Over the years we’ve had questions and feedback from customers about our theme pricing. Recently this prompted some thinking about what a premium WordPress theme is worth and why our themes cost what they do.
What is value
Merriam-Webster defines value as “a fair return or equivalent in goods, services, or money for something exchanged.” The modern world most of us live in is predicated on value and exchange of goods. For example, I buy some food supplies from my local grocery store — the grocery delivers value, and I provide money in exchange for that value. This allows the grocery to deliver value to other customers, pay their employees, pay their vendors, and sometimes realize a profit for the business itself. The circular nature of this system allows everyone to provide value in their own way, and receive a widely accepted currency in return for this value. It’s truly a beautiful thing.
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Every theme at The Theme Foundry starts out as an idea that is discussed and then put to paper by our designers. We review and refine the design, and then we build it out in HTML so we can see the design come to life in the browser. From there, every theme is constructed from the ground-up (no frameworks) as we try to build upon the successes (and failures) of our previous themes.
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As I was working on our latest theme, I came across a situation where I needed to filter out posts that had a specific meta key that either never was set (NULL) or was false. I started down the route of using the meta_query argument to WP_Query.
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At the end of last year Matt and Lance contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in designing Twenty Twelve, the default WordPress theme for this year. I was of course honored and excited, and after some discussion about expectations and details, we started the project in relative secrecy.
After a fast start, Twenty Twelve development slowed to a crawl in February (which was my fault) and in March we decided including it in WordPress 3.4 wasn’t a good idea. Since then we’ve re-focused, moved the Twenty Twelve repository to Github, and established a regular work schedule to ensure it’s ready for WordPress 3.5.
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As a theme developer, there are situations when having some extra buttons on the content editor can come in handy. WordPress provides the mce_buttons_3 hook, which allows you to add buttons to a third row on the visual editor.
However, by default this row will show no matter what, even when you toggle the “kitchen sink” on and off:
It seems more logical to toggle the third row on and off along with the rest of the advanced buttons. In fact, there is a core ticket dealing with this very situation.
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Today we’re super excited to introduce Foundry Pro, a new subscription based pricing option. Foundry Pro gives you unlimited access to all our themes, tutorials, and support for a one year period. You’ll also get instant access to new theme releases and a cool Pro badge next to your name in our Help Center. We’re kicking it off with an introductory price of $125 per year. Introductory price is no longer available, now $249 per year.
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We just started working with the talented Dave Ruiz on a brand new responsive photography theme. The whole team is super excited about it (to say the least). Dave has also posted a screenshot over on Dribbble.
We’re excited to announce that our latest release, Chalk, is now available for WordPress.com sites and blogs!
When you buy a theme on WordPress.com you get the same quality support from us with the ease of a WordPress.com-managed site. Check it out – and as always, let us know if you have any feedback!
You can also browse all our themes available on WordPress.com.
It’s that time again! Every so often we take a look at our accumulated bug lists, feature requests and bag o’ tricks and make a round of updates to our themes. Our goal is to always be improving and cleaning up our themes to make sure everything is working just wonderfully. At The Theme Foundry our themes only get better with age – no rusty and dusty old themes lying around here!
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At a small company, the “Jack of all trades” is often more valuable than the “Master of one”. Each team member must wear a number of hats at any given time. When I’m helping our awesome customers I wear my support cap, and when I’m working on themes I put on my coder helmet. Previously, my least favorite hat was the documentation ushanka – the “docushanka”. Bulky, uncomfortable, and when you wear it, you know you’re going somewhere unpleasant. But, that all changed when we rolled over to our new site.
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