The acquisition broadens our line of commercial WordPress themes and expands our member-base to over 30,000. ModThemes’ very popular Total Social Widget will also be improved and re-released via the WordPress.org plugin repository.

Welcoming New StudioPress Team Members

Also, ModThemes’ remaining management team, will become part of our team, and brings with it substantial experience, with Bryan Hauer becoming our Affiliate Program Manager and Roderick Sauskojus joining our Featured Designers group.

This is exciting for our members and us. After watching StudioPress’s rapid growth over the last few years and the enormous success of their Genesis Framework, we realized competing in the marketplace was going to be quite a challenge and joining a leader in the business was the way to go. - Bryan Hauer, ModThemes

StudioPress CEO, Brian Gardner stated, “We are excited about this and have a high regard for the ModThemes team, their efforts, and their skills. This addition to StudioPress will allow us to achieve our plans even quicker, as we aim to take our business to the next level.”

What Does This Mean For Current ModThemes Users?

The themes available from ModThemes will be converted to the state-of-the-art, Genesis Theme Framework and all ModThemes members will receive free upgrades to Genesis and the resulting converted child theme or can continue to use the legacy version.

ModThemes Developer pack members will also become StudioPress Pro-Plus All-Theme members, giving them access to the entire suite of current and future StudioPress themes.

ModThemes members will be moved over to the StudioPress Support Forums in the coming weeks and will have continued support along with future legacy-theme support.

For a number of reasons, the Revolution themes will be moving over to the StudioPress site – and I am asking you to trust that this has been thought out very carefully. There are a number of things that I’d like to work on, and in order for me to move forward with them and to do what I want, it makes a lot of sense to place all of that onto one site. (ie WordPress themes, theme support, design services and other internet consulting)

Here’s an excerpt from the post that I mentioned:

StudioPress will be the parent company for all that I do online, which means ultimately Revolution will fall underneath it as a web property that I own/run. One thing I will say is that I have a lot of plans moving forward, both with Revolution and other things in general, and needed an umbrella to keep it all under. For a number of reasons, I was advised to do this.

Ok, now here are the details…

As you can see, the StudioPress website is pretty much ready to go for the transition, with the exception being the support forum. I will be closing down the Revolution Two support forum tomorrow night (February 17th) at 10:00 CST for a few hours to move it over to StudioPress. Other than that, there shouldn’t be any other downtime.

What is the impact of this decision?

The first (and most important) thing is that nothing will change to the business model and theme licensing. This is strictly a change in the branding of the themes, which means the pricing, packages, etc will not be affected.

The support forum will be moving to the StudioPress site, and all of that will remain intact. In addition, the affiliate program shouldn’t be affected either, with the exception of new advertising banners that will be made available. Obviously ones that are currently being used should be replaced, but the links that are being used will also remain unaffected and you will receive credit for the theme packages that are purchased as you have your links now.

Why am I making this significant change?

Many of you think that rebranding Revolution at this point is marketing suicide, but for legal reasons, this is something that needs to be done. (Just trust me when I say that.) Moving forward, I plan to build a company around my WordPress theme business, and this is the best way to do that.

More than anything, the rebranding of Revolution to StudioPress is my way of committing myself to the future of my theme development and support.

I have already officially hired Craig Tuller, who will be director of marketing and manage the support forum. I am also actively seeking out a few other people as well who will help build out the company. We have a number of theme concepts in the works, and even some additional projects that will work alongside the business.

A word about the GPL licensing…

I want to reiterate that my themes will continue to carry the GPL license, as they have ever since the announcement when I made a few changes. There seems to have been some confusion about this post I made, and I want to clarify the theme license. Taken from the site’s Terms & Conditions page:

The CSS, XHTML and design of these theme are released under GPL license and are in total compliance to standards set forth by the authors of that license as well as with WordPress. Theme support will only be given to those who purchase a theme package.

I fully believe in the sharing of code, which is ultimately why my themes carry this license. After all, more than two years ago, I started developing my themes based on another theme. Yes, I adopted my own css and nomenclature for all of my code, but it was exceptionally helpful to have something to look at when I first got started.

Having said that, I want to point out that the true spirit of the GPL encourages members of a community to build from and share their new efforts. It’s very sad to see how some people are misusing and abusing the license for their own personal gain, and it saddens me to see people purposely trying to exploit my work.

In closing…

I want to personally thank all of you who read my blog, those who have purchased theme packages in the past and those who purchase theme packages in the future. None of this would be possible without all of you, and I want to say how appreciative I am for those who continue to encourage and support me. Moving the brand over to StudioPress will result in a better user experience, a growing community of users and better theme development.