We have three big updates and more coming in April that we’re excited to announce.

Vantage 1.0

The first, widely available version of Vantage, the business directory application theme from AppThemes, will be on sale by April 27. That’s right — this release will be available to everyone, not only club members. Of course, all AppThemes Club members will have access to Vantage 1.0, too.

The release of Vantage has been a long time coming. To show our appreciation for your patience, Vantage will be on sale for the first week following the release. As mentioned in a previous post, Vantage will be available for 30% off the regular price of $99 for standard and $159 for developer. This sale will only last a week, so make sure you mark your calendar.

It’s been a very hectic couple of weeks, AppThemers. But we promised a Vantage release date this week, so this post will be brief. We will have more news on Monday.

Vantage 1.0 will be available on April 27.

JobRoller 1.6 will be available by the end of April.

Clipper 1.3 will be available on April 9.

Many more announcements and exciting developments coming soon. Stay tuned.

Ladies and gentlemen, Vantage beta is now available to all AppThemes Club members and beta testers. We are truly happy that we can finally pull the curtain back to give everyone a peek at this long-awaited and much anticipated theme. Here it is folks…Vantage, the business directory theme for WordPress.

So let’s get to it and see what this theme is all about.

With all the buzz about Vantage these days, it might be hard to notice that we have been working diligently on our other themes as well. In fact, one of our New Year’s resolutions was to release a new update for ClassiPress, JobRoller and Clipper once per month. I’m happy to say, we haven’t faltered on that resolution yet.

We just released JobRoller 1.5.4 – that’s five updates in the last five months! We’ve made incredible progress with the theme in that time period. Our once sizable ticket list has just a handful of open issues. We feel that JobRoller is stronger and more stable than it’s ever been – and now it’s time to take it to the next level.

The end of the year is upon us and it looks like I’ll be eating banana slug stew. Vantage will not be ready by December 31.

Our development team has been burning the Vantage candle from both ends the last several months. We’re close – we just need a little more time. It’s important to us that we get it right before releasing it into the wild.

We understand that everyone has waited a long time for Vantage. As we come closer to completion, we are prepared to offer up a mea culpa. So here it goes:

Google recently announced that they would start charging for the use of Google Maps. Full details can be found at the Google Geo Developers blog.

The following is an excerpt from the Google Maps API FAQ page:

One of the most popular requests we’ve received from our customers has been, “Can you please improve the theme update process?”

We agree, it’s not been easy (especially for non-technical folks) to upgrade your theme. Not only is it a hassle for our customers, it uses unnecessary support resources which could instead be applied towards other customer needs. So how can we improve this experience?

Since the recent additions to our development team over the summer, we started brainstorming on how best to tackle this. The objective was to provide a simple way for anyone to upgrade our themes. After many discussions, working prototypes, and days of trial and error, our theme scientists emerged from their lab with the solution.

Issue. Tracking. Made. Easy. It’s that simple with Quality Control, our newest application theme – a full-blown ticketing system built by developers, for developers.

It’s flexible framework allows coders to easily build plugins and child themes. It also runs on WordPress Multisite so you can setup endless projects – each with it’s own set of user permissions. And best of all, it’s integrated with GitHub and Beanstalk for seamless ticket control.

The development of this theme was headed up by Cristi (aka scribu) and is his first major contribution to AppThemes since he joined us a few months back. As we mentioned previously, he’s a WordPress core contributor so you’ll notice the extensive use of the WordPress API and the beautiful craftsmanship of the code.

The latest version of JobRoller is now available. This release includes several bug fixes, new features, and an important Indeed integration change. Please read this entire post before performing the upgrade as not everyone may wish to do so.

What’s New?

The most notable changes in 1.5 have to do with the Indeed integration and a new resume (CV) subscription monetization feature. To see the full list of fixes and changes in this release, read the 1.5 release notes on our docs site.