WP Assist » WP Themes

WordPress Theme Marketplace

Lisa — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 01:37:24 +0000

Matt Mullenweg, of Automattic, announced at WordCamp Argentina that Automattic will soon launch a service for premium WordPress themes. The idea? To provide a repository of ‘premium’ WordPress themes for sale. Designers make 50% of the revenue from themes that sell – - Automattic pockets the other 50%.

It will be interesting to see if this kills the free WordPress theme offerings. From a designers standpoint – why continue offering up free themes when you can submit them to this WordPress Themes Marketplace and make a buck, or two.

And what will the going price be for these premium themes? Is it a standard price – for instance will it be a blanket price for all themes? If not, will Automattic valuate each theme? Based on what criteria? Or will the designer be allowed to set the price? Maybe it will be an auction-type setup where users can bid on the themes that are only sold once?

I will guess that the designers who continue to provide good quality free themes to the WordPress community have more of an opportunity to get their names out and about, than designers who stick with the paid, premium themes. And there will always be a market for custom themes

Good designers are out there. A quick search on Google will help you find them and the themes they offer – - either free or premium. As a designer myself, I cringe at the idea of giving anyone 50% of the profit from my work. However, on the flip side – this will be a nice opportunity for theme users to find some good, quality themes for their sites.

As I’m writing this, I checked the original post and Toni Schneider (of Automattic) posted a clarifying comment to the thread:

Some bits of information seem to have gotten lost in the translation here. Most crucially, the theme marketplace will be launched for WordPress.com (not WordPress.org) users. We are enabling theme designers to offer paid themes to over 1.7MM WordPress.com users who currently can’t upload custom themes. The marketplace is separate from the existing thriving world of open source WordPress.org themes. Also, theme designers will set the price for their themes, not Automattic.

That clarifies things a bit more. WordPress.com users need to have a solution for customized themes. Other hosted blog solutions like Typepad and Blogger give their users the ability to customize their themes, as well as having a handful of premade, standard themes available to them. Although, Typepad and Blogger give their users that ability at no cost – as far as I know, WordPress.com is the only free, hosted solution that requires payment for such abilities.

Now, if only WordPress.com will allow their users to monetize their blogs a little.

UDATE – Matt Mullenweg made a post on his blog to clarify the Themes Marketplace issue:

Right now WordPress.com is a little bit like a clothing store with only XXL men’s pink ponchos available — not a lot of selection. We’d like to offer more products, hence the idea of a theme marketplace.

Imagine you’re a theme designer and if you do a custom one-off theme for a site like this you may get $500. (Keeping the numbers simple for the sake of argument.) Making a good theme is really hard, and you may only be able to do one a week. Now imagine you made a theme and uploaded it to our theme marketplace, then set a price of $50. You’re now an option on the dashboard of 1,736,206 blogs, if we split the price evenly and 20 of those 1,736,206 blogs purchase the theme, you just made as much as you would doing a one-off design. You can plug in different numbers and assumptions there and it’s pretty easy to see how this could be big for designers.

No offense to XXL men wearing pink ponchos, of course

Farms Really Big Theme Pack

Lisa — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 07:53:25 +0000

Do you run a WordPress MU site? Are you thinking of running a WordPress MU site? Do you know anyone who runs a WordPress MU site?

This post is about WordPress MU – could ya tell?

If you answered yes to any, or all, of the above questions – then run.. don’t walk – to download Farms Really Big Theme Pack

Just like the title of the theme pack suggests… it’s REALLY BIG!

In Farms own words…”Here’s my latest pack.. and it’s a whopper. It contains all the themes from the last pack, updated with Nevin’s fixes and a stack more besides. All in all there are 67 themes, all Widget compatible, all tested and in use of popular WPMU sites…”

Get ‘em while they’re hot (and they ARE hot!)

Custom CSS on WordPress.com

Lisa — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 01:24:47 +0000

It’s true! However, unlike the service you’re using to blog on WordPress.com – customizing the theme is not free. At the time of this post, the current cost is $15.00 per year to obtain access to the Custom CSS feature on your WordPress.Com account.

WARNING: The WordPress.Com Custom CSS feature is not for the faint-at-heart. It does require knowledge of CSS in order to accomplish the task (or hire someone to accomplish it for you).

In your WordPress.Com administration panel, click the Upgrades tab in the top menu to access the place you need to be in order to purchase the option. Once done, you are granted access to the CSS editor and are able to edit the CSS to style your template the way you’d like.

With the Custom CSS option, you do not have access to any of the template files (i.e.: header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php, etc). Rather, you have access to a stylesheet editor that creates an additional, Custom CSS file – and since your Custom CSS is loaded after the theme’s CSS, the styles in YOUR CSS override the styles in the original Theme CSS. Clear as mud? Good!

Not sure where to begin? Well, like I mentioned before – it does take some CSS know-how to accomplish the customization of the CSS of your WordPress.Com theme. Here’s how I would get started….

I use Chris Pearson’s Cutline theme on my own WordPress.Com account. If I wanted to start styling a new Style Sheet for it, I would begin with the basics.. by looking at the source code of my own blog….starting after the < /head> tag….

Any style element (also called selectors) you see can have a style applied to it in your Custom CSS. Some style elements include: body, id, class, span, ul, ol, li, p. For instance, in the image above, the very first style element you see is the body tag. This can have a style applied to it in the CSS like this:

body { margin:0; font-family:arial, verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; background-color:black; color: silver }

That style gives the margin definitions, the font you’d like to use, the font size, the background color of the page and the color of the text on the page.

The very next style element you see in that source code is:

...

Again, that element can be styled in your CSS in any way you’d like:

#container { width: 800px; background-color:white; border: 2px solid silver; padding: 5px; }

This style defines the width, background color, border size and color and padding of the container id.

All style elements that have an id (p id, div id, etc) must start with the hash symbol in the stylesheet. All style elements that have a class (p class=, div class=, etc) start with a period. For instance, this would be an id element in your CSS:

#container

While this would be a class element in your CSS:

.container

This is just some very basic information about styling with CSS. Here are some great CSS resources if you’re interested in learning more about it in order to customize your own CSS on your WordPress.Com account:

Have fun!