Whats the best place to get a pass or membership to Wordpress templates for web Developers and programmers?

May 5, 2009 7:34 PM

Whats the best place to get a pass or membership to Wordpress templates for web Developers and programmers?

I was thinking of buying this:

http://ithemes.com/combos/

because I am freelance web developer and wanted a good set of templates to choose from. Something with variety (ecommerce, corporate, etc) is important and quality of the code is important as well.

What I am worried about is that I am overpaying for this or not getting all that I could out of the money. It costs $500 so I wanted to ask MeFi community for their advice. Is ithemes just an affiliate for another site that I could be getting more from? Is there a standard one that everyone likes?

Some other posts about this (here) talk about specific free themes that are good, but no type of member site to be a part of. Previous posts dont address this either. Please help MeFi!

posted by msoffab to computers & internet (8 answers total)

The iThemes are very, very good. While $500 seems like a lot for their developer package (All Access Package), the themes are of such quality that one or two jobs would pay for it.
posted by Gerard Sorme at 12:17 AM on May 6, 2009

I saw this somewhere recently (digg I think?) and have found it to be a good collection of places that sell commercial themes:

25+ Reliable Sources to Get Commercial WordPress Themes

I personally use Thesis on a couple of sites and have been pleased.

$20 per theme at that place is a solid price though, as long as you're really going to use all the different themes they offer, otherwise I'd look around.
posted by imabanana at 12:19 AM on May 6, 2009

so it seems as if ithemes is pretty competitively priced with other sites.

does anyone else have a standout membership based site for wordpress themes?

templatemonster has been around for a while now, anyone had good or bad experiences with them?
posted by msoffab at 12:35 AM on May 6, 2009

Theme Forest is awesome and inexpensive.
posted by jbickers at 5:01 AM on May 6, 2009

I would avoid iThemes, Thesis, and Woothemes -- each of them violate the GPL license that WordPress is under and their questionable legality is not a good base to build a business on. You'll also note that 95% of the people promoting them are using affiliate links. The developers of Thesis have even publicly talked about taking legal action against WordPress to try and protect their "business" model.

There are a few folks out there (Gorilla Themes, Revolution, Press75, etc) that are "premium" and offer great designs and commercial support, but are licensed under the GPL. They're 100% legal and supportive of the WordPress project, which means I think they'll be around for a long time.
posted by saxmatt at 10:22 AM on May 6, 2009 [1 favorite]

Saxmatt, Matt Mullenwag himself has said that people can do whatever they want, he's just not going to promote non-GPL themes on wordpress.org. There was a big kerfuffle last December when Matt removed a bunch of themes from the theme directory, and that was the end result.

You can read his comments here (in the comments).

The odds of Automattic suing iThemes, Chris Pearson, or Woothemes and trying to put them out of business is pretty much zero.
posted by imabanana at 3:26 PM on May 6, 2009

And now I see that you actually are Matt Mullenwag, ha! When did your outlook on this change?
posted by imabanana at 3:27 PM on May 6, 2009

Sometime around here, perhaps. GPL-violators are a net drain on the WordPress community, leaching off the community and actively keeping people from better projects. People should do their best to avoid them -- it'd be silly to support someone who is talking about suing their underlying platform and invalidating the entire basis of Open Source software.
posted by saxmatt at 10:42 PM on May 6, 2009