Decided to dress up my site with a new black pinstripe suit background created at http://www.stripemania.com.

Added my own css theme file called Black_Pinstripe to my Wufoo themes collection so I can select it any time I am feeling the need dress up the site. Now if I could just find a tie….

There is much debate about Thesis vs GPL in the last 48 hours and many demonizing Chris Pearson.

I found this interview with Chris Pearson from Andrew Warner at Mixergy very interesting. Chris reveals his “inner engineer” – a guy hell bent on discovering problems and then solving them – and then sharing his solution. If you have already made up your mind about Chris then don’t watch as you might find him less evil than you wish to believe.

http://mixergy.com/chris-pearson-thesis-interview/

Installed WordPress 3.0 beta on some test sites yesterday. Happy so far.

Good things I see:

• New default theme
• Custom header images managed from the dashboard
• Custom page background images managed from the dashboard
• Multi-site !!!!
• Widgetized Fat Footer in the default theme (4 widget areas so now default theme has 6 widgets instead of 2)

So on the bad news:
Multi-site with multiple domain names – to do this you still need

• a domain mapping plugin
• customized wildcard DNS settings in cpanel or WHM
• create a parked domain in cpanel
• eye of newt
• live owl intestines

BUT it does and did work and hopefully the days of maintaining dozens / hundreds / thousands of standard WP installs are done.
What to do with my time?

Markus Urban discusses different Theme options available.

While there are certainly tons of great FREE themes available the past year or two has seen the development of Professional WordPress Themes. Theme sellers offer single themes, groups of themes or theme clubs where you can access all of their themes for an upfront cost and a monthly club fee.

One of my favorite WordPress Theme providers is Woo Themes. They offer beautiful themes for a fair price.

Sample of a few Themes for sale at Woo Themes:

Optimize Theme from Woo Themes

Mortar Theme from Woo Themes

Thick Theme from Woo Themes

SophisticatedFolio Theme from Woo Themes

Woo Themes usually has a sale or special and offers developers licenses or single site licenses.
Link: Woo Themes:

WordPress Themes allow WordPress users to publish a web site and/or blog without having to hire a graphic artist to design a look and feel for the site. Changing themes is almost as easy as changing your mind, in fact it might be too easy. I have seen some WordPress installations with 50 or 60 themes installed!

Good News about Themes:
Lots of Them
Since there is no EXACT way of knowing how many WordPress themes exist one can only make an educated estimate in the thousands, possibly the tens of thousands.

Flexible
Most themes have the same number of files and must use certain file names so they can be installed on any WordPress installation.

Bad News About Themes:
Lots of Them
You can waste precious hours wading through lists, downloading and installing really bad themes.

Unknown Authors
Who builds WordPress Themes? Anyone that follows a basic set of rules can create and package a theme for distribution. This is one of the many downsides of WordPress Themes as you don’t know the author and it is possible that unwanted code or files can exist inside a theme therefore you need to exercise caution when downloading and installing WordPress Themes from unknown sources. Many WordPress themes are free and are given away by the authors with the only “payment’ being leaving author credits and linkbacks in the footers of the themes. You may notice a free theme on a WP site and see in the footer Theme by ___________ and then a strange link like Credit Card Applications or whatever. The author is using the link to drive S E O back to a site or page that is being monetized by Google Adwords or some other method. Nothing wrong with that but many people don’t want this kind of noise appearing on their web site or blog.

Flexible
You are now potentially dealing with many folders of files that use the same names and things can get confusing quickly.

Up for a wild goose chase?
Find Free WordPress Themes at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/