On November 1st, Brian Gardner, the author of the incrediblly popular Revolution Theme for WordPress, will be going to an Open Source release system for his future themes. He”ll be releasing his future themes for free and then charging people for tech support and modifications. All of the themes on his new site will be released under the GPL license that the people behind-the-scenes of WordPress are so incredibly fond of. You can read more about Brian’s move to Open Source over at this blog.
What impact will this move have on the theme community at large? My guess is not too much, at least in the early goings. With the global economy in a bit of a meltdown right now, my hunch is that lots of Premium Theme developers are going to be very gun shy about changing the way they are currently doing business. Especially since many Premium Theme developers appear to be doing quite well selling theme licenses for their works. A switch to Open Source and making 100% of your income on tech support and modifications might seem to risky for the other established theme developers out there.
If you’re on something of a budget and are looking for a new theme for your blog you might want to give the SitePoint Marketplace a look. While SitePoint is traditionally known as a place for website owners and buyers to come together and make deals, there is a specific division of the site solely for the buying and selling of themes and templates.
The Templates for Sale portion of SitePoint is frequently full of WordPress themes being sold by designers. 90% of these themes are being sold with exclusive rights so the winner of the auction will become to sole owner of the theme and it will never be sold again.
The pricing on these exclusive rights themes can vary wildly but if you have a few hundred dollars to spend on your blog you can find yourself with a very nice looking theme at a price that some of the more expensive freelance designers probably can’t compete with.
Over the years, Alex King has written and released a large number of incredibly useful plugins for WordPress. There’s one in particular I wanted to highlight for you all very quickly today called Delink Comment Author. I’ll let Alex describe it himself:
This plugin gives you the ability to remove the link a commenter left as their URL without removing the entire comment. A link to do this is added to your new comment e-mail notifications and to the comments list in your admin area.
What a great idea. I run multiple blogs and each one has the same problem of people leaving comments with their name being a keyword phrase. It drives me crazy but this is a great way to stop those people dead in their tracks.
You can download Delink Comment Author or check out its README first if you want to learn a little bit more.
