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.

The creators of FlashDen are getting ready to roll out their own theme marketplace soon. There’s an announcement about this new site, called ThemeForest, on a post at NetTuts.

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.

The official WordPress.org theme directory is a project that has been a long time coming. Finally, over the weekend, it was launched but it seems like it might not be totally ready for primetime just yet.

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.

The world of WordPress themes is a dark place, my friends. I’ve written before about the dangers of using free WordPress themes but things are only getting worse for this topic.

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.

With all of the downtime issues the popular service Twitter has been suffering from in recent months it might be time to look again at Prologue.

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.