Wow! April’s Going to be Huge!

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.

JobRoller 1.6

Bruno, our JobRoller developer, has been doing some absolutely incredible work. 1.6 is going to be a fantastic release with some highly anticipated features.

Job Alerts

This version of our job board theme will introduce the popularly requested job alerts feature. End users fill out an easy-to-use form to define what jobs interest them most. Whenever a job gets posted that fits their criteria, JobRoller sends an email to them. It’s just another way that JobRoller helps you stay engaged with your audience. We’ll have a full blog post on this feature in the coming days.

Job Packs

1.6 improves on job packs by adding new options. And we’re throwing away the plain design of job packs and introducing a new, more polished design. Another simple feature that should have a lot impact is allowing the purchase of a job pack without buying a job listing. Your site’s customers will now be able to click a link in the sidebar and buy job packs whenever they want.

New and Improved Feeds

Not only are we adding a Simply Hired feed, we’re improving the ways that you can use the feed data. Pull jobs from job sites, direct employers or both — sort jobs by relevance or date; style sponsored jobs using custom CSS classes and more. More feeds mean more opportunities for you and Indeed and Simply Hired are just the beginning. We’re in conversations with Career Jet and JobG8 in hopes of adding feeds from them. Have your own favorite feed you want to see added to JobRoller? Let us know in the comments!

Leaner Themes, More Plugins

The Simply Hired feature marks a major change for AppThemes. Instead of continuing to pack in feature after feature, we’re going to create lean and robust themes that have a solid set of core features. With plugins, we can continue to create a ton of new features that will not bog down your site. As a site-owner, you will get a chance to choose the features you want and leave behind the ones you don’t need.

Speaking of Plugins…

AppThemes has a fantastic community full of talented developers and designers. You may have seen some of the great work produced by members like Mr_Green, Rubencio, TinyGiant Studios and more. These folks have been selling their plugins and child themes through the forums for some time now. Well, it’s about time that they have a proper place to offer their products to all AppThemes customers.

We have been quietly working on an AppThemes marketplace for child themes and plugins. It will be a one stop shop for fine tuning and customizing your AppThemes application theme. Want to change the look of your ClassiPress site? No problem. How about a plugin to add extra features to JobRoller? Get it in the marketplace!

We’re about a month away from launching. If you have a plugin or child theme that was created to work with our themes, drop us a line at support@appthemes.com. But know up front that we are looking for only the best, highest quality products to sell to our customers.

Clipper Too!

The hits just keep coming! Clipper 1.3 is available now. That’s right, we just released it today and there are some big changes to the layout. Here’s what we have done…

• Revised the standard Clipper logo
• Created a much larger, full-width featured coupons slider
• Added store thumbnail to coupons – a very popular request on our ideas exchange!
• Added expiration date to coupons in coupon list
• Added tags to coupons in coupon list
• Revised voting and rating display
• Submitting a coupon has changed – more info here ( http://docs.appthemes.com/uncategorized/setting-up-submit-coupon-links )
• Added editable text to “Receive Coupons by Email” widget
• Enabled styles on retrieve password page to create a seamless, branded experience

In addition to these layout and feature changes, we fixed a number of issues and addressed many other items requested by the community. You can see a full list of changes here.

We think this is an outstanding release of Clipper. The new look is bound to please your customers and visitors. We strongly recommend updating to take advantage of the great new additions. You can either download Clipper 1.3 from your customer dashboard or upgrade directly from within WordPress.

Check out the demo to see the new layout.

We have more in store for Clipper. We’ve heard your requests to make this theme more effective as an income tool and we are working on making that happen. Stay tuned, there’s a lot more to come for Clipper.

Whew! Anything Else?

Yup! We sure do have a lot going on here. As soon as we release Vantage 1.0, we’re jumping right back in to work on the next release. We’re going to keeping pushing the limits on JobRoller and keep finding ways to monetize Clipper. And there are more themes on tap but nothing that we’re ready to announce yet. We’ve learned our lesson about pre-announcing themes. But it’s really going to be a banner year for AppThemes and it all starts with our big April. Get ready everyone, it’s going to be great!