Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> Thesis 2.0 & The State of Premium Frameworks

At the start of the month, DIYThemes launched the latest version of their hugely successful theme framework, Thesis.

Due to Thesis’ closed-source licensing, outside the tight-knit Thesis community, it is, to be honest, a little bit of a taboo to talk, write about Thesis unless you’re giving it a hard time.

I’m not setting out here to give Thesis a hard time, but I am setting out to look at what the launch of the latest version of the framework says about premium WordPress themes at the moment, specifically premium “frameworks”.

I don’t use Thesis, and it’s unlikely I ever will, but I still took an interest in the launch and the new features etc. What I noticed was so… notable I felt it’s worth of a post here on Shout.

A little bit of background

I couldn’t actually find an exact date for when the last major version of Thesis was released, but as far as I can tell, it was roughly August 2010.

The new version was released on the 1st October 2012.

The various marketing materials have promised the latest version is a  ”total re-write”, but even so, two years? That’s a hell of a long time, to go without a major upgrade.

At the very least, though, you would kinda expect something that’s taken this long to make is at least, you know, finished and complete. Maybe even well documented.

Sadly, as far as I can tell, on initial release, Thesis was none of these things.

Big release hype backfires

A lot of hype was made about 1st October being the “big release day”. People were — obviously — excited. They were rocking Windows 95 and had just been told they were going to get a free upgrade to Windows 8.

Sadly, release day came — and nearly went again — Thesis 2.0 was released at around 11.45pm. Not what you’d expect on the day of a release that’s been in the works for two years, right?

I didn’t stay up until then, by the way, I learned this from a blog post that went up on the DIY Themes site the next day. Have a read of the post; when I did, I was appalled.

“But as we expected, with such a major overhaul, and tons of people using the new software, we’ve stumbled on a few bugs.

And while we squash these bugs, we don’t recommend you switch over your old version of Thesis to Thesis 2.0 just yet.”

Okay, so there are some bugs. Fair enough.

The big point for me, though, was that despite the fact the new version was a “complete overhaul”, with all new menus etc, there, um, wasn’t any documentation on how to use any of it.

“Why release something like this with all the bugs”?

Reading through the comments, it became clear that Thesis 2.0 was unfinished and released just because a release had been promised, not because it was ready. Again, as far as I could tell, there was no beta testing, no documentation or tutorials and saying “hey, we released that new version like we said we would… just don’t use it yet!” isn’t exactly ideal.

But marketing saves the day

Thesis bashing complete, the point I’m getting to here is I very much doubt the launch will be considered the failure it kinda was.

I’ve seen these “all new features” before!

A lot of new features were introduced, just they were essentially playing catch-up with the rest of the market. “Drag and drop” theme design has been something Headway and Builder have been doing for years. SEO features? I’ll take Yoast’s plugin any day.

But if you’re clever about it and your marketing’s good, then, hey, it doesn’t matter.

And DIY Themes are damn good at their marketing.

It’s all about the hyperbole

Which finally brings me to the point I’m trying to make here.

I’ve noticed a distinct trend over the last couple of months of a distinct shift towards marketing and hyperbole from theme makers.

StudioPress joining Copyblogger Media has had great results for Brian and his team, but even Genesis hasn’t really seen any major new features added recently. The StudioPress site, however, is now packed full of marketing content designed to drive you to purchase.

And I have absolutely no complaints about that — clearly it’s working very well for StudioPress; Brian said on his blog:

“Brian Clark promised me that he’d double sales with StudioPress, and that happened in half the time he had expected. Our site traffic has tripled since then as well.”

Innovation, please

But is this just the marketing side catch up with the innovation side? Or is there secret stuff going on behind the scenes everywhere that I’m missing?

iThemes haven’t been ones to “blow their own trumpet” with Builder.

Certainly, in DIY Themes’ case, I don’t think this is the case at all. Thesis 2.0 was playing catch up with the competition, but it’s been presented as groundbreaking. Has anyone really noticed? I’m not entirely sure they have.

But what about Genesis, Builder, Headway and the other frameworks?

I asked Cory Mille, Brian Gardner and DIYThemes whether it was a fair accusation that innovation had been replaced with marketing. DIYThemes didn’t reply to my email and Brian declined to comment, but Cory said:

“We’ve believed since Jan. 2008 that our work should speak for itself. We take great pride in building software that our community wants and loves. The test is if we fulfill our mission of “making people’s lives awesome” and whether or not we’re deserving of attention.

Sadly though, because we don’t like to toot our own horn we get forgotten. There is a fine line between sharing what your product does with marketing messages and going over that line into hype. It’s just not who we are. The result is we’ll just keep probably getting overlooked in this sea of hype but stick to our core values and be in this for the long term.”

I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions from what Cory said, but “because we don’t like to toot our own horn we get forgotten” — that stings.

Let’s talk it out, folks

Had any other theme shop spent two years making a theme, released it and then immediately told people that they shouldn’t use it, but DIY Themes? They can get away with it, no sweat.

So was it just their marketing that allowed them to stay ahead in the WordPress framework market for so long? And is it just down to StudioPress’ Copyblogger-backed marketing that means they’ve taken the lead as the premier framework?

And more importantly, has this shift towards marketing left everyone else behind, or is this their biggest opportunity yet to come up with something genuinely different and better?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> Thesis 2.0 & The State of Premium Frameworks

Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> Documenting A Premium Theme

On Monday I submitted a beautifully simple theme to the ThemeGarden marketplace — “Simplicity” is a minimalistic, typographic and simple addon for Genesis. If you would take a look and perhaps even buy it (for only $9.99!) then that’d be lovely.

That’s self promotion covered.

But it comes round to a more serious point: documenting premium themes. In my experience, documentation is poor. I appreciate that the likes of Woo have extensive and excellent documentation, but the same doesn’t apply to everyone. Amongst the best I’ve seen is a couple of lines on the website explaining how to upload the theme and press the install button. Whilst this is helpful, not saying anything else when the theme is the monster it was was a little unhelpful.

That’s as may be, but it’s the first thing someone who’s just bought your theme will see. That’s why it’s vital your documentation is good. There are a number of steps to documentation nirvana; we’ll discuss them in the rest of this post.

1. Clear, concise and jargon free

Installing a WordPress theme is easy, right? Just unzip, upload to your theme directory via FTP  and activate the theme from the backend.

In know that, you know that… but the person who’s just bought your theme doesn’t. It’s vital you make no assumptions and explain absolutely everything that is needed to set up your theme. Use language everyone can understand and be as clear as possible but at the same time don’t get too wordy. It’s a precise art which is probably why I’ve never seen something that fits the bill perfectly.

2. Make it visual

Fact of the day: people like pictures. Fact of the week: people like moving pictures. Fact of the year: people like moving pictures in high definition which are clearly narrated.

Screencasts are a godsend when it comes to documentation. Web apps such as the excellent (and free) Screenr make it so easy to make your own screencasts that there’s no excuse to not have them. Write out each section as normal and then record a two minute video explaining everything.

3. Readable and looking nice

You’re (probably) a designer. Why on earth would you put your documentation in a plain text file?

Spend ten minutes making your documentation look nice. It needn’t be fancy; Thematic’s, for example, is fantastic. It’s just a single column layout but it serves its purpose perfectly.

4. Link to other useful resources

I’ve got a question! I’ve just finished reading the documentation and… oh, where do I go?

Helpful links at the end of the documentation are just a little extra touch that show there’s somewhere a customer can go to find extra help. It’s a small thing but they all make a difference.

Making documentation a better place

Hopefully this (ironically horribly wordy) post will inspire you all to go and update your documentation to make your customers’ lives just that bit easier once they’ve bought your theme.

This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> Documenting A Premium Theme

Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> A Guide For Selling WordPress Themes

Recently there’s been a lot of (mis) information around about “how to start your own premium WordPress themes site”.

They make all make it sound fairly easy.

Just make a design, hack it into a WordPress theme, buckle on a zillion theme options using the old Woo options panel and you have yourself a wonderful theme that’ll make you rich.

It’s a lot harder than you think to make a good, respectable theme; only about 10% of premium themes are actually any good.

“Good”, being a theme that’s well built, well supported and follows best practises. I’m of the view that the vast majority of themes don’t do this. Don’t let your new site join the ranks of other mediocre themes, follow my handy guide and you’ll be flying in no time.

Run, faster

First off is to make sure your code and template files are the right bits for the job. Have you got too many template files? Is your author.php file doing essentially the same as your index file? Know your file structure and you can vastly reduce the amount of work you’ll need to do. Equally, ensure your loops are run as efficiently as you can; do really need a second loop for that featured content area?

Add features, not bloat

Building in features is always fun, but it is very, very easy to get carried away and start adding a whole load of widgets and fairly useless features that nobody will actually use. Be very careful when adding features like widgets; always be thinking “who will actually use this? Would I be better off bundling an optional plugin with the theme?” Speaking of plugins…

Don’t rely on plugins

I thought I’d seen the back of this one a while ago, but apparently not. Under no circumstances whatsoever make your theme reliant on plugins. What does that mean? It means if a user has to install a plugin for your theme to work, that’s relying on a plugin. By all means build in support for popular plugins, in fact, that’s always a good thing to do, just wrap calls to plugins in ifs so if the plugin isn’t installed then the theme still works.

In my list of bad things to have, this is right up there. Whilst the line between theme and plugin has blurred of late, themes shouldn’t be reliant on plugins.

Run out of the box

“With built in 1000 options!” About nine months ago this was very cool. 1000 options! Wow! That’s the reaction you could expect from potential customers.

Not any more.

Just take a moment to think how long it would take to set up 1000 options. Ben first told me this and at first I wasn’t too keen on it, but on reflection, he’s bang on. Themes should work as much as possible out of the box, without any customisation or set up. When someone first installs your theme, they should be greeted by their latest posts, not a whole load of errors telling them to set up the options page. Speaking of…

Make a useful options page, if at all

Options pages should have as few options as possible. If your options page spans five pages, you’ve got something is fundamentally wrong. Users have come to expect options pages and whilst five pages of options does sound impressive, it means there’s too much in your theme that’s fiddly. Let’s have a couple of examples:

• “Link to logo image” — big no no. Provide an uploader and auto resizer so users can upload something quickly and easily.
• Featured content images and text — another no no. You should be using a category, custom field or even custom post type for this, but don’t make users type in their featured content by using the options page.
• Category/Page IDs — don’t make your users search around for the IDs of various categories, give them a nice list of categories/pages to choose from instead.

You should also ask yourself whether you actually need an options page at all. If all the options you’ve got are Analytics and Footer text, why not follow Leland’s example and instead recommend a purpose built plugin?

Don’t duplicate WordPress’ functionality

The number of themes that have some fancy menu system, some odd way of doing images for posts or a quirky way of organising widgets through layers of options is just astounding. If WordPress already does something, then don’t duplicate the functionality. Use the post thumbnail function, the 3.0 menu manager and the widgets page. Work with WordPress, not against it.

And finally

I’ve not really touched on the other ingredients outside of the themes themselves, but they’re going to change in each situation; you may decide a ticket system works better for you than a forum, for example.

Either way, just because the barrier for entry into the premium themes market is low, don’t let your themes be of that all too common low quality.

Awesome background image from Smashing Magazine, designed by Thais Trizoli.

This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> A Guide For Selling WordPress Themes

Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> The State of Premium WordPress Themes

Premium themes are, in fact, great. They mean people can happily spend time building them, refining them and supporting them. They mean that themes can stop being good and start becoming great and even more importantly, the themes can innovate WordPress, the platform they’re all dependant on (we’ll come to that later). In this article we’ll look at what’s next for premium themes and what kind of legacy they’re leaving behind.

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.

This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> The State of Premium WordPress Themes

Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> Premium Frameworks Reviewed

Of late commercial frameworks have started appearing everywhere. This post will try and make sense of it all, comparing Frugal, Headway, Builder, Genesis and Elemental. That’s all the commercial frameworks I could think of bar Thesis, who didn’t reply to me emails. This is an unbiased, unaffiliated look at what your options are if you want something to build more WordPress sites off.

Update 06-04-2010 — I’ve added in affiliate links as regular readers will have read the article by now, but the content remains the same.

Frugal

Initial impressions are good. A hefty user guide covers most things although a quick video introduction to the theme would have been useful. Installation goes smoothly and I’m all set with a decent looking site from the off.

Frugal’s big selling point is it’s options pages. These offer you a huge array of different options for changing the look and feel of your site. In a couple of minutes I was able to make a respectable looking site which was impressive.

Asides from the theme options, Frugal offers the usual in post SEO options and a whole load of custom hooks.

Who’s this for? I’d say it’s a better option that Thesis for most, and Eric Hamm, Frugal founder agrees with me (he also thinks that everyone, everywhere should be using it though!):

I see all kinds of people use my theme.  From total beginners to seasoned WP developers. Usually, though, it seems to be people who don’t want to mess with much coding, but who still want to do-it-all with their theme.

Summing up, really comprehensive options pages let you change pretty heftily the design. I fear though that if you don’t know a lot about design then you’d find the options overwhelming and not know what to change.

Headway

Wow. Headway’s got a visual editor that’s not like anything I’ve ever seen in a WordPress theme.

Headway is visual.  You edit and customize the theme right before your eyes.  We use a system that consists of “leafs”.  Leafs can be compared to widgets, but you can move a leaf almost anywhere on the page.  You can also have sidebar leafs that allow you to add widgets.  The sky is the limit.

That’s Headway’s Clay Griffiths. He’s not far wrong actually. Headway has a visual editor overlay thing that lets you quite literally drag bits around your page. If you want a block wider you can either set the width or just drag it across the page! It’s very well done – you can hover over an element to find its class or ID, click on elements to change them etc etc. A video would explain this better, so I’ve just made one. I didn’t narrate it as I didn’t really have any idea what I was doing – I was just playing around :)

Headway also has things like the colour pickers, options pages, all the things you’d expect from a premium theme. I’m impressed, but would I actually use it? I’m not sure I would. I don’t think you’d ever be able to create something really nice and unique by dragging and dropping. Some might find it’s a good option, but for most I think it’s a bit too gimmicky.

Builder

Builder has a page that lets you… well, build pages in a way similar to Headway’s visual editor.

It’s not quite as innovative as Headway – no drag and drop here, but the interface is functional – select a ‘module’ – be it navigation, widget bar, content area, footer etc and where you want it and you’ve built a layout. You can then choose to apply this to a page, post or homepage. You’ve got control over the layout but not really the design which I’m not sure isn’t a bad thing – with Frugal and Headway I get the idea you’ll see largely the same sites being churned – there’s only so far you can get with their options I think.

Other nice touches include things like a menu manager (although it’s nothing like the 3.0 manager!) and a couple of SEO options. It also has iThemes’ impressive array of video tutorials which cover most things I can think of from changing your permalink structure to creating a post. As with the others, it offers what you’d expect from a decent quality premium theme.

It’s right up with Headway with the whole build pages idea and between the two I’d probably go with Builder – it doesn’t offer nearly the same design options, but for building layouts, it’s pretty good and my favourite out of Frugal and Headway.

And now for something completely different

You’ll only be able to get so far with any of Headway, Frugal or Builder before you have to actually start writing some code. No matter what you do with any of these themes, with the built in options, they’ll still have some features that point them out as powered by that theme. They’re all good for people who can’t write code, but you’ll only get so far editing them and no way are these going to be the death of the good old well designed and then coded theme.

The second half of this post will look at two ‘frameworks’ that more or less exclusively designed for building new designs. Introducing Genesis and Elemental.

Genesis and Elemental

From StudioPress, Brian and Nathan did a pretty damn good job of presenting Genesis as the be all and end all of frameworks. On installation I was impressed with the options page that isn’t covered in jQuery, but actually looks nice and blends in with the WordPress backend. The big focus though is on child themes. Genesis has been presented as something that you can build all kinds of sites off and it’ll function great regardless. Hooks and filters all over the place, they’ve certainly nailed those. The SEO options are comprehensive too, I’ll give them that as well. I’m going to come back to Genesis in a sec. First, Elemental.

Elemental is from ProThemeDesign. It’s certainly a turn away from the likes of Mimbo and if I’m honest I had pretty high expectations of it. Ben’s work is always awesome so something that was originally built for him has got to be pretty good, I thought. On installation I instantly took a shone to Elemental. I don’t know why, but I got the impression that if I was going to build all my themes off something, then this would be it.

In a framework like this, it’s the attention to detail that matters and Genesis might win on the development side, but the little touches like a bar at the top of all pages with quick links to writing posts, pages and the dashboard make me lean towards Elemental as something I’d actually like to use day in, day out.

Between the two, Genesis is certainly well made, but then so is Elemental. The Genesis options page fits in really nicely but the Elemental one looks good too. It’s tough to choose between the two; they both offer similar awesome page templates, options pages, filters and hooks. There is one difference though that separates the two. Genesis offers a theme store which lets you buy child themes but Elemental doesn’t. For me, it’s not a problem, but if you don’t want to build a design from scratch then Genesis should be the one to go for. If you want something to build all your sites with then go for Elemental as it’s a pleasure to use.

Could you concise that?

Sure. Frugal has a huge options panel which is good for those of you who want something they can customise a bit but ultimately you want a blog look. Headway is like Frugal with layout options added on. Builder is what Frugal would be if it did layout options instead of design options.

Genesis and Elemental are both very well built but the deciding factor is whether you want to be able to buy child themes (note themes – you can buy them for Elemental from ProThemeDesign). If you do, go for Genesis, but if not Elemental.

This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> Premium Frameworks Reviewed

Lots of posts on WPShout are art directed, so you may wish to view this in your browser --> On Modded Premium Themes

As someone who quite likes being controversial from time to time,  I thought I’d vent some steam on people releasing “modded” premium themes. This post attempts to take an unbiased view, considering both sides and producing a coherent and acceptable conclusion backed by evidence. Attempts, anyway… Throughout the post I’ll quote two people: Ben Gillbanks who co-founded ProThemeDesign and Foress, the guy behind PremiumMod who kicked this off. Thanks very much both of you.

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?

This is a post from WPShout. If you enjoyed the post, please head over to the site and share or leave a comment! --> On Modded Premium Themes