Over the past two years the premium themes market has continued to innovate and prices have steadily declined to the point where you can find a nice premium theme for a very affordable price.   With that said, there still is not a better premium themes deal available than the Elegant Themes club, which gives you access to all of their premium WordPress themes for only $19.99 a year.

Thanks to a generous offer from Nick Roach, the founder of Elegant Themes, I have been given three free memberships to give away to WordPress Hacks readers.  Before I give the details of the giveaway, here are the three most recent premium WordPress themes released by Elegant Themes:

Lumin Theme

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Over the past year the premium themes market has continued to grow and expand, causing designers to search for ways to separate themselves from the competition.   Because many buyers choose to customize the design to meet their personal needs, it only makes sense for the focus of designers to instead turn to building custom settings pages that allow for a ton of flexibility.

These settings pages have become very complex in many cases and can offer a variety of features, including selecting where you want your sidebars placed, how many sidebars, which color/design style sheet should be used, or it can also offer simple things like places to enter your custom RSS feed, twitter feed, and Google Analytics code.    As I’ve watched these control panels evolve over this past year, it has been truly amazing just how much can be changed without changing a single line of code!

Nick Roach, the founder of the popular Elegant Themes theme club, has been offering complex settings panels on his themes for as long as I can remember, but earlier this week I was given a peak at the new revamped settings panel named ePanel.  This new settings panel is extremely complex and will eventually be added to all of the themes included with an Elegant Themes club membership.   As of today’s date, ePanel is already integrated into the following themes and available for download: eBusiness, eNews, ePhoto, PureType, Bold, and CherryTruffle.  Nick promises that the remaining themes will receive the same treatment over the coming month(s) and all themes will include this new ePanel.

So, what exactly is ePanel?   Here is a screen shot of the updated design:

As you can see from the screen shot above, there are a few bonus tabs under the General Settings tab alone, and there are a total of 8 tabs down the left sidebar.   The General Settings has the following 3 tabs:  General, Homepage, and Featured Slider.

After loading up the theme to see how the settings panel works, I have to say I am very impressed!   It looks like the General tab (under General Settings) allows you to select the style sheet color you want to use, enable/disable blog formatting on the homepage, Feedburner integration including all your Feedburner settings, and selecting the date format (dates are displayed differently depending on what part of the world you live in).   In the Homepage tab you’ll get access to category display, as well as the ability to exclude certain categories of your choice.  Of course the Featured Slider tab allows you to control how the featured slider works.

That is just the beginning though, as on the left there is also a series of tabs which include a large number of other settings.   You’ll find Navigation options, Layout Settings, Ad Management settings, Colorization, and you’ll even be able to control certain SEO settings on the SEO tab (mostly meta information similar to how All-in-One SEO Pack works).

The best part is that all this new functionality is available for all Elegant Themes club members!   Currently a membership to Elegant Themes is only $19.99 for an entire year, and stays at that price in order to renew your yearly membership.  You can learn more about the Elegant Themes club here.

After redesigning WPShout a couple of months ago, I decided to add some advanced features to the theme, package it up and release it into the wild. The result? Biblioteca. It’s a mix between a magazine theme, a tech blog theme, a bloggy theme and a theme framework – it looks quite nice out the box but has a solid library of advanced features including an advanced theme options page, widgets all over the place, in post SEO options, the lot. The features list is as follows:

• A practical theme framework that offers a solid starting point for any WordPress theme.
• Plug and play – works out of the box, with an extensive options page.
• Awesome SEO. Everyone talks about their theme having ‘awesome SEO’, but Biblioteca doesn’t just let you believe it, it has options for setting the post title and description.
• Featured content gallery – Biblioteca uses Chris Coyier’s jQuery slider.
• Extensive options page – pictured below, the options page lets you change a ton of options, from the width of the sidebar to the contents of the footer to the ads in the sidebar to your Analytics tracking code.
• Magazine look – you want a fancy featured content gallery? Biblioteca has one. Enable/disable it from the opions page.
• Tech blog look – you want a couple of posts featured below the main featured content gallery? Biblioteca has got one of them; it’s widgetised too.
• Bloggy look – you just want a blog? Biblioteca can do that as well. Just set the options in the options panel.
• Drop down navigation – Biblioteca has some rather nice drop down navigation.
• A ton of widgets – Biblioteca has an ever expanding number of widget ready areas in all sorts of places that allow you to easily pop text just about anywhere.
• Fancy footer – the three column footer here on WPShout is often complimented and you too can have one – Biblioteca has one which you can enable/disable from the options page.
• Auto image resizing – set an image to display on the homepage and it’ll automatically resize itself.
• Multiple layouts – through the options panel you can change the layout, having a thin main content area, a slightly larger main content area or an even bigger main content area.
• The list goes on – just download it and see for yourself!

When creating Biblioteca I wanted to make something that would allow me to rapidly develop future themes, something I’ve done. Whether that makes it a ‘framework’ or not I don’t know. What I do know is that if you’re a designer looking to create an awesome WordPress theme but you don’t want to start from scratch, you could do worse than base your theme on Biblioteca. If you’re not a developer, then by no means are you alienated from using Biblioteca; the advanced theme options and in-post SEO options make it a great choice for any blog – take a look at WPShout and you’ll see; pretty much all I’ve done is change the background on the theme.

As in accordance with WordPress itself, the theme is GPL, although offered ‘as is’ with no free support. You can see the theme live here and grab the download it here. Enjoy!

Over the past year I’ve had the privilege of getting to know Leland through his excellent WordPress resource, Theme Lab.  While most designers have turned their attention to building premium WordPress themes, Leland is one of the few who has continued to release quite a few completely free WordPress themes which are of a comparable quality.  Through his work with the WordPress community, he has been able to build a nice reputation as a coder and also build a loyal following.

About a month ago, Leland made me aware of a new project he was working on, building a business around the outstanding domain name CustomTheme.com.  As you’d expect, this new project is a service building custom WordPress themes.  While speaking with Leland, I was given the opportunity to be among the first to give the CustomTheme.com service a try (before it officially launched).  I jumped at the opportunity and ended up having him build a custom design for a new website I’m working on, Blog Tutorials.   Blog Tuts is similar to WPHacks.com, but will be expanded to cover SEO techniques, blogging tips, etc.

As far as the new design goes, here is a screen shot of the new custom design which was built specifically for Blog Tuts:

Last night I got the new design loaded on Blog Tuts and today I received word that Custom Theme was finally ready for the official launch, so I wanted to take a moment and let our readers know about this new service.   According to the services page, Custom Theme is able to accommodate just about any type of WordPress design you may need, including blog themes, magazine themes, gallery themes, and even CMS themes.

As of the publishing of this article, right now the beginning rate for purchasing your own custom design is as low as $299.00, which you’ll find is very competitive within the custom theme market.

Want to learn more about this new service?  Check out CustomTheme.com!

Over a year ago, I was among those that speculated on custom widgets and their role in the future of WordPress themes.   One thing that wasn’t speculated on, however, was the rise of WordPress theme frameworks.  Now, just over a year later, many of the leaders in the premium themes market are building their own internal frameworks which are used as the backbone to design their premium WordPress themes.  For example, Woo Themes now has their own Woo Framework.   Brian Gardner of StudioPress also recently informed me that he is also developing a framework for his StudioPress themes.

Premium theme designers are not the only ones using frameworks these days, however, and a few can actually be used by anyone in the development of their own personal themes!    As with traditional WordPress themes, WordPress theme frameworks have free options, as well as paid alternatives.    In the post below, I’ve collected the five major theme frameworks, and I intend to update this post as I learn of more WordPress theme frameworks.

Note: If these theme frameworks look a little plain, that is intentional.  Frameworks are designed for someone to use as a building point, so they lack a lot of images and design elements.   Once downloaded (or purchased), you can then build upon the framework to make your design.   Many of these frameworks also include child themes, which allow you to quickly convert your framework into a ready to use design.

Thematic WordPress Theme (FREE)

Thematic is a free, open-source, highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins, and a whole community behind it. It’s perfect for beginner bloggers and WordPress development professionals.

Thematic Framework | Live Demo

WP Framework (FREE)

WP Framework is a blank WordPress theme framework by Ptah Dunbar, which aims to cut down on your theme development time. It gives you a solid theme foundation to build your project on top of so you can focus on project-specific features right from the git-go.

WP Framework | Live Demo

WP Unlimited Framework (Single-Use $59.00 | Developer’s Pack $150.00)

The WP Unlimited theme has a fairly simple design but a very complex control panel, allowing the user to set up their blog without touching any code.    Once the functionality is in place, then you can easily customize the design to meet your personal needs.  Here is a screen shot of the control panel:

WP Unlimited | Live Demo

Thesis Theme Framework (Single-Use $87.00  | Developer’s Pack $164.00)

The Thesis theme framework is the most popular theme framework which has a cost associated with it and has built a loyal cult following.   Among those followers are some very high profile WordPress sites built upon the Thesis framework, then customized for their personal needs.  You can look through a list of these clients on their homepage.

Among the reasons people love Thesis is their attention to SEO techniques and the complex control panel:

Thesis Theme | Live Demo

One Theme Framework + One Panel (Single-Use $60.00 | Multiple-Use $110.00+)

By default, One Theme offers a variety of styles/looks to choose from and a complex control panel to get your site setup without having to hard code anything.    The One Theme also features several child themes to give the user more customization options.

In addition to the design, you get their comprehensive control panel which they call One Panel:

One Panel Control Panel

One Theme Framework | Live Demo

Know of a WordPress theme framework we are missing?  Please leave a comment or let us know about it!