Ahhh! The sound of a productive team is wonderful to the ears. The AppThemes lead team is making great progress on Vantage. Andrzej is doing fantastic work on ClassiPress 3.2. And we’re finalizing designs for the release of our ideas theme.

The lead developers are getting so much work done on Vantage that it’s time for management to start thinking about our next theme. That begs the question, “What should be next for AppThemes?”

Your Chance to Decide

Who better to put this question to than you? That’s right, our loyal customers and supportive community members. This is your chance to tell us what you want next. What theme have you been longing to have?

We checked out our ideas exchange to come up with the most popular theme ideas. Read the short summaries and then vote in the poll below. If you don’t see the theme you want, why not tell us about it in the comments.

About a month ago, we started an internal campaign to produce more tutorial content. Everyone at AppThemes is contributing to the effort. The result will not only include some great articles on how to use our themes but also some fantastic insights into WordPress from one of the best teams in the business.

To help get the word out, we’re introducing Tutorial Tuesdays to the blog. Tutorial Tuesdays will be run down of all instructional from the previous week. We will also highlight some important content from our archives and occasionally link to tutorials from other sites.

And now, on to the tutorials…

Your Clipper coupon site should be an affiliate revenue generating machine. But it’s tough to do that when your site lacks the great deals and coupons that most people are looking for.

Chasing down coupon codes and importing CSV files can be a huge drag on your time. So how do you get the coupon data you need without spending hours getting them in your coupon site?

I’m sure you all have been waiting with bated breath, and your patience has been rewarded. I’m here to announce that the first update to Vantage is here.

Vantage 1.0.1 has a bunch of stuff that you’ve been asking for:

Themed Logins
You asked, we listened. Login, Registration, and the rest of the user experience is themed for an immersive experience for your users.

Bundled Child Theme
We’ve bundled a child theme right along with Vantage. The child theme is the absolute basics but it’s a head start to creating child themes the best way possible. All you have to do is move it from the Vantage directory to the Themes folder, and start modifying.

Note: With Vantage 1.0.1 release coming in the next week or two, I’ve asked one of our developers – Tyler Carter – to write a blog post about it. Cheers ~ Shannon.

Sitting here in my nice comfortable office chair, behind two screens, looking at a terminal filled with teh codes, I’m excited about what we have coming up in the next few weeks. Vantage, our latest creation, is now getting stronger, faster, and overall more awesome.

Some of you may not know me. My name is Tyler Carter, and I program. I program in coffee shops, in churches, in people’s backyards. Sometimes I program on top of a nearby mountain with nothing but the tunes from my iPod and a soda (indeed, I am a blue dot on the Great Debate of the Universe). And yes, I would program on a plane, and I would program on a train. And in a car, and in the rain, and … well now this is just getting silly.

Our new custom form builder is going to make your life easier! Do you need more than basic contact info for a business listing? Is your business directory in a niche market that requires unique data? Well, get it done with the new custom form builder.

With push-button simplicity, the new custom form builder makes it a snap to add custom data to your theme. The form builder allows you to create custom fields that will show up on the Vantage “Create a listing” form. After your customer enters data into the custom fields, it shows up on their listing. Simple as that.

We created a short video tutorial to show you how to get the most out of the new custom form builder for your site. Check it out below.

We would first like to announce that the response to Vantage has been phenomenal. We are really encouraged by how much people like the theme and have posted some very supportive comments. Thank you everyone. We look forward to adding even more features to Vantage as soon as possible.

Quite a few people have asked us about the checkout process after an end-user creates a listing in Vantage. It’s not possible to see this with the demo, so we thought it would helpful to create a video.

Here ye! Here ye! AppThemes is proud to announce our latest creation, Vantage!

Vantage is a powerful and robust business directory theme for WordPress that’s easy to use and even easier to setup. It’s fast, got lots of horsepower under the hood, and uses our new drag and drop form builder which will help transform your site into an interactive, money-making, community-building machine.

With the release of Vantage coming soon, our new theme framework is mostly done. All our themes will now have the same code for similar features and functions – including payment processing. In addition, all payment gateways will be created as plugins. This allows us to create a single gateway plugin that can be used in ClassiPress, JobRoller, Clipper and Vantage.

We wanted to know what gateways you are interested in having the most. We have seen suggestions in the forums and on the ideas exchange but thought a poll would be a great way to measure the demand for this.