Theme Lab

WPShift Launches, Two ShiftNews Theme Licenses Up For Grabs

Leland — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:02:48 +0000

For any of you who have been following the WPShout or followed either @AlexDenning or @epicalex (no relation) on Twitter, you’ve most likely heard of a new premium WordPress theme company launching soon called WPShift.

They launched a couple days ago with a theme called ShiftNews, normally priced at $59.95 for a single site license. Check out the screenshot below or click through for a live demo.

For two lucky Theme Lab readers, you could win a single site license to the ShiftNews theme absolutely free.

Watch the following video to get an idea of what this theme is all about, including features (like custom widget based layout control) and support.

Read on to find out how to enter the contest. It’s not that hard, I promise.

How To Enter

It’s pretty easy to enter, you just have to do every single one of the following things (or you’re disqualified):

Make a blog post with a link back to this post
Tweet a link to this page once per hour for a 24 hour period (bonus if you use multiple accounts).
Same thing with Facebook status, MySpace bulletins, and FriendFeed, and five other social networking sites of your choice.
Bookmark this page on Delicious, Digg, Mixx, Propeller, and six other social bookmarking sites of your choice
Subscribe to the RSS feed via e-mail and get twenty or more of your friends to do the same.
Fave this blog on Technorati, since Technorati is still relevant, and people care how many times a blog has been “faved” there.
Pick a number between 1 and 1,000,000, jump through a flaming hoop, and then buy a ferret through my affiliate link.

Just kidding, don’t do any of that stuff. Well, actually you can do all of the above (except I don’t have a ferret affiliate link), but it won’t give you any advantage in the contest.

Seriously, this is how you really enter

Tweet about this contest. You should include @wpshift, @themelab, and a link back to this page. If you want a short URL, use this: http://www.themelab.com/1470. For example: I just entered a contest at @themelab to win a theme from @WPShift. Details here: http://www.themelab.com/1470
Post a comment below on this post with a link to your Twitter status. URL should be similar to this: http://twitter.com/themelab/status/8456081609
That’s it

Also remember, there’s only one entry per person. If I catch you using multiple accounts, aliases, whatever, you’ll be disqualified.

On Wednesday, February 10, 2010 at 12:00 PM EST this content will be closed to new entries, and I’ll pick two winners at random.

I’ll e-mail the winners, so make sure to leave a valid address when you make a comment. I could also try to contact you via Twitter if email fails, but yeah…just leave a valid email address. It’ll make things easier.

Conclusion

If you consider yourself unlucky, a black cat just crossed your path, and/or recently walked under a ladder, you could buy the theme now.

If you’re feeling lucky, go ahead and make your tweet, post your tweet link in the comments below, and hope you win. Good luck!

WordPress Clone Themes – Your Take?

Leland — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 15:29:45 +0000

I came across a theme the other day called TweetPress, which bears a very obvious resemblance to the Twitter profile design. Let’s compare.

First, here’s a screenshot of the TweetPress theme:

And here’s a screenshot of my Twitter profile.

Not only is it a striking resemblance, it appears the cloudy background image was lifted directly from Twitter’s website, among other things. It’s the default background image set for new profiles.

Update: According to Gabriel Jones, creator of the TweetPress theme, “The [Twitter] API returns the background image, the link colors, everything…” in this comment.

Cloned WordPress themes aren’t exactly a new phenomena though…

Other Clone Themes

This blog post over at WPZOOM with 15 examples of WordPress clone themes shows a few more examples.

Some of the themes are clones of popular news sites, such as ESPN, and the New York Times. A theme review which I did here a while back called Red Carpet could have been considered a clone of People.com

Others are clones of popular social network sites like Digg, Facebook, and of course, Twitter.

Some are free, some are paid. Either way, I don’t like it one bit.

My Take

At best, they are overly inspired. At worst, it’s downright theft. I’m no lawyer, but I’d imagine that taking a custom design of another site would involve some serious copyright issues.

When you’re releasing the theme into the wild, selling it, and profiting off of it, you’ve probably opened a whole new can of worms.

Running Custom Theme, I have received several requests to make clones, replicas, whatever you want to call it, of other sites the potential client is not associated with.

I’m not talking about inspiration, I’m talking about requests to completely copy a site. I have refused every single job like that, and will continue to do so.

A while back, someone actually took my old blog design of Theme Lab, converted it to a Blogger theme (yuck) and released it under some Creative Commons license. This was almost an exact copy, images, styles and all, released without my knowledge or consent. I asked nicely (as in, no internet hounds involved) and the webmaster who released it removed it.

In another incident, someone released a theme (which I reviewed as a Theme Lab Look-alike Theme) which also took some obvious inspiration from Theme Lab, although I don’t believe any images or CSS was directly taken from my site.

Needless to say, in both instances I was pretty upset that it seemed people were taking advantage of my popular site design and using it to get more traffic, promote themselves, and ultimately profit off of my copyrighted designs.

Your Thoughts?

WPTavern had a great discussion titled “Themes that mimic copyrighted design,” started by Hafiz Rahman of WPlover. The consensus? It was generally a bad practice. Whether or not it was legal or not, or enforceable, remained up for debate.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on the issue. Here are a few questions to think about.

Where do you draw the line between inspiration and design theft?
How would you feel if someone copied your popular blog design, and then released the theme without your permission?
What if they were profiting of your copyrighted work, through direct theme sales (if it’s through a paid theme) or ad and affiliate revenues?

Sound off in the comments.

Update: Hafiz Rahman (previously mentioned in the post) has published a response: Theme Developers, Learn to Steal the Right Way!

What Makes a “SEO-Friendly” WordPress Theme?

Leland — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:15:34 +0000

There’s a lot of hullabaloo regarding “SEO” when it comes to WordPress themes. In this series of posts, I’ll go over what most people believe is “good SEO” when it comes to web templates. If your theme doesn’t have it already, I’ll show you how to “correct” it.

Content ordering, and how to make sure your content appears before the sidebar no matter the layout
Clean, semantic markup, and how to eliminate unnecessary code from your themes
Lots and lots of navigation, including the all-important breadcrumb navigation.
The “All In One SEO” syndrome, how to integrate a custom write panel to control title and meta tags in your theme

I’ll update this post with links to the articles as I publish them. Think of the above as a dynamic outline of my “SEO friendly” WordPress theme series.

My Thoughts on “SEO friendly” WordPress themes

First up, here’s a challenge: try to find a premium WordPress theme for sale that doesn’t mention something related to “SEO” as one of the benefits. You’d be hard pressed to find a single one that hasn’t hopped on the “SEO friendly” bandwagon. But what does it actually mean?

I’ll tell you what it doesn’t mean. It has nothing to do with content, incoming links, outgoing links, you know, the things that actually count for something. That’s part of the reason why I’ve put every single mention of “SEO” in scare quotes, because it’s so much more than the on-site benefits that can be provided by the template you use.

For themes that have a clue, they probably do a lot of the things I’ve listed above very well. Whether or not your pages actually rank is another story, but “SEO friendly” themes can put you at a slight advantage, and that’s what I hope to show you how to do in this series of posts.

If you’re so obsessed with “optimizing” your site that you neglect creating quality content, link building, and the like, you may have a problem. Don’t go too overboard with this stuff, but don’t be completely ignorant to search engines and be so naive as to think, “all I have to do is create good content, and Google will love me!” Even amazing content needs to be promoted.

This post was originally meant to be a response to Alex Denning’s post called “Some Thoughts on SEO” and Jeff Chandlers post “Write For People, Not Spiders” but it evolved into this.

Am I Missing Anything?

Themes can provide the tools to help you, but they can’t hold your hand, make sacrifices to Google gods for plentiful traffic, or anything like that.

If there’s any on-site SEO that a theme is capable of doing that I’ve missed, please let me know and I’ll consider adding it to one of my future series posts.

WordPress Weekend Resources – July 3, 2009

Tasty Showcase – Free WordPress Theme

Leland — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:09:35 +0000

Finally, presenting the winner of theme battle #3. Tasty Showcase was a template designed by Brad of DemusDesign, who also coded it in XHTML/CSS/JS. I then took the coded template and ported it to WordPress. It has a ton of widgetized areas, including widgetized footers (plural).

Read on to see the features, including how to use the slider, in more detail…

The Slider

Displayed on the homepage, this Karmic Flow powered slider will display your four latest posts with a custom image should you choose.

Once you have a custom image sized 653×367 (653 pixels wide, 367 pixels high) simply input the absolute URL to the image in the built-in custom write panel.

If you don’t have an image, the theme will automatically use one of the placeholder images (depending on which slot it is) if you don’t specify one yourself. That means even if you don’t have any images, there will still be a different picture for each one.

Widgetized Areas

This theme is chock-full of widgetized areas, 14 to be exact. Here’s where they are, and what they do:

Sidebar – Four areas, one full width above, two half widths, and one full width below
Footer – Five areas, one for each column
Home Footer – Four areas, one for each column
404 Template – One area, so you can customize your 404 pages

Keep in mind the “Home Footer” areas are only used on the homepage (where the slider is). The rest of the footer widget areas are controlled through the “Footer” ones, and affect every other page on the site besides the homepage.

The above diagram shows all the “Sidebar” and “Footer” widget areas. Not pictured are the “Home Footer” areas (basically the same place as the regular footer, except on the homepage) and the 404 template widget areas.

Conclusion

I bet you all forgot about theme battles, didn’t you? I know it was a few months between the conclusion of the voting and the release of the winning theme (this one) but better late than never.

Brad from DemusDesign was kind enough to code this one into XHTML/CSS and integrated the Javascript for the slider even though I usually code the winning theme battle themes myself. This time I just did the WordPress portion. You can get the static (non-WordPress) version on his site.

I’d also like to thank Cristian Antohe of Cozmos Labs for spotting a bug on the theme via Twitter. Also a special thanks to Omar Corrales of Slimmity who tested the theme himself and provided some good feedback, including several bug fixes before the release.

Anyway, since the time RS16 was released, I got the forums back online (with a matching bbPress theme) so if you have any support questions, they go there.

Let me know what you think of the theme in the comments, I’d really love to hear your feedback.

New Community Links Page

Leland — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:00:52 +0000

A number of you have asked me what happened to my “WordPress Weekend Resources” series since I haven’t posted one of those since September 2009. Basically what I would do is roundup some of the top WordPress-related links I found during the past week, and posted them on the blog with my take on it.

I stopped doing it, because I was posting most of these links on my Twitter account already. Although, for those of you who don’t use Twitter, or follow so many people you might miss one of my tweets, I created a new community links page.

This page is an automatically updated list of tweets from my @themelab account with either a #WordPress hashtag and/or a #tlcom hashtag. The “tlcom” stands for Theme Lab Community, by the way. Also, remember it only posts tweets with my Twitter account, so don’t try to spam the hashtags thinking it’s going to show up on that page, because it’s not.

It’s powered by Juitter, a jQuery plugin, which uses the Twitter Search API to pull my latest tweets with that criteria. Being powered by the Twitter Search API, I believe it only goes back seven days, so make sure you check it at least once a week.

With that said, I have a couple questions for you:

Would you still be interested in WordPress Weekend Resources returning? Although you can get more real-time information through Twitter, it has a temporariness attached with it, as you can only go back 7 days or so with the search API. Blog posts would be more permanent, plus there would be more room for information in the descriptions.
Would you be interested in a tutorial on how to make your own “Community Links” page template in WordPress? Although it wouldn’t have to be community links, pretty much anything that you can search on Twitter could be put on an automatically-updated page on your site.

Let me know in the comemnts, thanks!

Stop Complaining About Scrapers and Start Taking Advantage of Them

Leland — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:52:27 +0000

If you have a semi-popular blog, chances are you have a few scraper sites copying your posts directly from your feed. When you catch a site doing this, you’ll probably be pretty upset at first, seeing as they just copied all your hard work, and probably didn’t even give you credit. Instead of getting mad, get even.

In this post, I’ll go over some ways to do just this in WordPress by building links back to your blog (even when the scraper conveniently “forgot” to credit you):

How to use the RSS Footer plugin to insert links (or whatever other content you want) directly into your feed.
How to use FeedBurner FeedFlares to insert social bookmarking links in your feeds, plus your own custom-made flares.
How to install YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) to automatically insert related post links into your feed.

Read on to see the rest, there’s a video too…

RSS Footer

This RSS Footer plugin by Yoast is a popular solution for adding copyright messages and other messages (including ads and links) to your feeds. It’s pretty simple to set up, after installing the plugin just customize the message you want to appear in the RSS footer of your posts.

The default message in the screenshot includes a link to your post, as well as a link back to your blog. There are also a number of other parameters but the only one that really needs to be dynamic is the %%POSTLINK%% one.

I’ve seen people put image ads down there, even more text links back to pages on their site, and messages like “This post was stolen by a scraper.” Keep in mind, not only will these messages show up on splogs scraping your site, they’ll also show up in your feed (where actual people see it).

With that said, I probably wouldn’t recommend messages like “This post was stolen by a scraper” as your human RSS subscribers may not understand what that means.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

This is a plugin that I recommend for almost any blog. Pretty much, if you have enough posts to have related posts, use YARPP. It’s practically guaranteed to keep visitors on your site longer, as they tend to click through the various related posts to find more stuff

When first installing it, you may notice it doesn’t detect any related posts at first (even when you have a ton of blog posts). This is probably due to the “match threshold” being set too high, or the related posts cache hasn’t been built yet. Check out the YARPP FAQ for more information on this.

After installing it, you have the option of automatically displaying posts on your blog, as well as in your feed. Not only does this help keep bounce rates low, it is a good way to get deeplinks to your site from all the automated scrapers out there stealing your content.

RSS Footer + YARPP Screencast

In this screencast, I install the RSS footer plugin and go over some of the settings. I also show how I set up my YARPP settings here on Theme Lab, as well the option to display related posts in feeds.

Bonus: FeedBurner FeedFlare

FeedBurner FeedFlare is a service provided by, you guessed it, FeedBurner. If you’ve ever seen links like “Save this post to Delicious” or dynamic comment counts within feeds, this is how you do it.

After you’ve set up your FeedBurner feed, go to the “Optimize” tab in your account and activate FeedFlare. From here, there are a few “official” FeedFlares you can use.

On Theme Lab, I use: Email This, Comments Count, and Save to Delicious, and also a couple custom ones with a link back to my homepage and to my Twitter. In hindsight, it might be better to link back to these two with the previously mentioned RSS Footer.

However, if you want to set up your own custom FeedFlare links like mine, what better way could there be than to look at the actual XML files I use myself?

After you’ve modified the XML files for own use (unless you want to have links back to me in every one of your posts) just upload them to your server and paste the URLs in the “Add New Flare” box.

Internal Linking

In addition to these techniques which obviously make things a lot easier, it’s also a good idea to include internal links within your actual posts. You’ll notice I do this quite a bit whenever I publish a post.

You could also use a plugin like Internal Link Building (need to subscribe to their RSS to download) to automatically set up links for certain keywords.

As always, use in moderation.

Conclusion

I personally haven’t used this before, but Tynt seems to come recommended when it comes to dealing with scrapers. If anyone has experience with this, I’d like to know about it in the comments.

Now, I’m sure some people will disagree with me about my stance on scrapers. I hate plagiarism just as much as everyone else. The point I’m trying to make is, instead of wasting time trying to fight scrapers, why not set up YARPP, an RSS footer, other internal links, and use them to your advantage instead?

I really don’t believe switching to excerpts is the answer, as opposed to full content feeds. You might deter scrapers, but really annoy your RSS subscribers at the same time. Which is more important?

Builder Theme by iThemes – WordPress Theme Review

Leland — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:32:19 +0000

I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about the Builder theme by iThemes. I’ve been hearing about how innovative it is, and how easy it is to make a lot of different layouts with this one theme.

I managed to get my hands on a copy, and you lucky Theme Lab readers will now get to see just how easy it is to set up your own Builder-theme-powered site. In this review, I’ll go over:

An initial overview of the Builder theme, including set up and the various theme options
How to use Builder’s custom layout feature and how to apply it to your pages

Check out the rest of the review after the jump.

Setting It Up

Initially installing Builder is just like any other theme. Once you get the zip file, just extract the “Builder” folder and upload it to your /wp-content/themes/ directory. Activate it in the “Appearance” section of your admin panel.

This is what Builder will look like on a plain WordPress install. As you can see, right now it looks pretty plain. Basically just your blog surrounded by a ton of widgetized areas to the top, right, and bottom.

Overview of Settings

You’ll notice a new menu in your dashboard entitled “My Theme” after activating the Builder theme. Unlike admin menus added by themes from other companies which include their logos and such, themes from iThemes appear to have completely unbranded menus. This can be useful if you’re setting up sites for a client.

Start Here – This is a page with links to unbranded iThemes video tutorials, which I believe may be included in every iThemes theme. If you would rather replace this page, there is a tutorial link titled: How to change this Tutorials ‘Start Here’ page to your own custom URL.

Settings – I noticed in the original set up there was just a Home link and no other page or category links visible. This page will let you include you build your navigation menu with a choice of page and category links.

After you’ve set up your widget areas, you can also turn off the rest of the blank widget areas you’re not using (remember the original screenshot where they’re all displayed, for identification purposes).

You can insert tracking code (such as for Google Analytics) and place it in the header or footer. More often then not, this code is placed in the footer, which is the default setting.

Also there are a few SEO options, such as using post tags for meta keywords and disabling indexing of category archives. Both of these SEO options are turned on by default.

All in all the settings are pretty straightforward, nothing too overwhelming.

Custom Layouts

Now, what you’ve all been waiting for. This custom layout engine is really what sets Builder apart from other ordinary themes. Instead of showing a bunch of screenshots with text, I thought it would be better to create a quick Screenr video to demonstrate how to create a layout and use it within the Builder theme.

The one column layout I did in the video was pretty simple, but remember all the possibilities with different combinations of modules, widgets, etc.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Builder did what I expected: easily build layouts directly from the admin panel, and without editing code. One thing which I would like to see would be a style editor with the ease of use similar to the layout builder. Maybe even something on a layout-by-layout basis. Even though I value consistency, having different styles on different pages may be a good option to have.

From what I hear, Builder may have a simple style manager coming soon which allows for easy edits of universal style elements, such as fonts, colors, and things like that. When this is done I think it could really benefit all you “noncoders” out there.

Pricing – The Builder theme costs $127, and I know that may seem pretty expensive especially compared to other paid themes which rarely exceed $75. Keep in mind these things though.

Since the theme is licensed under the GPL, you can use this theme on as many sites you want with no restrictions.
Since the theme is so flexible, you can use this one theme as a base for a number of completely different sites.

Conclusion

Please note this post is riddled with affiliate links. If you don’t want me to make money, you can always go directly to iThemes.com to buy the Builder theme.

This is my second review of a paid theme (with the first being Aperturious). I know most people visit this site through search engines and such looking for free WordPress themes, however I would like to start throwing paid WP themes in the mix soon, whether it be affiliates, or maybe even direct sales (hint hint).

Anyway, hope you liked the review. I’d really love to hear your thoughts on the Builder theme in the comments.

10+ Most Creative Free WordPress Themes in 2009

Leland — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 13:24:32 +0000

Believe it or not, there were actually some really great free themes released in 2009. You might not know it because a lot of theme roundup posts these days are riddled with affiliate links to paid themes.

This post will list some of the most creative themes I’ve seen produced in 2009. Note that I won’t be listing every single good looking theme, just ones that I’ve come across which I deem “creative” enough.

Photography / Gallery

AutoFocus – This theme is for photographers looking for a creative way to showcase their photos. There is a pretty unusual layout in which photos are displayed.

Viewport – Posts are presented on the homepage in graphic form with a small excerpt through a “viewport.” Users can click through to view the full content of the respective posts.

Gallery – This is a Thematic child theme designed by Chris Wallace. Be sure to check out my Gallery theme review for more information on this awesome theme.

Personal / Lifestream

Seven Five – Created by Jason Schuller of Press75, this theme is described as a “semi-automatic” lifestream theme which can integrate with services such as Twitter and Flickr to bring all your content together in one place.

Irresistible – This WooTheme could be considered a “lifestream” theme for a personal site. You can integrate your Flickr photos, Tweets, and recent blog posts all on one neatly organized homepage.

Unusual / Other

LiveTwit – This theme from Templatic lets you set up a Twitter microsite based on a search word or username. Comes with a few different color schemes.

Visiting Card – This Templatic theme is a great choice for non-bloggers who want to set up a quick mini site with contact information, including links to various social networking sites.

RS16 – Not only does this theme have a very artistic and creative design, this theme mostly makes the list because it’s primary page navigation consists entirely of icon-based links which is pretty unusual (and maybe because I’m a little biased).

Video / Multimedia

Selecta – This is a free video blogging theme released by Obox with six different color schemes. The video player is located at the top for main emphasis on your video content.

Smashing Multimedia – An amazing Smashing Magazine release designed especially for podcasters, photographers. With the theme you can easily embed videos and images, and allow users to rate them.

Magazine / Content-Heavy

Meta-Morphosis – This WooTheme has an interesting main index layout with room for lots of featured content and recent posts. There’s also a pretty sweet widgetized jQuery slider in the footer.

Magazeen – One of the few magazine themes you’ll see on this list. This one is very easy to read and fits lots of links to various bits of content from the homepage in an organized fashion.

Blue Rooster – This is a very cool free theme by Fearless Flyer web design. Included are a bunch of page templates which really separate this one from the pack.

Sources

I’ll spare you from the usual mile long list of free WordPress themes which you’ve probably already seen 50 times over.

Take a look at the following links instead. All of the themes above are probably on at least one of the following lists, plus a lot more quality themes to choose from.

Also thanks to the following Twitter users who made suggestions to me: @ubeloved, @Enked, @_FearlessFlyer, @wpcanada, @bradleypotter

And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter: @themelab

Rant

Those who follow me on Twitter know I was ranting about an article entitled The Most Creative 50 Wordpress Themes of 2009 yesterday. Not that I have a problem with creativity, WordPress themes, or list posts in general, as the post did have some creative WordPress themes in the form of a list.

My problem was every single theme listed was paid and every single link was an affiliate link. Now let’s get this straight, I have no problem with affiliate linking, I do it myself on occasion.

But when you’re publishing a post calling out the “most creative WordPress themes” and you completely exclude free themes, not only is it blatantly obvious your primary motivation for posting such a list derives purely from potential affiliate revenue, you’re also doing a huge disservice to your readers by not mentioning any of the excellent free themes available.

Okay. Rant over.

Conclusion

Unless I get a ton of Delicious saves, Diggs, retweets, and oodles of other traffic to this post (and subsequently get hooked on the cheap traffic), I probably won’t be posting another linkbait-style list post for a long while.

I know there are probably a lot of really creative free themes in 2009 which I have missed. If you have any personal favorites, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Blogwave – Free WordPress Blog Theme

Leland — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 16:37:14 +0000

Blogwave is a free WordPress blog theme that I just released over at Custom Theme. It has four different color options including blue (pictured below), red, orange, and green.

This is just a clean, simple blog theme with no fancy options or features. I know it bears a striking resemblance to Slick Red (a free theme available here) because of the similar header gradients, layout structure, and color switching ability.

There are a few additional features available in Blogwave including WP125 support for 125×125 ad management. Just install the WP125 plugin and place the widget wherever you want in your sidebar. There’s also a widgetized 404 template and styles built-in for the WP-PageNavi plugin as well.

Head on over to Blogwave WordPress theme page to download. If you have any feedback leave a comment here or on the release post.

The Best of Theme Lab in 2009

Leland — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 19:42:09 +0000

It’s been a great year for Theme Lab, the community, and WordPress in general. We’ve seen a number of innovations, such as the Builder theme by iThemes. We’ve seen some cool new WordPress-related sites like WP Questions and WP Chat.

Being the end of the year, I thought I’d take this opportunity to highlight some of the best content here at Theme Lab this past year. Without further ado…

Add a Widgetized Footer to Your WordPress Theme – A step-by-step tutorial on how to add a widgetized footer to (almost) any theme. Includes HTML, CSS, and WordPress code examples.

Gallery WordPress Theme Review – Gallery is a free Thematic child theme designed by Chris Wallace. It was no doubt one of the most stunning free theme releases of the year. In my theme review I went over the features and how to use them.

Are Free WordPress Themes Dead? – This post of mine was a response to a post at WPShout entitled Free WordPress Themes? Forget it. It’s Over. Basically, I disagreed that all free WordPress themes were dead, but rather lame, boring themes were (as they should be).

Jungleland – Free WordPress Theme – Speaking of lame and boring themes, Jungleland certainly is not one of those. Designed by Styleshout, I took the template and ported it to WordPress with custom thumbnail support and a whole lot of widgetized areas. It was featured on one of Smashing Magazine’s recent free theme roundups.

Newsworthy – Free WordPress Theme – This is a free news/magazine theme designed by DemusDesign. I took the template and ported it to WordPress, again with custom thumbnail support and even more widgetized areas than Jungleland.

Interview with the Owner of Premium Mod – Of course, how could I not mention this now “infamous” interview with the owner of Premium Mod? What started out as a relatively straightforward interview with someone who re-released modified commercial themes for free, erupted into a gigantic GPL fight in the comments.

Stop Downloading WordPress Themes from Shady Sites – In this enlightening post, I go over the issue with encrypted/malicious code in distributed WordPress themes. There’s also a video which shows how the sites with top rankings in Google for keywords like “free wordpress themes” tend to have encrypted code in their themes.

Conclusion

Although this isn’t really “content” per se, I thought the new Theme Lab design was also worth mentioning, which was introduced earlier this December.

Hope you all had a good 2009. For the upcoming year, I’d like to hear what you’d like to see on Theme Lab in 2010. More free theme releases, WordPress tips/tutorials, theme reviews, videos/screencasts?

Sound off in the comments. And of course, happy new year!