It seems everyone is selling premium themes these days (We’ll be selling our own premium themes after the New Year), but my favorite for WordPress is Elegant Themes. Rather than sell themes individually like we will do here, they offer complete access to their entire inventory for a measly $19.95 a year. I would never do this because it allows you to use all their themes as many times as you want for one ridiculously low price - but - I couldn’t not promote theme here because while I don’t like that particular business model it makes awesome sense for anyone who needs premium themes.

What makes Elegant Themes different is that their themes are actually great themes. Like Bust A Theme, they focus on providing incredible themes that focus on a niche market rather than throwing a bunch of blog/portfolio themes together. These are just 3 (my personal favorites) of the now 20 themes available for download:

Elegant Themes also has an excellent affiliate program where they will pay out 50% of each sale to you. I have been approached by nearly every theme (re)seller for promotion and turned them all down for quality reasons, but it was I who found out Elegant Themes and chose to promote them. Even though Bust A Theme will soon be competing with them, I couldn’t not pass the word along when I saw what they were offering for less than $20. That should say something about the level of quality they offer compared to other theme marketplaces. Elegant Themes has Bust A Themes stamp of approval and then some.

Visit Elegant Themes and sign up now » » »

Keep an eye out for new themes from Bust A Theme after the first of the year!

News CMS is - as the name implies - a news-slash-article-slash-cms WordPress Theme. The goal here was to provide a customizable theme that could be turned into any given news site with as little as a graphical face lift. The emphasis with News CMS is on customization rather than aesthetics. It’s one of the very first themes I did with the intent of release (about a year ago), but it still holds up so I figured I’d take some time and package it up as a Thanksgiving freebie.

News CMS uses quite a few plugins, but I’ve included them in the download to make life a little easier for you. This theme still functions without any of them, but I strongly recommend you install them as the site functions much more like a news site with their aid.

Download: news cms latest (2.68 MB)

What’s Next?
I know I said I was done with WP CODA, but I’m thinking about making a Christmas themed version or perhaps just a Christmas themed derivitave of it. I’m working a premium theme called WP Slider that takes the best aspects of WP CODA and ads all the standard functionality we’ve discussed putting into CODA BLUE but didn’t get the chance to. If I can, I’ll release WP Slider and then release a Christmas theme for it. Whatever I decide to do, I hope to see another 2 themes released by 2009!

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Update:
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WP CODA has been a tremendous hit. While I no longer have the intention of continuing development with WP CODA - at the request of Panic! - I wanted to release CODA BLUE and the accompanying PSD as promised. This will be the last CODA release that mimics the Coda site functionality. While I may use some of the techniques used in this theme again, I will not be duplicating the functionality of the Coda site so closely.

So what’s next?

I developed this cms/news theme nearly a year ago and never used it. I need to update it to be used with Wordpress 2.5+ and write a unified plugin to make installation easier, but it’s a complete CMS theme in a news-site format. The purpose behind this theme is to offer a very basic-but-clean cms/news theme that is easy to customize.

I’ll also be re-designing, or rather, designing Bust A Theme to serve as a wordpress theme site so keep a look out!

Download: coda blue latest (1.02 MB)

wp coda latest (353.37 KB)