Some of our long time readers may remember last April I wrote about a somewhat revolutionary new WordPress theme, which in my opinion was well ahead of its time, known as the Shifter theme.  Though this theme looked a little plain at first, it was completely built around using the WordPress widget feature, allowing for incredible versatility.

Since that time no one else has really attacked the widget angle the way Shifter did…..at least until now.   After over 2 months of production and quite a few beta testers (myself included), I am excited to share with our readers that iThemes has released what is probably their best theme yet, the Flexx Theme.

This theme comes with over 1,000 possible layout combinations!   Other Flexx features include:

• Rotating Header Images – Easily upload your new header images and set the Flash-like transition effects
• Contact Form Page Template – The custom image uploader feature allows you to personalize your site with your own logo
• Plug and Play Graphic Changes – Easily change the look of your site by uploading new background images (setting every different combo with it) and setting the color through a Photoshop-like color picker.
• Menu Builder – Pick and choose what Pages you want in the menu navigation, including subpages.
• Search Engine Optimization – As with all our themes, we’ve built it to get you the best exposure in the search engines, and include a SEO panel to tweak some basic settings.
• Multiple Color Styles – This first series comes in two pre-built color styles (Bold and Canvas), but it has a rockin’ feature that lets you easily upload new background images (setting every different combo with it) and setting the color through a Photoshop-like color picker.
• Drop down navigation menu

To get an idea of one of the 1,000+ possibilities available, you can check out the Flexx demo.   Here are a couple screen shots:

Flexx Homepage

Flexx Post Page

The best part about the new Flexx theme is the price!  It falls under the iThemes standard pricing model of $79.95 for a single-use license and $249.95 for the developer’s license.  iThemes 2008 theme club members of course get this theme for free.

What do you think of this incredible theme?   Anyone else think that widget-based themes might be the future or the premium WordPress themes market?

Here are some WordPress links that I thought our readers may find useful.  They were all published over the past couple weeks.  Enjoy!

• How to Display Page Children on the Parent Page – WPLover provides some code you can use to place links to your page children on the parent page.   This is a nice idea for your themes sidebar.
• 5 Plugins to Secure Your WordPress Blog – Our friend Jean of Cats Who Code who published a great list of WordPress plugins that help you secure your WordPress installation.
• Links in a WordPress Sidebar Text Widget – This post by WordPress Max provides the code and explains how to create a sidebar text widget.
• How To Build a Featured Post Section in WordPress – Net Tuts has written a great tutorial explaining how you can build a featured post section into your WordPress blog.
• Theme Hybrid – Justin Tadlock releases his much anticipated “free” themes club with an option for an exclusive membership for $25.00.

Like many other bloggers, I display 125*125 pixels ads on my blog, and earn some money with it. Currently, I own 6 different ads, and most of them change every week. I became bored of editing my sidebar template everyday, so I asked my friend X-OR to write a cool widget to manage thoses ads. Let’s review it together.

What the Show125 widget can do for your blog

I always loved the concept of widgets: drap n’ drop, easy to edit, easy to place, easy to remove. Most of todays themes can handle widgets, so there’s many chances that the theme you use haven’t any problem with it.

In addition to the basic widgets advantages, Show125 gives you many option and a true control over your ads. Let’s see:

• Display from 1 to 8 ads
• Available in English (default) or French
• Display all your ads together, or in an eye-candy Mootools slideshow
• Optionally add the target=”_blank” attribute to links, if you want ads to open in a new tab.
• Show (or not) a title for your ads block
• Easy to install
• Clean code
• Add custom css class to links for styling it your way
• And more!

Installation

Nothing hard here: First, download the widget. If you want to see a “live demo”, just have a look at x-or’s blog, where you’ll be able to see the slideshow mode of the widget.

Once you unzipped the widget to your hard drive, upload the entire directory to your wp-content/plugins directory. Then, go to your Wordpress administration panel and activate the plugin.

In Design » Widgets, you’ll be able to drag n drop the Show125 widget to your sidebar (or any other widgetized part of your WP theme) and set the options.

Once you filled the fields and saved your changes, you’ll see your ads in your sidebar. Managing your ads with Show125 really makes money earning easier!

If you don’t have a lot of coding knowledge, you probably find that you use widgets a lot for your sidebar content.  I know many bloggers have come to rely on widgets and now WordPress 2.5 has changed some things.

If you would like to learn how to use widgets in WordPress 2.5+, I recommend you check out the WordPress 2.5 Sidebar Widgets Guide over at WordPress Max.  He does a good job of getting you used to the new look and feel of the new WordPress widgets system.

As the premium WordPress themes market continues to grow and competition becomes more intense, it is only natural to begin looking towards the future of premium WordPress themes. We all have different opinions of what that future holds, but one thing that is for sure. Widgets are going to play a huge role in the future of these themes.

The first theme that appears to be focused completely around widgets is the Shifter WordPress theme, which features a fully customizable dashboard with widgets for pretty much everything.

Here are two screen shots:

My buddy Jeffro of Jeffro2pt0 is one of those guys that is always ahead of the times. If you’d like to see an example of what Shifter can do, I recommend you check out his website. He switched to Shifter awhile ago and hasn’t looked back. You can also read his explanation for “shifting” to Shifter.

Sound interesting? You can purchase Shifter for $79.95 for a single-use copy, $99.95 for a single-use copy with support from the author, advanced copy is $199.95, and the developer’s package is $999.95.

If you’d like to learn more, I recommend you check out Shifter’s website.