Today we’d like to announce that all AppThemes products are moving to the General Public License (GPL). We’re excited about the change and how it benefits our existing customers especially with all our new upcoming themes.

So why the switch?

Earlier this year, I attended WordCamp SF and had a chat with both Brian Gardner from StudioPress and Matt Mullenweg about the WordPress premium theme market. We covered a lot of topics and shared our perspectives on the direction the premium themes market was heading. I then brought up the topic of GPL and how AppThemes (ClassiPress at the time) planned to eventually move from a fixed license model to GPL.

Update! We’ve released Vantage. Please make sure you view the following blog posts to see the current state of this theme and future plans:

• Vantage Beta Launched
• Sound the Trumpets, Vantage is Here!
• Video: Creating a Listing in Vantage
• Vantage Introduces the New AppThemes Custom Form Builder
• Vantage 1.0.1 is Near
• Vantage 1.0.1 Released
• Vantage 1.1 Released

We’ve been quietly working away on a special theme which will be our most advanced WordPress App to-date. Vantage is not your typical business directory. It’s a powerful social networking business directory and can be better explained by breaking it down into three primary pieces:

Local Search

Vantage provides online local search capabilities for site visitors. Typically a visitor will search for a specific thing (i.e. a sandwich shop) and the location (i.e. a specific address, city, state, or zip code). This is all done using the Google Maps API and leveraging geo coordinates since they are the most accurate measure of distance.

Each business listing result contains details such as the business address, hours, website, description, etc. It also includes a 5-point rating system and reviews from other site members which are built up over time. The business owners can directly update their own business’ listing information via the Vantage customer account area.

It’s been a while since we’ve released a major feature update to ClassiPress but the good news is there’s one just around the corner. Version 3.1 has been in the works for a while now and will include lots of sought after features.

We actually planned on releasing it a while back but wanted to wait for WordPress 3.0 to first be released so we could benefit from its new features.

If you have visited the ClassiPress Demo recently you may have noticed some color and pizazz that you hadn’t seen before. If you take a closer look you will see that…wait, there are icons for every category!

Wow, that’s great. But how are you going to get icons onto your ClassiPress site? Well, we are here to give you a small tutorial on how to add one icon to one category, giving you the knowledge that will allow you to create categories for ALL your icons!

Before attempting this tutorial, you should have already read and completed the “ClassiPress Child Theme Tutorial Part 1“. Assuming you have done this you will already have a folder for your child theme which leaves us right where we left off.

What we will Cover in Part 2

• Creating the functions.php file.
• Overwriting an existing function (the prices function in this tutorial).
• Creating your own new function in the function file.
• Use the child theme to modify the index-directory.php file so that our homepage is modded.
• Build a new dashboard template to show confirmation messages and activate it.

Step 1: Creating the functions.php file

Navigate to the child theme folder you previously created. Now we need to create a new file in it. You can do this a variety of ways, but we are going to use a technique that is the most “universal”.

One of the most common requests we receive from our customers is, “Do you provide consulting services”? As much as we’d like to help, we just don’t have the resources to do outside projects. Instead, we focus our efforts on enhancing and building amazing WordPress Premium Apps.

But that didn’t stop us from figuring out a way we could add value to our customers and provide such a service. Our new AppThemes Certified Partner program does just that. We’ve partnered up with some top design/development firms who would be happy to help you customize your AppThemes themes.

Please welcome JobRoller – the newest edition to the AppThemes family. JobRoller is a premium WordPress job board app designed to instantly turn your site into a professional job listing site.

JobRoller takes full advantage of the latest available features in WordPress 3.0, specifically custom post types, custom taxonomies, and a custom write panel. This gives you several key advantages to better manage your site.

A ClassiPress patch has been released which addresses a couple of important bugs. You can download it immediately from your customer account dashboard.

This patch includes over 20 fixed tickets ranging from bugs to a few nice enhancements. The most noteworthy additions are PayPal IPN support, a new bank transfer gateway option, and a smart payment drop-down engine.

For details on what has been fixed and added, see our previous ClassiPress 3.0.4 Upcoming Release Details. To see all the changes and which files were affected, take a look at the changelog.txt which is included in the 3.0.4 download. Upgrade instructions are just like previous upgrades. Just make sure to backup your theme before uploading the new version.

It’s been a while since we’ve updated our affiliate banners and figured now was a good time to do so. You’ll notice that we’ve streamlined the banners into a uniform look to focus more on the AppThemes brand. We created a bunch of unique ones for each theme so you can grab em to promote on your site.

If you already have our ClassiPress affiliate banners on your site (using your affiliate code and image url), you don’t need to do anything. They should have automatically been updated.

If you would like to get a hold of our new banners for JobRoller or general AppThemes banners, just login to your affiliate account and get the code. There are several new banners and dimensions but if there is a size you would like us to create, just let us know in the comments below.