I’ve been keeping a close eye on a number of different theme marketplaces recently. As far as WordPress is concerned, to me there are 2 main marketplaces in the ecosystem today. The first and the biggest by some distance in my opinion is the juggernaut that is themeforest (part of envato). The second is the newer kid on the block Mojo Themes (disclosure: I currently sell themes with Mojo Themes). This isn’t a themeforest vs. Mojo Themes post – it wouldn’t be appropriate for me as I’m currently not a theme seller on themeforest. This is purely a post to dispel some common misconceptions about the quality of product available in said marketplaces.
If it was once …

Ok I’ve had enough – I NEED better options for deploying WordPress websites.
Right now I manage a LOT of WordPress websites – probably close to 40 sites – maybe more. In fact I’ve lost count!
Right now my development process goes something like this.

Download latest and great WordPress stable version
Build website locally – get everything looking sweet within a XAMPP instance on my Mac.
Deploy website to a staging/test link – this is where the process gets messy. My deployment process at the moment is far from ideal and I’m sure it can be automated and streamlined. Anyway, this is what I currently do:

Dumpy mysql DB .
Zip local WordPress instance.
Setup staging DB user/db.
Import DB to staging server.
FTP/SCP …

Today I read one of the best blog posts I’ve read in a long time about What’s Wrong with commercial WordPress themes by Martin Vlachynsky Vicenik (sorry Martin for getting your name wrong!) over on the Foliovision blog. Martin delves deep into the bowels of some of the most popular commercial WordPress themes to reveal how poorly optimised queries in some of the themes Foliovision have used have ended up having a huge performance cost in the form of overly expensive DB queries. Martin also does an excellent job of providing lots of information about how to test your themes performance and some excellent tools and plugins to help with the process. WooThemes and Elegantthemes are just …

So I’m doing some Sunday driving today and taking a closer look at WordPress Custom Post Types and how they can be implemented into WordPress themes in WordPress 3.0.
I must admit, this is pretty powerful stuff and the lines between theme development and plugin development are blurring a lot more now in 3.0 than ever before.
Anyway, those for interested here’s a quick list of 5 Must Read tutorials on WordPress Custom Post Types that will get you up to speed on what you can do with it:

As usual Jason Tadlock has the definitive skinny on the latest and greatest WordPress innovations – go read his Custom Post Types in WordPress
Nice and simple modification of TwentyTen …