Last week we held a contest with our friend Hong and decided to give away five free copies of our popular ClassiPress theme.

To enter the contest, all you needed to do was leave a comment on the contest post and at the end of the week, five people were randomly selected.

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Now that we are officially a “theme company”, it’s important to produce more high quality, well, themes of course.

Launching AppThemes took many months of development and migration which slowed us down on product development. With the new infrastructure in place, we are now in a good position to scale and offer more products to our customers.

Our goal over the next several months is to release a handful of nifty new WordPress apps and sprinkling in some typical premium themes.

Now many of you have asked if there will be a subscription-based pricing model so you can get each theme as it becomes available. The good news is yes, there will be a “theme club” which we will announce later this year.

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With the roll-out of ClassiPress 3.0.3 behind us, we can now focus some of our resources on our next theme slated for release, JobRoller. This new premium theme will address the need for those looking to have their very own job board.

We decided to keep the design simplistic since many customers will want to style their job board to match their existing website. For those of you who don’t, it’s elegant enough to run as a standalone website so you can charge people to list their job reqs on your site.

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It’s certainly been one heck of a busy year for the ClassiPress team and now after months of hard work, we are pleased to announce our new website, AppThemes.

As you could probably tell, AppThemes is not your typical WordPress premium themes business. Our goal is to fit a much needed niche of providing business software easy enough to use without requiring a technical person to setup. What better system to build these apps on top off than WordPress.

Not only that but we also take pride in the quality of our code so developers can easily understand what’s going on. How many of you have ever downloaded or purchased a premium theme before only to discover the code is a mess or doesn’t even work properly? I’ve been there before and it’s frustrating especially after you already spent the money.

I call this the Great Oz effect. You have this powerful-looking character that looks great on the outside only to discover that behind the green curtain is a tiny little old man. I regress.

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It’s time for some spring cleaning and the customer showcase page needs an overhaul. Are you an existing customer currently using 3.0 and want to show off your work? Heavily modded or straight out of the box ClassiPress sites are both welcome.

If your site is selected for inclusion, you will be featured in our ClassiPress Customer Showcase  which is one of our most popular pages. This will put you front and center and includes such benefits as a free link from an authoritative WordPress Premium Themes site (great for SEO), additional free traffic, and bragging rights. Interested?

To enter, please submit a comment below with a link to your site and a brief description. All entries will be reviewed and then selected by the end of May. Good luck and we’re looking forward to seeing a few of the thousands of ClassiPress sites being used all around the world today!

This past weekend was the annual SF WordCamp which I had the pleasure to attend. It’s always a great event and the energy was especially high this year with the upcoming release of 3.0. The first day consisted of general sessions and a “State of the Word” keynote from Matt Mullenweg (WordPress founder). There was a nice bbq outdoor lunch and even live Jazz.

I also had the pleasure to meet Matt Mullenweg and Brian Gardner (who are both great guys, btw) to discuss WordPress 3.0 and Premium WordPress Themes. Lots of good stuff which has helped me strategize and better plan the direction of ClassiPress and the upcoming launch of our new theme business. It’s a very competitive environment and the sad part is lots of theme developers just aren’t doing a good job. It’s still the wild west when it comes to theming standards and guidelines. Hopefully that’s something WordPress will change in the future.

What I was surprised to see was the number of people who had iPads. It’s apparent that a majority of the attendees are early adopters and big fans of Apple. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised and in fact, I am one of those people as well sporting my new 3G iPad. 😉

Overall this year was a great conference and if you’ve never been to a WordCamp before, I highly recommend going. Look for a WordCamp coming to a city near you.

Here are a couple pictures I took during day two at the “Unconference” for developers.

It’s a great experience so if you are able to ever attend a WordCamp, I highly recommend it!

How many of you have already started to take advantage of the child-theme feature within ClassiPress 3.0? I’ve started to see some forum threads on how to hack it a bit. All this is wonderful and the more I can get the community involved the better results for everyone.

So if you’ve started a child-theme, finished one, or just need someone to help you, please start the discussion below. I’m excited to see what the community has done thus far. Once everyone starts to get the hang of this, I’d like to hold a challenge. There’s nothing like good old fashion competition, right? This time it’s on a global scale and the winner will receive a prize (not yet disclosed). Who knows….we might soon be offering a theme aftermarket place where you can sell your stuff on our site.

So what are you waiting for and start those engines. For those who are still new and need some help, I recommend starting with these two articles.

Besides all the great new features included in ClassiPress 3.0, I also wanted to bring up the much improved installation process. Most Premium themes or plugins you install (including ClassiPress 2.9) require you to manually create pages, assign them to a custom template, name the permalink/url a certain way, publish them, find the page id, paste it into another field, and then save.

Not only is that process a real pain, but it takes time and allows the opportunity for mistakes. It also means those who don’t like to read instructions or cannot read English will have a lot less trouble getting their site setup. It also is a good thing for those who are new or aren’t very comfortable with WordPress in general.

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Many of you have been asking how to be part of the 3.0 beta testing program. Well, today we’ve officially launched the first ClassiPress beta testing program and now is the time for you to become part of ClassiPress history.

Being a beta tester actually requires a lot of work on your part so before signing up, please make sure you are ready for the commitment. You will need to dedicate several hours of your time (over a two-week period) to help flush out any bugs before 3.0 is ready for a GA release.

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One of the most talked about features of ClassiPress 3.0 is the ability to create your own custom fields and forms. This cool new feature will make it easy for you to have a different form for each category.

For example, say you have a WordPress category called “Cars” and you want to have fields called “Year”, “Make”, and “Model” that are all drop-down lists. No problem. Just create each custom field, add the drop-down values, and then add those fields to your “Cars” custom form layout. That form will only display when someone is posting a new ad under the “Cars” category.

In this video demo I show you how to create a custom form for a category called “Electronics”. Then you’ll see how it dynamically shows up on the ad form page. It’s that easy to create your own forms and fields all from within the WordPress admin.