For the last couple of months and beyond, the idea of a premium WordPress theme site has been brewing in my mind … and coming soon … real, real soon is just that.

WordPress guru Brian Gardner and I are teaming up to launch this venture — iThemes.com — in a big, big way.

Undoubtedly, you’ve seen Brian’s work and name scattered throughout the WP community and blogosphere. Not only is he listed by Automattic (the developer’s of WordPress) as an official WordPress consultant, but I’m also honored to count him as one of my best friends.

Next week, in fact, we’re meeting for two days of long-overdue brainstorming in Chicago to talk about iThemes.

Tentatively, we’ve scheduled the launch for late January … but if you’d like to be the first to know about the launch and get special email-only discounts, sign up for the iThemes email newsletter here.

We both love WordPress … we’ve contributed well over 50 free themes to the community … and we’ve built full-time businesses around it.

Now, we hope to offer the best WordPress premium themes around in one place …. with solid code, beautiful design, and lots of flexibility and options.

So stay tuned ….

After the recent announcement of our first premium WordPress theme — NewsPixel – we’ve come out with a totally different color scheme and look — Dark News Theme.

Purchase this theme now and get my 7 Steps to Optimizing WordPress Blog and my Quick Start Guide to Using WordPress as free bonuses.

Reading some summaries of WordCamp at Blogging Pro, I saw this blurb that really caught my eye (and excitement) drawn from Matt Mullenwegs talk:

WordPress is evolving into a content management system.

My friend Brian Gardner has talked about WordPress as a CMS … and I wrote a whole series about how smaller church websites could utilize it as a cheap (free) and easy CMS entitled Building Rockin’ Cool Church Websites.

WordPress 2.2 has been released. And now it comes boxed up with WordPress Widgets.

I’m really glad this particular feature is included …. for one, it takes some surfing at the Automattic site to find the plugin, and a lot of users I encounter have a hard time figuring out how to upload a plugin.

One feature I’d love to see incorporated into future versions: Some kind of FTP tool embedded within WP admin panel so users can easily upload plugins and new themes.

Yes, I am not a programmer guru … but hey, I can dream, right?