But WooThemes has made our work tremendously easier, which is why we bought into their Developers Club within a day of learning of it, afraid they’d come to their senses and charge more, which we’d then end up paying anyway.

This is more a custom work I guess. But what do you guys charge for custom work?

A theme that is centered around events would also be an excellent addition. There’s an innate problem in the presentation of displaying events because of how they need both a publication date and an event date, not a natural course for WordPress. Last time we had to tackle this problem, none of the event plugins really cut it so we went with embedded Google calendars.

Finally, as a Shopp beta tester, the idea of an e-commerce theme that is already expecting Shopp to be installed would be truly spiff.

http://testbp.org/resources/bp-skeleton-component-1.2.zip

… using your existing PSD -> HTML -> WP workflow, you could simply use the skeleton theme to show you what page types are necessary and what BP code you needed to stick into your HTML version of those page types. The learning curve is probably not as steep as you imagine.

Obviously, far fewer people are going to have BuddyPress sites than standard WordPress sites but the financial argument for offering a BuddyPress theme is that a far higher percentage of BuddyPress sites will actually pay for their themes because they will be businesses, organizations, churches etc for whom piracy would not be an option.

Also, the existence of a BuddyPress theme in your collection would be appealing to potential customers considering club membership because, although they might not have immediate plans to create a BuddyPress site, the possibility is interesting to most site owners, they would certainly perceive the inclusion of a BuddyPress theme to be an added value, even if they never actually get around to using it. It is also the sort of move that would garner a lot of publicity and goodwill within the WordPress community.

The market for premium BuddyPress themes is wide open because none of the free themes look very good. Andy Peatling himself created an impressive theme for the main BuddyPress site, which gives a hint of what is possible:

http://buddypress.org/

… but he will not be releasing that as he wants the main BuddyPress site to remain distinctive. Aspects of Andy’s design remind me of the upcoming Antisocial theme by Tim van Damme, that could be a very good starting point.

I only mention all this because it would be good to see some Woo tastiness appear in the BuddyPress world but I totally understand how easy it is to get bogged down in your existing business commitments, to the extend that pursuing new markets becomes impossible.

In terms of the Traveler theme though… There’s nothing special or at least different to the theme, when it is compared to most “magazine” themes. The only thing that’s unique there is the weather widget. So why not just use a magazine theme for a “city theme”?

I’m just playing devil’s advocate btw…

How about some elegant yet colorful themes for authors? Not a grunge style like the upcoming musician theme, but maybe Mainstream or Meta-Morphosis redesigned for authors.

It might include a blog, picture of author on the top, speaking tour schedule, a section containing thumbnails for a few of their books with the most recent one large and on top, links to purchase the book, links to see videos of the author, FAQ, etc.

Thanks so much!

Rahim