Get Rich Quick

Inevitably there are some how want to piggy back on the success of the premium theme market. This, again inevitably, means that some people get a bad deal when buying themes as they don’t know any better. This allows people to label small theme makers as “not to be trusted”, claiming they should only buy from any of a select number of “trusted” names.

It may just be a coincidence, but I’ve often found it’s the “trusted” people making these claims and whether they mean to or not it’s an incredibly clever way of ensuring their position at the top of the market is unchallenged. I don’t think having someone “everyone” has heard of behind the theme company should be a test for whether they’re any good or not. Whether the themes work well should be the test, surely?

Positive Competition

Or is it? The nature of the competition means if someone does something it’s incredibly easy for everyone else to copy it. And so they do. Perhaps without thinking whether it’s a good idea to include that function in their themes.

Affiliate Heaven

Premium themes have brought a new kind of menace to the WordPress community: the list post filled with ”100 Best Premium WordPress Themes“. Posts filled with affiliate links and screens of themes that, frankly, are a little bit rubbish. I’m looking at ThemeForest (the irony!) especially where designers trying to develop often leads to poor results and copying.

On the flip side though, they allow bloggers to share in the success of premium themes, earning a little extra income from supporting something that they (hopefully) genuinely believe is a good product. Some folks are even kind enough to buy advertising on sites like mine, something I and I’m sure others are very grateful for.

Dependency on WordPress

It’s obvious, but premium WordPress themes are dependant on WordPress and the continued success of WordPress. Woo have been the first to branch out into ExpressionEngine and then Tumblr, something I expect others will be doing too.

At the moment though, it’s in everyone’s best interests that WordPress continues to grow and it’s going to be interesting to see how all parties contribute. At this point it’s customary to cite what Woo did with the custom navigation. Trouble is there’s a limit to how many times something like that can be replicated as otherwise we’ll all upgrade one day to find colour pickers and widgets everywhere, something that’s not necessarily a good thing!

It’s all… shiny

Originally themes were designs. Then they became designs with functions stuck on. As I said earlier, because someone did it, everyone else copied. This has led to themes becoming not-quite-as-nice-to-look-at although recently there’s been a shift back to looking good instead of just functioning well. Personally, I think that whilst a theme can function awesomely, it’s not something that all themes need to do or even should do; fundamentally they’re designs and thus that should be the primary function of the theme — to look good.

Acceptance

They’re here to stay, I think everyone needs to realise that very quickly. Personally, I see no reason why there shouldn’t be some option for themes to be installed directly from the admin panel, but that’s something to argue about another day. Do let me know I’m wrong.

I don’t want to join most other blogs in publishing a useless list of features that will be coming to WordPress 3.o. Instead, I thought I’d do it a bit differently. Recently I interviewed Adii, Nathan Rice, Alex Cragg, Cory Miller and Ian Stewart. In that post I asked “what in 3.0 are you looking forward to working with?” today’s post will have a look at what 3.0 is going to do for themes.

Menu Manager

Adii, Ian, Nathan and Cory all said they were most looking forward to working with the new custom navigation in 3.0. Nathan said:

“It’s going to be one of the 3.0 killer features, for sure.”

And he’s not wrong. The developers have been struggling of late to find an easy to use alternative to list IDs of categories you don’t want to show and this seems to be the perfect solution.

Using it seems to be really easy too, making use of the template tag wp_page_menu() which was introduced back in 2.7.

Custom post types

This is certainly my favourite feature. Custom post types will allow you to create types of post other than Posts and Pages. Adii agreed with me, adding:

“That will be game-changing for WP themes in the longer run.”

That could be quite literally anything. I’ll be using them on Nometet so I’ve got a separate post type for reviews, editorials and news. This means I can then add custom taxonomies to each type of post; ratings for reviews and bits of info like developer for news.

I do see these being used extensively for tumblogs which even though possible to make at the moment with WordPress could really use the new post types. I’m fairly confident we’re going to see a lot more tumblr style blogs soon.

Making your own custom post types is actually really easy. For example, to add my review post type, I’d use:

function post_type_reviews() {
	register_post_type( 'reviews',
                array( 'label' => __('Review'), 'public' => true, 'show_ui' => true ) );
	register_taxonomy_for_object_type('post_tag', 'review');
}
add_action('init', 'post_type_reviews');

Of course, you can take this further as WPEngineer explains — custom taxonomies I mentioned earlier are really easy to do.

Custom background and header images

Something I’m not particularly bothered about but I’m sure many newer bloggers will find useful is the background uploader and the header uploader.

I do fear this will cause an increase in background images that:

1. Aren’t big enough to fill a screen larger than 1280.
2. Really shouldn’t be tiled.
3. Are pointless.
4. Are badly made.
5. Are badly compressed.
6. Etc.

But hey, it’s a learning curve, right?

They’re both easy to add to themes, so you might as well; backgrounds can be added with add_custom_background(); and headers with add_custom_image_header();.

Multisite

WordPressMU and WordPress are merging into the new multisite feature.

In practice, this just means it’s easier to create a WPMU site. I’m not aware of anything that changes for themes.

New default theme

WordPress’ new default theme, 2010 is going to be awesome. I really love the look, feel and readability of 2010 and Alex agreed with me:

I think we’re going to see a lot of new bloggers just sticking with that theme when they first install WordPress.

And he’s right; as a theme for ‘just a blog’, I think it’s nigh on perfect. Hopefully we’ll see more themes inheriting its awesomeness if they’re starting off with it as a base.

Coming soon

3.0 should be out next month. What are you looking forward to?

I’ve recently being developing a new design for my first ever WordPress powered site, Nometet.com. The design is looking a bit shabby at the moment, that’s the kind way of putting it! I digress though. The new design is what I’d call advanced WordPress. It’s got things like a background that is automatically resized (ie the background-image), a choice of three post templates, a fancy review section which holds the score and things like blockquotes that change depending on which category you’re in.

Here’s the thing. I’ve not used a single plugin.

I wanted to see what the fuss about frameworks was all about, so I took my own advice and I thought I’d try and build a site with Elemental as it was my favourite. How I got on is something for another day, but I think it says something about the power of WordPress’ built in functions (like post_class and body_class which I’ve used to get out of many a hole) that I’ve been able to get this far with no plugins. The only non-standard thing I’m using (that’s built into Elemental and not WordPress) are post templates.

So if I’m able to make more or less a whole site with some advanced features with no plugins, how come people are using plugins for utterly useless tasks?

There’s nothing wrong with using plugins, that’s not what I’m trying to say, just please don’t use plugins for trivial tasks. That’s what I’m getting at. Sure, some people find plugins easier to use, not everyone is comfortable customising themes, that’s fair enough, but if you’ve got a plugin that is doing something like changing all your permalinks so that “and” is replaced with “&” and another that changes the colour of your post titles (like, woah, it’s got a colour picker and everything!), there’s something wrong. It’s so easy to install a plugin, it’s easy to get carried away installing useless ones.

Before you jump up to defend your useless plugin that makes your life so much easier, just wait for a second. I’ve got an analogy for you. It’s fairly long, but it’s the best way I can think of of pointing out the uselessness and flaws in using a plugin for everything.

There once was a country called Bobland (named after the found, John). It was a free and fair society and one day they thought they’d revise the constitution. It started of fine, until the person in charge (we’ll call him Adam) set up a website for the people of Bobland to suggest revisions.

“As Adam added more and more, it got slower and harder to maintain.”

After they suggested them, all Adam had to then do was click ‘Add Suggestion’ and the suggestion would be added to the constitution. Some were genuinely useful and allowed for a faster running society and a safer one too. Trouble was, Adam got a bit carried away and started adding more and more to the constitution, after all, it was so easy! Occasionally he’d tweak some of the suggestions using the graphical user interface he’d built.

As Adam added more and more to the constitution, it got slower and harder to maintain. Then some people started abusing their suggestions and exploiting them for their own good. The constitution eventually become overrun with features that the people of Bobland didn’t need but thought would be useful. They ended up having to start again from scratch with their revisions. And then they all lived happily ever after.

The point I’m trying to make is as you install more and more useless plugins, you’ll only be creating something that’s harder and harder to maintain and keep running securely and quickly.

So go on then. Stand up for the useless plugin. Not the useful plugin that makes your site faster, but the useless ones that change the colour of your links. Someone’s making them, so there’s got to be a reason, no? For me the some people can’t edit themes argument is a bad one. You’ll have to do better than that.

[the-series]

Today it’s Ian Stewart who has very recently joined Automattic as “Theme Wrangler”.

Maybe. Probably not. All powerful Themes with pretty Child Themes are
a solution to a lot of Theme development problems (specifically, rapid
site development in a particular mode) but they can’t solve every
problem.

My wild guess is that this year we’ll see simplicity become a feature
in WordPress themes with the disappearance of ridiculously massive
options pages altogether. We’ll see the best WordPress Themes become
simpler and more focused.

“We’ll see simplicity become a feature in WordPress themes”

My easy, for sure guess? Integration with the super-cool new menu
management introduced in WordPress 3.0.

But they already are! This is happening right now every time a cool
free Theme is released. No one has to literally join forces when they
free up the code behind their WordPress themes. And everyone that uses
WordPress really does benefit. It’s completely awesome.

I think most users look less for flashy designs and more for Themes
they can make their own. Themes they can see themselves in. It’s the
Themes that “disappear” that truly stand out.

Without a question, the new menu management. It solves a whole mess of
WordPress site development problems for Themers looking to create
robust, sustainable designs. There are also a few new Theme functions
coming that will make the rapid creation of solid Themes that much
easier. Oh, and the integration of WPMU. And the 2010 Default Theme,
of course! Lots of stuff, really.

[the-series]

Today Cory Miller from iThemes joins in the conversation.

No, I think it’s a blend of single “typical” themes and all-powerful ones that do cool things and of course everything in between for different niches and functionality needs. WordPress is too diverse and expansive and the needs too great and varied to think there will be one theme or framework that can do everything. Thinking otherwise is arrogance, in my opinion.

The biggest one on our roadmap right now is a Style Manager where people can make quick and easy changes to their theme design that personalizes it for their unique brand. Talking with other theme devs and knowing our own community, customization requests are by far the biggest request we get.

The needs [of WordPress are] too great and varied to think there will be one theme or framework that can do everything

Generally though I would say … anything that makes it easier on the end user, which is almost endless. The menu issue was critical and on our roadmap as well but I’m thankful it’s being solved by, I might add, a premium theme developer in WooThemes. (Score one for commercial enterprises assisting the community!)

I could only see that if WordPress.org hosted an actual commercial theme store, but even then we’re way past that point now with established communities and independent sites, directions and priorities. The primary reason I don’t think it’ll ever happen is a combination of ego and control. We all believe we have the best product and all want all the control — if we’re being honest, that’s why we became entrepreneurs. But I will say … competition is great for theme innovation and for the community. The other theme devs force us to be and do better for our customer communities, and vice versa.

The other theme devs force us to be and do better for our customer communities, and vice versa.

Design (beautiful, attractive design sells a theme), functionality (does it help you do something better or easier), followed by support. People come for the first two and stay for the third … good support is a non-negotiable.

The WordPress MU merge (I think it’s called MS) and custom menu navigation. I’m also interested to see how the image editing/resizing features work.

[the-series]

I think that for each Theme company independently this will more or less be the case. What won’t happen, is one theme, such as the new 2010 default theme being used by everyone in framework form. Child Themes are still fairly unheard of, which is a shame because they are so powerful. I do think that the continued success of Frameworks is the mass adoption of Child Themes.

Custom Post Types. This will allow sites to be built in so many new ways, and IMO give finer control over display and organisation.

I think that actually the inverse would happen. If everyone joined forces, a) nothing would ever get done; design and development by committee is tedious, time consuming, and most importantly conflict-causing. B) the theme market would stagnate. Nothing new would ever come about because there would be no commercial or Capitalistic drive for themes to develop more.

The WordPress community has always benefited from sharing code and learning from others. By seeing one dev create a theme with a certain feature, others are inclined to better it, use it, tweak it etc. This all brings about better themes for us all.

Design is always a huge selling point, but good viral and social marketing/advertising goes a long way too. Getting people to know about your product, and getting them to believe that it is what they want (;-)) is crucial. Often, just because a theme has X amount of kick ass features, that doesn’t mean the theme is going to stand out from the crowd, since that crowd is, as you say, always growing bigger.

I’m loving the new default theme that will be released with 3.0. I’ve been playing with it a lot lately, and I like what I see. I think we’re going to see a lot of new bloggers just sticking with that theme when they first install WordPress.

[the-series]

I think so, yes. To me, this is the way WordPress themes have been moving for the last couple of years. There’s simply no way to accomplish the things that theme frameworks + child themes can accomplish with a traditional theme.

I think everyone will explore the idea of a central framework. Some won’t have the stomach for it … it’s not an easy thing to take on. I think many people are looking to StudioPress and Genesis to see what happens there with the Child Theme Marketplace. If it does well (and it has so far), then I think you’ll see more people explore the concept in their own companies.

“I think everyone will explore the idea of a central framework.”

Also, I think more and more you will see themes integrating with core WordPress features rather than building out their own. This may also be the year that many theme developers really start to contribute back to WordPress core, with WooThemes taking the lead on that front with the integration of their Navigation system into WordPress 3.0.

No, and I don’t really think there would be any benefit from all the theme developers joining forces. Perhaps on little projects here and there, but not as a whole.

Creativity and competition are soulmates.

I’m not crazy about this, but designs do sell themes. I wish that more people would focus on the important stuff, but at the end of the day, pretty colors make people drool.

Aside from that, support sells the theme. If a customer is confident that they have a force of helpful individuals to help them get their theme running correctly, it takes the much of the risk out of the purchase.

“At the end of the day, pretty colors make people drool”

Finally, I think a theme developer (or development company) has to prove themselves. There’s no such thing as an overnight success in this business. It takes months (maybe years) to prove that you’re here for the long haul, and that you’ll deliver on your promises. Earning trust for your brand is a slow process, but it’s necessary for the success of your business.

Menu management is something I can’t wait to play with. It’s long overdue, but I’ve been watching the progress in WordPress trunk and I can safely say that the implementation is going very well. It’s going to be one of the 3.0 killer features, for sure.

[the-series]

Today it’s Adii. He doesn’t really need any introduction as I expect most of you know about the astounding success he’s had at WooThemes of late.

“I believe that the friendly competition is good for everyone as it keeps theme developers on their toes.”

If there were any prizes for predicting this correctly, I’d win… It will definitely be the new Custom Navigation system that WooThemes has contributed to the WP 3.0 core. As soon as this is ready, every commercial theme developer worth their salt will integrate support for this.

I don’t agree with the joining of forces, because I believe that the friendly competition is good for everyone as it keeps theme developers on their toes. This competition breeds innovation and forces everyone to re-think what they’re doing at the moment and how they can better that in future. The knock-on effect of this is (for example), that if WooThemes releases something great, other theme developers copy that and implement in their own unique way too (so everyone in the community benefits).

At WooThemes, we’ve been inspired on many occasions with what others were doing and implemented similar feature sets in our themes

We don’t necessarily have to be first to market with every new feature, as that is impossible. But by implementing it and improving our themes, our users too benefits from innovation by another developer. Hope that thinking makes sense…

That’s an open question, isn’t it? To a large extent, you can see what every theme developer’s niches are by looking at their themes and I think everyone has an unique angle towards satisfying specific needs for their own users. Hence why you’d get users who own themes from WooThemes, StudioPress, ThemeForest and then a copy of Thesis to top things off.

I think all of these themes (and the respective developers) solve different problems in different ways and the variety in choice (to potential users) is extremely valuable. So whilst they may decide on a WooTheme for one project, they might go with StudioPress or Thesis for the next, as they may be better suited to a specific project.

The custom navigation, but that’s because I’m biased… Beyond that, we’re hoping that custom post types are more defined and elaborate in 3.0, as that will be game-changing for WP themes in the longer run (turning the platform into much more of a fully-fledged CMS).

Many new bloggers be ome slightly obsessed with optimising their content. I started blogging in the games industry and was often asked not to refer to “the game” but the title as this would apparently improve rankings. In the same way, much to the frustration of those who attempt to encourage intelligent discussion on their blogs (such as myself(!) ), many commenters don’t use their real name as the name of their comment, but instead opt for keyword filled drivel. I don’t publish such comments, but many blog owners do, thus encouraging these misled people to repeat. One often gets the impression that these people (strike through) Best Plumber in Oregon are leaving commets in an attempt to increase their search engine ranking. Which leads me onto content.

I said that, by the way. It’s true though. The whole point of a blog is that it is a way of publishing content. Blogs such as Smashing Magazine and Nettuts are so successful because they have excellent content. Blogs such as Best Plumbers in Oregon aren’t because usually the content is very poor.

If you’re having to try to improve your search engine ranking that means your content isn’t very good.

Search engines are clever beasts. They can work out what is good content and so if you’re optimising your content then surely it’s not good enough in the first place? Surely you’d do better to spend the time improving your content and improving your ranking that way, instead of leaving comments under random names filled with keywords?

“Our themes can haz great SEOz.”

As the number of premium WordPress themes continues to spiral (including an excellent one launching soon), many themes struggle to find any features of any value to users and so fall back on “great SEO”. As a freature, it’s perfect as it can’t really be tested or proven either way. Search Google and you’ll find huge lists of themese with the specific purpose of SEO. Ironic really as you don’t see the sites containing these lists (and thus with the high rankings) using these themes. Looking at these themes, it just seems they’re an excuse for poor design. And what’s “great SEO” worth without the content behind it?

Designs are for life, not just for Christmas

A design should be using semantic code which a search engine can read and decide for itself what is best. It’s a search engine’s job to find the content, not the blogger’s job to show the content to the search engine. Changing your meta tag with a plugin is something that thousands and thousands of people do with the “All in One SEO Pack” plugin. Heck, it was one of the first plugins I installed on my first blog. I had no idea what it did or how to use it. I just installed it because I thought I order to get good rankings I’d need this plugin. I was wrong.

As long as your design is coded well, that’s all the “SEO optimisation” you need to do. An awful lot of themes these days are, too. But for the average blogger, it’s hard to tell what is and isn’t these days; back in the day one would see if the theme validated, bit these days the better themes are often using CSS3 and the like which doesn’t validate. The only thing I can suggest is to see what the errors produced by validation; a bad design will have errors caused by unclosed elements, a good design will have errors caused by unrecognised elements.

So then. Hopefully this has been an interesting read and educated you that leaving comments with odd names isn’t worth it. That’s all really.

The state of affairs

It’s pretty much this (as far as I can see). A small number of people are (as they entitled to) re-releasing “premium” WordPress themes for free under the GPL, something the license entitles them to. Before release, these themes are often modded slightly, hence the name.

Introducing PremiumMod

The first people to start this whole thing off (as far as I am aware) were PremiumMod. PremiumMod launched on 5th November, in an attempt to “create a movement” and as far as I can tell, make people aware of the possibility of releasing it to the general public, with or without modification (if they’re licensed GPL). Frankly, they’ve been met with some hostility from some of the community.

The concerns

The main criticism seems to be these modifications aren’t huge which is true and the only problem I have with these mods at the moment. I asked Foress about this:

If you think the mod themes do not offer ‘improvement’ and shouldn’t do it, then take a step back and look at the new free themes release everyday. Are these new, free themes offering any ‘improvement’? Sadly, if you have been in the WP Community for a while, you will realize most of these theme are almost the same. Why they released it anyway? Because they THINK they will contribute to the community.

Which is fair enough and it’s the best argument for these things I’ve heard. Foress continues:

My secondary answer is, because nobody else do it.

Why? May be because nobody dares to challenge authority. Everybody are actively modding the premium themes – but only for their own use or for their client. Nobody dares to release it to the public because the premium themes owner would certainly complain. But why not (releasing it) when their license (GPL) perfectly allows you to do so?

Again, very fair and picks up on the important point of the huge power the premium theme authors are wielding, whether they recognise it or not. But that’s for another day.

The aim of modded themes

So it appears Foress and PremiumMod want to create a movement, encouraging more and more people to release their GPL modded premium themes.

But what affect will this have on the “premium” themes?

Not much, according to Ben Gillbanks who had this to say:

When going GPL I did consider that people would take the theme and modify it and give it away, but I don’t consider it a problem. People will always give away paid software for free – it’s happened for years with pirated applications – and so making the themes GPL just means it’s no longer illegal, however is it unethical?

Ben then goes on as far as to say people downloading his themes for free could even increase sales:

I think that most of the people who download GPL premium themes for free will either not use them or go on to buy them anyway. We won’t support themes that haven’t been purchased from our site unless people purchase a license from us, and we also won’t give out updates (and we release updates quite regularly).

I then asked Ben if he had taken any steps to “prevent damage” to sales. His response, I think, is great:

I haven’t taken any steps to prevent damage. All I do is offer the best service and support I can, with regular product updates, and hopefully that is enough to make people want to purchase a theme from us.

Concluding

I’m about to launch a theme company, and I’d be seriously annoyed if I found that my theme which I’ve spent a seriously long time making was being distributed for free and I can totally empathise with those who place restrictive licenses on their themes, but if a theme is GPL then you can’t complain when someone redistributes it under the very same license, can you?