Earlier this year the Cutline theme was replaced on WordPress.com by Coraline, and just last week PressRow was replaced by Pilcrow. Both themes were originally developed by Chris Pearson, the developer behind the popular Thesis Theme framework. Offering an alternative to those WordPress.com users disappointed about the change, Pearson is planning on making optimized versions of PressRow and Cutline available to Thesis Theme customers in the near future.

On offering the new themes, Pearson said:

Sadly, the crew at WordPress.com have chosen to retire two of my old themes, Cutline and PressRow.

If you loved these themes and are sorry to see them go, don’t sweat it! Soon, I’ll be re-releasing both of these classic theme designs for free to everyone who uses the Thesis Theme Framework.

And thanks to the power of Thesis, these new versions of Cutline and PressRow will be more optimized, more flexible, and faster than their predecessors.

Pearson also has an email subscription form, where interested users can sign up to be notified when the new versions of the themes are available.

Pearson and Matt Mullenweg have a history of disagreeing on the issue of the GPL, which is covered in part in our WordPress and the GPL timeline.

You can follow Pearson on Twitter at @pearsonified.