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.

After my last post about using RSS feeds for content, I thought it would be a good idea to spotlight a theme that takes the concept one step further.

The OneNews theme offers users a very nice copy of the concept at the popular news aggregation site Popurls. Popurls is a site built around the idea of taking multiple RSS feeds from popular sites and displaying them all on one easy to browse page. OneNews takes that same idea and builds a similar site using WordPress as the platform. This is definitely not your standard blogging theme.

You can check out the demo for yourself to get a better understanding of what OneNews has to offer. There are two versions: a free and premium edition. The premium version of the theme costs $49 USD for a single use license and a multiple use license will set you back $138 USD.

Choosing a WordPress theme is a very important step to running a successful WordPress blog. Presentation is always a factor in how successful a website runs; do you think Yahoo or MSN would be popular with an amateur looking presentation? The answer to that question is no. These websites all had a design that made it great for people to enjoy, making them wanting to come back.

So when you are picking a new theme, you want to make sure it matches your site. What do I mean by this? This means that you want to make sure the content and your theme match; if you are writing about how bad life is I am sure you would not want a fluffy cloud theme would you? So how can you decide if a theme will match with your content?

Well that is really simple, if you take the time to download the theme, and upload it to your site, you can see what it looks like without even activating it. All you need to do is click on one of your available themes and it will show you exactly what your WordPress blog will look like with that theme.

So the next time you are picking a theme and you are not quite sure, why not just take the extra minute to download the theme and see what it will look like with your content. This can help you decide between a great theme for your blog and an theme that is just “OK”.

When we all install Wordpress for the first time, we all have the “Wordpress Default” theme. Most Wordpress users change the theme to a theme that matches their site and their site’s content. However, when you go in and actually change the theme, you see your list of themes, and among them is “Wordpress Classic”. This made me start wondering if anybody actually uses Wordpress Classic, and if not is there an actual purpose for it?

I searched google and other search engines to see if I could find a blog that was using the Wordpress Classic theme, and if they were, I wanted to see if it was a successful blog. However I could not find a blog with this particular theme. I guess no blog would have its theme in the description, so that is probably why I could not find it.

Since I could not find the theme, we are going to pretend that nobody uses it. So since nobody uses the Wordpress Classic theme, is there a point of actually having it pre-installed? The answer to that is yes, because you have to remember that there are some people out there that have no idea how to run a website. There are mothers out their who run a blog, and have no idea how to customize it. This theme gives extra customization for the people that do not know how to customize it them selves.

Then who knows, maybe there are blogs out their that use theme, and maybe they are successful.