Take a look at Refresh.

The Details.

You can choose a color scheme, add in a custom heading, and choose a category of posts to feature in the home page rotator. Take a look at the starting color schemes:

If you have requests for additional color schemes or features let us know. Stay tuned for this theme to be released within the next week!

WordPress Development & Announcements

• Official WordPress Blog
  Jane Wells provides great updates on the development status, any new features being released, and also where you can jump in to help the project.
• WordPress UI
  The WordPress UI group works here to discuss improvements to the software that are user interface related. You can get involved with the UI IRC chat on Thursdays at 2:00 PM Eastern.
• WordPress Dev
  From here you can follow the status of the latest WordPress development projects. You can get involved with the main WordPress development IRC chat on Thursdays at 3:30 PM Eastern.
• Matt’s Blog
  The founders blog is always a good place to stay up on WordPress announcements, plus he is a very interesting entrepreneur.
• BuddyPress.org
  The official site & forums for BuddyPress development. If you aren’t already using BuddyPress for a project you should be as it no longer requires an installation of WordPress MU.

Tips & Tutorials

• Smashing Magazine on WordPress
  Smashing always puts out high quality articles and their WordPress posts are no exception.
• NetTuts on WordPress
  Envato has a great section on working with WordPress, not updated too often, but definitely worth subscribing too.
• WP Engineer
  Here you can get more technical tips as well as great previews for what is coming in the next version of WordPress.
• WP Recipes
  Jean-Baptiste Jung’s blog on WordPress tips and tricks. He has some of the best simple tips to help you customize your WordPress blog.
• Justin Tadlock
  I learned all about custom taxonomies and other great ideas from Justin. His blog is a must read for an advanced WordPress developer.
• WP Candy
  This site hasn’t been updated lately, which is a shame, because their old content is really good and helpful.
• Theme Shaper
  Ian Stewart is the creator of the Thematic framework and the Kirby theme which is the foundation of the new WordPress default theme 2010. His blog is great for tips and WordPress news.

WordPress MU

• WPMU.org
  Though mostly focused on WordPress MU, they have recently branched out to standard WP tips as well as lots of great resources on BuddyPress.
• WPMU Tutorials
  Andrea and Ron are two of the most helpful members of the WordPress community. Their blog on WordPress multi-user is a must read!

There are many more WordPress tutorial sites out on the web that I didn’t list here. This is just the collection that I find valuable on a day-to-day basis. If you have suggestions of sites I should add let me know in the comments.

Our Themes

Here are the great themes we are launching with:

• Dynamic Business
  A CMS theme designed to help you easily create business sites.
• Knowledge
  Knowledge turns WordPress into a knowledge base or wiki site.
• Emphasis
  A free blogging theme with an emphasis on content.

Expect a new theme to be released every 2-3 weeks, with teaser the week before a release. Of course our themes are all released under the GPL license so you are free to modify and distribute as you please.

General Questions

Why another theme store?

WP Limits has been known in the community for over a year for pushing the limits of what is possible with WordPress, now the idea is to take that knowledge into the theme market. More friendly competition will mean that theme quality will continue to go up and more innovation will take place. I am looking forward to seeing what we can contribute to the community over the next several years.

What about support?

To start out to get support for our themes you can visit our support page. In the near future we will be adding support forums and user accounts.

How do we maintain quality?

We have a team of beta testers who review each of our themes before launch. If issues do come up we are fix them promptly and updated themes will be available for download. If you have suggestions for how we can improve our themes please let us know.

View our Themes »

Features

• Focus on Content
• Clean, effective design
• Author Comment Highlighting
• Widgetized Sidebar

Here is the home page:

Here is a post page (single.php):

Do you have any constructive feedback on the design and layout? If you were to use this theme on your blog what features would you like to see?

Since WordPress can be used to create a full website, not just a blog, we wanted to make great CMS-like, custom themes available at an affordable price. And to kick it off we are offering a discount to $1,200 USD.

WP Limits Custom WordPress Theme Designs

If you would like to see more of our work you can take a look at our web design studio in Boise where all of our great designs come from!

Make sure to follow the account here: http://twitter.com/wplimits

If you have any ideas to contribute we would greatly appreciate it as well!

Now in searching for a CMS to use you will come across everything from free, outdated systems such as Joomla, to some very expensive (think $50,000) corporate solutions that offer less functionality. In addition to that entire range a lot of development companies have created their own proprietary CMS. Having taken over clients from many of these development companies I can say that they usually produce nightmarish code, and have no documentation.

In a look search for the perfect CMS we finally settled on WordPress, no it’s not perfect, but here are the reasons we love it:

1. Easy Template System. WordPress will integrate very quickly into an HTML and CSS template using some simple PHP tags. Once you get the hang of how it works, then you can convert a template over to a basic WordPress theme in minutes.
2. Clean Code. WordPress outputs clean, semantic code. There are no outdated, table-based layouts, or anything else that gets in the way of web standards. Also the text editor will only let the user style text in a semantic way (such as using H1s for headers) that follows the CSS for the site (meaning the designer can set the style, and the site owner has to stay consistent with it).
3. Robust Backend. Since the WordPress backend has been recently redesigned, it offers greater functionality. Some of the best web designers in the world worked on it, and it includes hours of usability studies. Know that your clients are using the best interface around.
4. Regular Updates (including security). WordPress is updated regularly, which means that as soon as a security flaw is discovered, an update is sent out for it. Also you can rest assured that your client won’t be left years down the road with a system that is out of date. It will move with the times, and everything will just keep getting better.
5. Excellent documentation. Some people say you should buy from them because they can offer something nobody else can. I say don’t, because if they aren’t around to fix it, then nobody else can and you will be stuck. With an open source system like WordPress you have excellent documentation and resources available including a huge support community. So if your web designer falls of the face of the earth it won’t be that hard to find someone else who can work with your system.

There are many more reasons, but those are the five that are most important to me and my clients. Do you have any more to add, or better yet, reasons you don’t like WordPress as a CMS?

Why did they become popular?

It was very hard to find high quality themes as there was no longer a central theme directory. What was available had no standards for quality, and also themes often included hidden links, or backdoors into your WordPress blog. All things to be avoided.

With premium themes people no longer had to worry about the quality, and the $30-80 people would usually pay was a small price for the level of code they were receiving.

Are they here to stay?

After talking with Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp Utah a few weeks ago, I think they will die out. With the new theme directory we have standards that themes have to meet, and a blog designer can now go to one central location and know that every theme they are looking at is high quality. This takes the hassle out of it since someone else (who is usually more qualified) has already proofed the code, so now you don’t have to. And you are getting this quality for free.

Are free themes sustainable for developers?

The big question is how will these developers who were/are selling premium themes going to still make their money? It will definitely take some more innovation, but I believe it is possible. Take a look at WordPress, it is distributed for free, but is also quite profitable. There is plenty of money to be made off of blog ads, theme customization, and support.

Another example of giving themes away for free is Small Potato’s site WP Designer. He gave away a lot of great themes, and in turn it increased his site traffic (which he turned around and sold for a lot of money).

There are many ways to give themes away and still make money off of them. Maybe you are always being asked to customize certain themes, you can charge for this and make quite a lot. It all depends on what your specific community is looking for.

Recent changes.

The largest news in the premium theme world is that Brian Gardner (the founder of premium themes) is now switching all of this themes to open source. He obviously found a way to make this new business model profitable, so it shouldn’t be too hard for others to follow him.

You can read more about Brian’s changes on his website, as well as an interview with The Blog Herald.

Final thoughts.

For the last couple of weeks I have been trying to decide whether to release several themes open source or as premium themes. Last week after talking to Matt I decided on open source, but was still writing this post (Brian, I have been working on this post since before you made your big announcement!) so I hadn’t announced anything yet. In the next week or so look for several new theme releases including a never before created knowledgebase theme.

My thoughts on the entire premium vs. open source is summed up here:

Everything changes very quickly on the web. You always have to be ready to adapt the new markets and the desires of your community.

Will other premium theme providers follow?

1. WordCamp Utah Video Stream – http://www.ustream.tv/channel/wordcamp-utah
   This has all of the videos from the conference. In particular check out Matt’s keynote address and Cameron’s talk on design. By far the best.
2. Good vs. Great Design – http://cameronmoll.com/speaking/wordcamp/
   Cameron Moll is a great designer and very well polished speaker. He has a lot of things to say on the topic of design, and being a great designer. The link is to his slide deck for the talk. You can view the video on the uStream channel linked to above.
3. Carrington Theme – http://crowdfavorite.com/wordpress/
   Announced by Alex King of CrowdFavorite during his talk at WordCamp, Carrington is a new kind of theme. Or rather more of a theme framework. They have a lot of great features and an interesting new approach to theme development. Here is what Matt says about it:  http://ma.tt/2008/09/carrington/