Hot on the heels of the WordPress 3.1 release today comes a new theme shop from none other than John O’Nolan (member of the core WordPress UI team) and all round WordPress genius (have you seen the WordPress 3.1 admin area – it’s all nice and shiney and much cleaner under the hood thanks to John and the team). Anyway, John along with Gilbert Pellegrom recently took the wraps off BioThemes and announced their beta launch.
If we need further evidence of the continuing evolution of WordPress theme development from being basic aesthetic skins to much more sophisticated “applications”, John provides it in spades in the announcement post.
We’re a premium WordPress theme company focused on innovation and quality. Despite all the things that have changed since we started work, two things remain the same in the premium WordPress theme business: Themes which are identical in all but name, and innovation which is conspicuous only by its absence. You’re bored of get-rich-quick theme companies popping up and peddling the same old magazine themes, so are we. We’re here to try and do something different.
John continues:
For want of a better description; we’re not just building themes, we’re building applications. We aren’t interested in making more premium blog templates – there are plenty of other companies who already do that better than we ever will. We’re interested in exploring what sort of platforms we can build on top of WordPress itself. We’re not going to release loads of copies of the same theme with a few different colours and images. We’ll only ever release one theme in any niche that we’re exploring, and then we’ll keep on developing it. Just like companies who build desktop or mobile applications.
This is really exciting and refreshing to hear! As we predicted at the start of the year, I think this kind of direction is definitely what is needed more in the WordPress theme ecosystem and I look forward to exciting things from BioThemes in 2011 and beyond.
The best of luck to John and Gilbert.
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