WPCandy

ThemeForest is the newest and hottest marketplace from the same awesome people who also created the famous PSDTuts, NetTuts, and FreelanceSwitch. ThemeForest allows people to buy and sell HTML/CSS templates, themes for WordPress and Joomla, and more. Templates and themes are going anywhere from $10 to $75, depending on the the complexity and quality the file.

Authors and Referrers

Authors receive anywhere between 25% and 50%, depending on if you agree to keep your templates exclusive to ThemeForest. Affiliates take half of a new buyers first deposit, which is one hell of a deal if you ask me! Read more about the Referral Program here.

ThemeForest File Samples

The Enterprised Blueprint by arunkurian92

The Cobalt Core Blueprint by arunkurian92

Our Community by kailoon

ThemeForest Contests

An awesome contest is being held for ThemeForest authors. Whichever author(s) has the most approved files in the Site Templates, WordPress Themes, and Joomla & Misc. Themes categories during the month of September will win $600 to spend on an Apple Cinema HD Display. For your file to count, it has to be approved during 12:01AM 01/09/2008 and 11:59PM 30/09/2008 AEST.

WPCandy is also holding a small contest. We’re giving out 5 sets of $25 to spend on ThemeForest files. All you have to do is comment on this post below, giving your opinion on ThemeForest, before Wednesday, September 10th, 2008. Of course, the more elaborate comments will be taken into account when deciding on winners. Winners will be announced on Friday, Semptember 12th, 2008.

DailyWP has just released their latest theme, JobPress. As you can tell from the name, JobPress is a unique WordPress theme built specifically for job boards. Its fast setup, great organization, and PayPal integration make this theme a great buy. Read more…

Vikiworks V5 theme

Vikiworks V5 has some really sweet graphical elements and is plugin-ready for common WordPres plugins. Read more…

Adii and the Premium News Theme development crew have recently re-branded as the all-new WooThemes. This new branding will allow them to offer a larger variety of premium WordPress themes to the public. Along with their new brand, they’ve added Elliot Jay Stocks, ex-senior designer of web startup Carsonified, to the team, where he will be designing themes for the rest of the crew to develop. Elliot has already released ProudFolio, his first theme for WooThemes. Read more…

The other day, I came across a post written by Patrick Algrim of HellYeahDude.com entitled, What Not To Put Into WordPress Themes. Patrick dove into some well known, freely available WordPress themes to see if he could uncover anything out of the orindary. Unfortunately, he discovered some things inside of themes that I find appalling. Things such as blog ranking code to theme author RSS feeds that when clicked on, the end user would end up subscribing to a feed other than your own.

For a few weeks now, there have been a number of people that have preached about how the safest way to download themes is directly from the author’s website. If what Patrick discovered is true, (it sure as hell looks that way) then this leaves the door wide open as to how to go about downloading and using WordPress themes that are not filled with this stuff.

The WordPress Theme respository is not off line but it does contain a number of outdated themes that most likely do not work with WordPress 2.5. So the question is, why are theme authors including this crap into their themes and secondly, do we really need to go through each and every theme and look for this stuff before sites such as WPCandy give themes any sort of press?

Lastly, how do you feel about this situation?

During the last couples of days I’ve seen some pretty neat stuff coming from different blogs throughout the WordPress Community. The WordPress Community is a pretty big place. A while back, I read 0.8% of the Internet is powered by WordPress. Woah! Now, 0.8% may not seem a lot, but think about it, at least a couple hundred sites are created a day.

Anyway, I’ll be going through some cool WordPress related stuff you should check out!

Read more…