I get to fully focus on the design end of it – which is something I’ve had a hard time doing over the past two years since I’ve been caught up with the administrative day-to-day duties. So, alas – this week will be a week of design for me. I look forward to diving into the pool, and seeing what my creative juices come up with!

It’s sadly been over 3 months since I’ve blogged last, something I desperately want to change in 2010 – so much in fact, that I plan to add a category here called “lifestream” where I plan to write shorter, more profound things.

I’ve tried my best over the years to separate my personal site from business, and this year it’s going to happen. After all, the StudioPress blog is really the place where any formal announcements should be made.

That being said, I’d like to introduce my new personal site redesign, and also want to warn you in advance, that this will now be the home of my lifestream. Expect posts that range anywhere from business (in terms of my experiences with it), my passions (which include music, entertainment and social media) as well as things that pertain my spirituality. So this is the time to decide if you want to continue having me in your feed reader, whether to receive emails with my posts, or simply to drop by and comment.

Another element that I am very excited to share is that AgentPress has teamed up with Reggie and Nicole Nicolay, as well as Chad Johnson – who together form the team at My Tech Opinion. They will be handling theme customization and consulting – and can be hired to help take your real estate site to a much higher level. This will include graphic design work, additional search engine optimization, social media integration as well as real estate listing integration.

Here’s a video of Nicole Nicolay talking about AgentPress:

The 411 on the AgentPress Theme

The AgentPress theme provides the best opportunity to showcase your real estate listings as well as personal info. Why bother having two separate real estate sites, when you can have a powerful and amazing site that is search engine optimized, running on WordPress, which the Search Engines, like Google, LOVE?

Here are some features that the AgentPress theme includes:

• 4 Color Schemes
• Custom Write Post Panel
• Search Engine Optimized
• Custom Property Template
• Theme Options Page
• Auto-sized Thumbnail Management
• Widget-Ready
• Developed for Localization
• Header PSD Files Included

Other Important Things to Know

Believe it or not, this project has been in the making for over 6 months – I’ve been very busy with a lot of great things that have been happening over at StudioPress, which took higher priority over the launching of the AgentPress site. Speaking of which, I do want to point out that AgentPress is completely independent of StudioPress – they are two separate entities, but we’ll certainly be extending the 25% discount that we always give our theme users for repeat purchases.

In other words, the AgentPress theme(s) is not included in the StudioPress All-Theme package. But don’t worry, we are very busy working on some more themes that will soon be released on StudioPress as well as upgrading our support forum/tutorials.

Now to the Good Stuff

If you have previously purchased a Revolution/StudioPress theme package, and would like the 25% discount on the AgentPress theme, feel free to contact us and we’ll be happy to extend that to you.

You can also follow AgentPress on Twitter – we’ll be announcing theme updates, as well as publishing relevant articles for agents that include WordPress tips, how to maximize use of the AgentPress theme as well as other real estate industry news and events.

So what are you waiting for? Go on and take the AgentPress Demo site for a test drive!

This past year I participated in the Chicago Breast Cancer 3-Day, and raised over $34,000 for the event by giving away theme packages from StudioPress.

About a week ago as Breast Cancer Awareness Month began, I saw a post that Adii over Woo Themes wrote – they were campaigning to raise money as well to fight this horrible disease. As I was thinking about Woo’s attempts to make a difference, I felt the urge to send Adii an email to see if there was a way we could somehow team up.

As I had expected, they were more than receptive to the idea, so after a bit of brainstorming we worked something out. Woo Themes is now running a #woobs Giveaway where StudioPress has donated 1/2 the cost of the theme packages in prize list below:

• 2 x 3-month Developer Club Subscriptions
• 4 x Woo Themes Developer Packages
• 10 x Woo Themes Standard Packages
• 5 x Awesome WooThemes Ninja T-Shirts

You might find this cross-promotion a bit unique, I’d prefer to call it co-ompetition (thank you Brian Clark). More than anything, both Woo and StudioPress believe in giving back as we both have been blessed.

You can read more about their efforts to fight breast cancer…

Help spread the word by ReTweeting this post – thanks!

You see, ever since I launched Revolution back in August of 2007, my life has been pretty chaotic and I haven’t been able to really do some things that I enjoy. Mind you, I’m not complaining about the success of Revolution/StudioPress, but there are things about my world online that I miss – mainly reading blogs, commenting on posts and also writing my own posts here on my blog.

The Things We Think And Do Not Say

You can see that I have these Jerry Maguire moments from time to time, where I decide to slow down, and actually take a breath to do some things that I personally enjoy, and not just things that I have to do.

I still believe that many folks don’t realize just how much work running StudioPress entails – and I’d be willing to bet that guys like Cory Miller of iThemes, Jason Schuller of Press75, Chris Pearson & Brian Clark of Thesis and Adii Pienaar of WooThemes would agree with me. It’s more than just coding a few themes and setting them loose – there’s a number of things involved, that can very quickly consume your day before you know.

Research, coding, design, email inquiries, support, etc… and that’s not all of it.

Anyway, my point isn’t to talk about all that I have had to do over the course of the past two years, but rather focus on what it is I want to do moving forward. Thankfully, I have a wingman named Craig Tuller who I am proud to announce is taking over daily operations of StudioPress.

A Challenge to Give Back to the Community

Aside from a number of upcoming projects and future ventures that we’ll be going after, I really wanted to get back to a place that I seem to be missing of late – a time in my life where I thoroughly enjoyed interaction with the WordPress community. A few days ago, Andy Peatling wrote a blog post encouraging folks to give back to the community. This really made me remember the days where I developed a number of free themes, and how much fun I had watching people use them on their blogs.

While I have recently developed two free themes for the WordPress community (Shades of Blue and Core), I realized that it wouldn’t take much time, or effort for that matter, to update and submit some of my earlier themes such as Vertigo, Blue Zinfandel, Downtown Java, etc to the WordPress theme directory.

As much as I enjoy moving forward and developing new things, I also want to make sure that I take care of and nurture certain things that I have developed in the past – I think it’s only fair, and to be honest it was those themes/projects that really helped take me to where I’m at now.

So here I am, on the inaugural “Give Back” day of my week – and hopefully this is something that moving forward I can commit to. It’s a day where I’ll deliberately pass up future-minded things, and one where I’ll engage in the community that has supported me.

If you want to download it, feel free to test it out and take it for a drive and provide any feedback here. Or visit the official theme page in the WordPress theme directory. (yes, that means this theme carries the GPL licensed and what not…)

Traveling Back to My Find My Roots

A little about Core… as much as I enjoy developing premium commercially supported WordPress themes, I also really enjoy the simplicity of creating a free theme. After all, it was free themes such as Blue Zinfandel, Vertigo, Whitespace, Silhouette, Downtown Java, Tapestry among others, that really allowed me to build my business to what it is now, StudioPress.

In a weird way, I kinda miss the good ole days of releasing free themes and seeing what people can do with them. And besides, there are millions of people who are now using WordPress – many of which are relatively new to blogging and only want a simple theme.

Anyway – the primary reason behind Core is that I wanted to create one core (for lack of a better term) set of blog theme files that I could use to develop additional free themes. I figured that by building this set of files, it would then be easy to generate a number of high quality themes, and would be able to include some features that have been included in our themes on StudioPress.

Here’s a screenshot of the Core Blog theme (click to enlarge full size):

One of the coolest features inside the Core Blog theme is the choice between a Sidebar/Content layout, a Content/Sidebar layout or the traditional Sidebar/Content/Sidebar layout for your blog. This can easily be changed in the theme options page.

Another cool feature that I added was the SEO options block is available for the blog posts. Here you can enter a custom title tag, custom keywords and custom description for each post.

Here’s a screenshot of the SEO Options block:

That is a great feature for those who are just starting our with their blog!

How Cliche, but Sometimes Less is More

As I was developing this theme, I also wanted to do it in a way that only required an additional stylesheet to change the way it would look – in other words, instead of having X amount of free themes all which have their own theme folders, there would be one theme folder with many stylsheets inside. Why have 20 different themes sitting in your themes directory on your server when you only need one?

Having said that, the intent is for a user to simply select which style they want to use in the theme options page. They’ll still have the ability to customize the stylesheet in the theme editor section of the dashboard as well. So just like that, 20 themes become one. (and for those of you faithful original Brian Gardner theme users, the early ones just might be ported over as styles to Core)

Here’s a screenshot of an additional style I’m working on (click to enlarge full size):

This additional stylesheet is not available yet, but I’m hoping to release it along with a number of other styles as well. (gotta leave something to be desired, huh?)

Download Core Blog Theme | Core Blog Theme Page

Well, I temporarily placed my Core Blog theme on my site here, and knew that I had to put out a new theme pretty quickly. So you are now seeing the result of that, which is a pretty minimalistic theme that I’ll use for now. It’s currently a “blog” theme, and my hope is to incorporate a customized “home” page to go over the top. For now this will do.

The Meaning of Intellectual Reboot

I also want to explain what the title of this post means – I’m guessing it’s pretty self-explanatory, but I have realized that over the past few months, my blog has been really sparse. In other words, no content, not much commenting, and for the sake of cutting to the chase – lame.

Here’s my definition, how I see it:

Intellectual Reboot
v. To turn (an intellect or a blog) off and then on again; restart.

I have spent the better part of the past two years on my blog writing about WordPress, specifically theme announcements, etc with Revolution and StudioPress. As much as I enjoy making those announcements here, I also have been missing something that I have loved to do every since I was young.

Writing.

Not theme releases, but actually writing about the things that a blog is supposed to include – which is usually involves things that you are passionate about. This by all means doesn’t mean I won’t write about WordPress, because you all know I have a dear passion for that.

It just means that I want to deliberately warn you not everything I write moving forward will revolve around WordPress and StudioPress. After all, there’s a StudioPress blog for that.

The Growth and the Effects

As Revolution (RIP) grew into more than one theme, I quickly began to realize that folks around the WordPress world associated the theme (support, updates, tutorials, emails) with me, personally as Brian Gardner. In other worlds, the main Revolution site could have easily been known as BrianGardnersThemeStore.com.

For a while that was great, and I enjoyed being known as the “Revolution guy”.

However, as my business grew, and rebranded to StudioPress, I purposely tried to shift some of the spotlight from my name to the themes themselves. Fortunately for me, most of the current success that we’ve had is really a matter of how well our community is thriving, and not so much how well I personally am running it.

The Joys of Letting Go

Well it’s taken some time for me to relinquish some control, and have really chosen to treat StudioPress as more of a business. I’ve hired two unbelievably fantastic people, and have delegated some of the duties that I’ve clung to for so long to them. For me, this was a huge sign of personal growth, as well as the key to continuing the success of and growth for StudioPress.

That being said, I write this post.

To let you all know that I plan to spend more of my time here on this blog writing about things I personally care about or believe in. My new site design isn’t fancy, nor will it win any web design awards.

But I’m happy with it, and it should provide me the inspiration to move forward with a new chapter of my blog, and take things in a bit of a different direction.

And to put those of you at ease, we’re doing a lot of things behind the scenes at StudioPress – I’m about to release an updated version of the Corporate theme, and we have a number of themes (such as the News theme) that are in development and should be out soon.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and for any comments that you may have.

Guess that means I’ll be focusing on getting the site redesign done, eh?

Accidents happen. More than once.

If you have been sitting on the fence with purchasing a theme…

Here’s your opportunity to spend less money, and have it support my efforts to raise money to fight breast cancer. I am offering a free StudioPress theme + support package for anyone who is willing to donate $50, and a free Pro Plus All-Theme package (all themes + support) for anyone who donates $150.

It’s all about karma, and making the world a better place…

On August 7th of 2009, I will once again lace up my shoes for the Chicago Breast Cancer 3-Day, and start an emotional journey that will take me 60 very long and grueling miles from the suburbs to downtown Chicago. This walk will be hot, this walk will be painful. There will be sweat, and there will be tears.

Most importantly, this event will benefit women and help to save lives…

I am required to raise a minimum of $2,300 to participate in the event. By the time that you finish reading this, two more women will be diagnosed with breast cancer, and another one just died from it. In fact, while I am walking those 60 miles, 110 women will die from this horrible disease. 110 families will lose a mother, or a daughter, or a best friend.

That is why I walk…

I don’t walk to get recognition. I don’t walk because I want people to think of me as a hero. I walk so that a little girl can grow up and spend time with her mother. I walk so that a mother can watch her daughter walk down the aisle at her wedding. I walk so that I don’t have to console another friend while a part of her life was taken too soon. I walk because I am physically able to, while others are not. I walk because I’ve been given so much, and I want to give back as much as I can.

I walk, because I cannot walk away…

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT ME AND HELP ME RAISE $2,300 FOR THE EVENT

* I thank you in advance for reading this and for considering a donation!

I guess today can be considered “National Declaration of what Matt, WordPress et all thinks about it Day”. You can read all about the legality of the GPL license and how WordPress themes are affected.

For those lazy folk, here’s the meat:

PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.

There you have it.

It seems that even before the posting of the response that Matt was given from the Software Freedom Law Center, other developers such as iThemes and WooThemes had already decided it was wise to move their licenses over to the GPL.

And as Matt puts it, WordPress has chosen to celebrate those who are developing GPL themes with a brand new Commercially Supported WordPress Theme page. Which, of course is a follow through to a promise that Matt made nearly a year ago.

This also clearly illustrates Matt’s view that people can (and will be endorsed if they do it with the GPL License) make money using WordPress.