This theme comes in a variety of pre-selected color patterns that make it good to go right after installation. In addition, it’s one of the most flexible and easy to modify free WordPress themes I’ve ever come across. I’m using it for a World of Warcraft site I run called Alterac Volley and, as you can tell if you visit the site, I’ve heavily modified the original Typebased theme and I did it with ease and very little trouble.

If you’re looking for a clean and simple WordPress theme that gives you a lot of flexibility than I recommend you give Typebased a try.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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”.

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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.

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This sounds pretty cool based soley on the reputation of FlashDen. It’s probably going to share a lot of characteristics with that site. Unfortunately, it’s apparently also going to be sharing FlashDen’s payout structure and that is pretty atrocious.

The best you can hope for, right out of the gate, is 25% for every sale of your theme. That percentage escalates (if you make your theme exclusive to ThemeForest) with the more themes you sell but the maximum you can ever make per sale is 50%. I’m not sure I like those rates very much but I’m positive a lot of theme designers will go for it because of the people behind ThemeForest.

I’ll keep an eye on this as it develops and post more about it in the future.

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There have only been 9 themes added since the directory opened several days ago. Fortunately for those nine themes, the lack of selection means they’ve been downloaded a combined 15,000 times at the time of this post. Anyone who can somehow manage to get their theme up on this directory right now is going to get some pretty incredible exposure.

Hopefully the rate of submissions and approvals ramps up soon so that the WordPress community finally has a trustworthy resource for free themes.

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Recently, many sites are popping up offering free WordPress themes for download. That should be no surprise as there are already many similar sites on the web today. The twist with this new breed is that they’re posting freely available themes from other sites and then stripping out or adding in spam links to each theme.

Of course, they are being paid for those links while the original theme designer receives nothing and also has his creation modified against his will. A lot of these sites are being found and reported to designers in the WordPress community each day.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure there is a whole lot that can be done to stop them. If one happens to be shut down it would be pretty trivial for another one to spring up and take its place in short order.

Just remember to be careful about what themes you’re downloading and from where.

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For those of you who may not remember, Prologue is a free theme the folks over at Automattic released back in January of this year. It is, essentially, a simple self hosted Twitter clone using WordPress as the back-end and a highly customized theme for the front-end.

Any companies using Twitter as a means of social instant messaging might want to look into using Prologue instead. Twitter has been experiencing such awful server issues that it is no longer a reliable service at all.

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