharing and discussing free WordPress themes, premium WordPress themes, and we even have a forum dedicated to showcasing your WordPress theme.  I can see these forums being a good way for theme authors to get more exposure for their theme releases as well.
• WordPress Plugins - Like the themes, we wanted a place where people can discuss both free and premium WordPress plugins.   You can promote your plugin or publish a review of an existing plugin.
• WordPress Employment - Whether you are looking to hire someone for some WordPress-related work (coding/design) or you are looking for work, we’ve got you both covered.   The WordPress Employment section is designed to bring buyers together with sellers.  One forum allows freelancers to post their resumes.   The other forum is a great place for people to post what they need and get connected to someone that can do help.

Going forward, we are open to adding additional forums which may be in demand, so let me know if you’d like to see something added.   I also have plans to upgrade the design at some point soon, so keep an eye out for that.

Any questions or comments?  Leave those below.   Otherwise, go check out WordPress Forums already! 

Update: One reader has mentioned problems registering.  If you are having problems, please post the details below and I’ll get it looked into right away.  With that said, I just attempted to register and it worked fine so I don’t anticipate any problems.

Over the past month, I’ve been limiting my theme discussions in an effort to spend more time on hacks, news, tips, etc.   On occasion, though, a theme will really catch my eye and I’ll share it here.   This is one of those occasions.

If you are someone that enjoys a very flexible WordPress theme, you’ll want to check out the latest release from the team over at Woo Themes called Thick theme.  The first thing that will jump out at you is the color combinations available and the lifestream feature.  Want to display your latest “tweet”?  You can easily do that with your theme.

Here are the other impressive features you’ll get with this theme:

• 20 different styles & color schemes available - including grunge & clean, and light & dark designs (all included with purchase)
• 3 different widgetized spaces with oodles of custom widgets to allow you to move content around as your heart desires
• An integrated lifestream to publish all of your online activities elsewhere
• Two alternative header layouts for  you to play around with
• Integrated Theme Options (for WordPress) to tweak the layout, color scheme etc. for the theme;
• Automatic Image Resizer, which is used to dynamically create the thumbnails and featured images;
• Built-in Gravatar Support for Authors & Comments;
• Integrated Banner Management script to display randomized banner ads of your choice site-wide; and
• Asides / side blog functionality.

As great as that feature list is, in order to get a true appreciation for everything this theme offers, you’ll want to check out the Thick Theme demo.   Here is a screen shot of the homepage:

Despite all the extras this theme offers, Woo Themes has stayed true to their price, offering this premium WordPress theme for the same price as all of their other themes.   You can get a single-use license for $70.00, a developer’s license for this theme for $150.00, or if you have a large blog portfolio, you can get all of the themes from Woo Themes if you invest in their Theme Club.

A little over a month ago, Brian Gardner of Revolution Themes made a bold and brave move when he decided to convert his business model to something closer in line with the spirit of open source.   With this change came a lot of questions, with the primary question being what would happen to people who purchased these themes?  Were they screwed?

After his initial announcement, Brian quickly addressed the concerns of his “clients” by explaining that all existing themes would never be made available for free and would be retired.  The new open source business model will instead contain only 100% new themes.   Brian held true to his word and the 8 themes available at the launch of Revolution Two were all completely new.  The old site was taken down and the old themes are now gone for good.

In a different, yet similar situation, Woo Themes recently celebrated their first birthday (birthday includes 8 months under the name of Premium News Theme).   In what turned out to be a controversial move, they actually released a copy of their original premium theme for free to the public.   Unfortunately, this is the exact same theme that a large number of people paid $79.95 or $99.95 for (the original price for the first 8 months).   Is this fair to those people?  Should others who bought themes from Woo Themes also be concerned that a theme they had paid for may also later be released for free?

According to the Blog Herald, here is the official response from Adii of Woo Themes:

We don’t believe that releasing a year old theme for free infringes on our users’ rights, as they have not only bought a theme from us, but also all the goodies that goes along with that purchase (in terms of support, tutorials, theme-specific customization help etc.). We have also been in touch with all of our users and worked out an acceptable situation internally.

Now, I have no idea what the workout was (I’d guess buyers got to pick another theme of their choice for free?).  For the sake of this discussion, it doesn’t really matter, as this post is not about Woo Themes or Revolution Two.   It was just inspired by the situations described above.  What I want to know from our readers is what rights should someone have if they purchase a premium WordPress theme?  

The niche as a whole appears to have taken a significant hit with the launch of Revolution Two, and other theme designers have been stepping up and releasing premium-quality themes for free as well.   I think for the premium WordPress themes market to survive over the long haul, theme authors need to come together and some standards need to be put into place and followed.   If not, there is a good chance that buyers will lose trust in some designers and the niche will suffer as a whole or disappear completely as a result.   That, or it will continue its shift to more of a theme club setup.

What do you think?  If you pay money for a WordPress theme, what priviledges are you entitled to as a buyer?   Should there be a guarantee that it won’t eventually be free?  Should you get lifetime code updates?    Share your take in the comments below!

Though there are a large number of free WordPress plugins available to meet most WordPress blogger’s needs, generally speaking, when you are looking for a quality affiliate marketing plugin, you’re going to need to browse through the premium WordPress plugins available.

In today’s post I want to introduce you to a new premium plugin named Auction Thumbs.   For people that maintain a WordPress blog which discusses products that convert well on eBay, this plugin might be very profitable for you!

How Does Auction Thumbs Work?

If you’ve ever used BANS or another software to build an eBay niche store that takes advantage of eBay’s affiliate program, then you’ll have a general idea how this plugin works.   Auction Thumbs allows any WordPress user to fully integrate eBay’s affiliate program into their blog in just a few minutes.

Simply activate the Auction Thumbs plugin, enter your eBay campaign code (you can generate one in your eBay Partner Network account), and select where you want to place your ads.   With this plugin, you can easily display your eBay ads in any/all of the following places:  display a gallery of thumbnails, display pictures below each post, or as a widget in your blog’s sidebar!   By default, thumbnails will immediately show up in the footer of every current and archived post on your blog upon activation, but it comes with a fully configurable admin panel so you can control everything from the WordPress dashboard.

The plugin will then display relevant auctions (it matches the tags assigned to your post with eBay’s inventory) and when someone clicks on it, they are taken to that eBay auction.   Of course that is only the beginning, as a 7-day cookie is placed in their web browser and you get a percentage of EVERYTHING that person buys during that time.

The author lists the following features which are included with the purchase of Auction Thumbs:

• No messing with script or programming - add Auction Thumbs through standard WordPress plugin administration
• Installation and configuration can be done in a few minutes
• Thumbnail size, border color, count are all configurable
• Track revenue granularity with up to four eBay campaign numbers

Quick note about Auction Thumbs: PHP 5 and curl need to be running on your server. Please ask your hosting provider whether they are present on your server if you are unsure. It will not work on PHP 4.

Where Can I Purchase Auction Thumbs?

If you decide you want to purchase auction thumbs, it normally only costs $47.00, but WPHacks.com readers can use promo code “wphacks” to receive $15.00 off, meaning you can use this plugin on unlimited sites for only $32.00!

To give you an idea of this plugins potential value, when I purchased BANS a few years ago (costs $97.00), I made that investment back in under a month and a half.  Everything after that was pure profit and is still providing steady income today.  I’ve been using Auction Thumbs for a few days now on my video game blog and my book review blog, where I expect this plugin to convert well, and expect more of the same success as I’ve enjoyed with Build a Niche Store.

Are you following the WordPress Recipes blog?    If not, you really should be!   My fellow blogger and friend Jean-Baptiste Jung has created this blog to feature a number of “recipes” or code snippets.   In addition to the content, he’s also got a great design that has been getting attention all throughout the blogosphere.

In his latest recipe, Jean explains how to add a “Send to Twitter” link to your blog, or what I prefer to call it, a “Tweet This!” link.   The idea is to add a link on your blog (usually below the content) that people can simply click to discuss the post on Twitter.

If you’d like to add a “Tweet This!” link to your blog, here is the code you’ll need:

<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Currently reading <?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Click to send this page to Twitter!" target="_blank">Tweet This!</a>

I would think that this could potentially be another great way to fetch traffic, possibly even better than a “Digg This!” link or something else along those lines.