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Introducing WPShift

For the last couple of months I’ve been mentioning a fair bit on Twitter that I’m launching a premium WordPress themes company. This post explains what it is, what’s great about it and when it’s coming.

I didn’t want to post this until we’re finished, but recent developments in the WordPress community have forced me to rethink. So here we are then. It’s going to be called WPShift. Shifting WordPress Themes Up A Gear kinda thing. It’s a joint project between myself and Alex Cragg who between us have more or less the power to conquer the world produce very nice themes.

The first theme is going to be called ShiftNews. It’s a magazine style theme and is almost exclusively widget powered which means you can drag and drop the various widgets to produce your own beautiful layout that’s (possibly) unique to your blog. With the multiple colour schemes, that’ll probably be quite easy to achieve. We’re currently at around ten widgets including two “featured content slider” style widgets and a further two widgets for displaying content (based on Justin’s great work), one of which is a traditional blog layout and the second is a magazine style format. They all have quite a neat widget interface, complete with instructions of how to use them from within the widget itself which is pretty darn cool:

As you can see, you’ve got the full power of query_posts at your disposal so if you want to display specific types of post, skipping out others, then that’s perfectly possible. This is by far my most favourite feature in the theme. Speaking of features, other widgets include a very neat social media icons widget, Flickr, Adsense, Twitter, YouTube; the lot.

As I said before, it’s a ‘magazine theme’ but we’ve built it in such a way it’d still work very well as a blog theme. I don’t really want to show a pic of the theme itself as we’re stilling tweaking things although I will show one of our ads which gives you a sneak peak:

So when are we launching? Soon. The next couple of weeks or so. In the meantime, you can sign up to be notified at WPShift.com. I hope to see you guys there too!

Yay! 🎉 You made it to the end of the article!
Alex Denning
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Dan
February 5, 2010 5:32 pm

Great luck for you, wish you have a large business, When it launch, I will promtion yours!

John Zemler
January 13, 2010 12:10 am

Congratulations!
It is not too early to announce your new theme or WPShift. Building some buzz for it will hopefully help people give it a good look when it arrives, they’ll be more eager to see it.
I look forward to visiting when you have officially kicked off.
btw: Will you be still maintaining this blog?
All success to you and Alex Cragg.
Semper Pax, Dr. Z

Michael Martin
January 11, 2010 7:45 pm

It looks awesome Alex, really excited to see this coming out!

Have to agree with Brian above, going to be plenty of competition in the market this year! I’ll be looking to join you in the niche soon after! 😀

Brian
January 11, 2010 5:28 pm

Looks cool, looking forward to checking out.

Seems like many of us designer/devs (including myself) will be jumping into the premium themes business this year. The launch-date for mine is shaping up to be Feb 1.

I think it’s fantastic that this market is heating up the way it is. There’s always room for positive competition from talented designers and devs.

Good luck guys!

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