If your site is selected for inclusion, you will be featured in our ClassiPress Customer Showcase  which is one of our most popular pages. This will put you front and center and includes such benefits as a free link from an authoritative WordPress Premium Themes site (great for SEO), additional free traffic, and bragging rights. Interested?

To enter, please submit a comment below with a link to your site and a brief description. All entries will be reviewed and then selected by the end of May. Good luck and we’re looking forward to seeing a few of the thousands of ClassiPress sites being used all around the world today!

I also had the pleasure to meet Matt Mullenweg and Brian Gardner (who are both great guys, btw) to discuss WordPress 3.0 and Premium WordPress Themes. Lots of good stuff which has helped me strategize and better plan the direction of ClassiPress and the upcoming launch of our new theme business. It’s a very competitive environment and the sad part is lots of theme developers just aren’t doing a good job. It’s still the wild west when it comes to theming standards and guidelines. Hopefully that’s something WordPress will change in the future.

What I was surprised to see was the number of people who had iPads. It’s apparent that a majority of the attendees are early adopters and big fans of Apple. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised and in fact, I am one of those people as well sporting my new 3G iPad.

Overall this year was a great conference and if you’ve never been to a WordCamp before, I highly recommend going. Look for a WordCamp coming to a city near you.

Here are a couple pictures I took during day two at the “Unconference” for developers.

Not only is that process a real pain, but it takes time and allows the opportunity for mistakes. It also means those who don’t like to read instructions or cannot read English will have a lot less trouble getting their site setup. It also is a good thing for those who are new or aren’t very comfortable with WordPress in general.

This functionality is revolutionary with premium WordPress themes and in 3.0, all this will be fully automated once you activate the theme. We like to lead by example and you’ll see several other trailblazing features including the WordPress custom fields GUI built into 3.0. Yes, you will still have to go in and adjust the ClassiPress setting pages but the manual process of creating pages and assigning templates will be done behind the scenes within the install script.

Oh, and for those of you who noticed the screenshot, the featured ad listings will be much smaller and located across the top on the home page. This is one of two available home page layouts in 3.0. It’s also using a jquery carousel which automatically rotates through your featured ads. You’ll also notice that ClassiPress is by AppThemes which will be a premium wordpress theme site launching later this year.

Being a beta tester actually requires a lot of work on your part so before signing up, please make sure you are ready for the commitment. You will need to dedicate several hours of your time (over a two-week period) to help flush out any bugs before 3.0 is ready for a GA release.

Beta tester requirements:

• You must be an existing CP customer (prior to 12/1/09) and in good standing
• Actually using ClassiPress in a live environment (your site url is required)
• Understand how WordPress should work and how to identify potential bugs
• Document each step you took, what page you were on, and the bug behavior

What a beta tester is not:

• Someone just looking for an early copy of 3.0 (There will be bugs)
• Someone who is a customer but not currently using ClassiPress
• Someone just looking for an early copy of 3.0
• Someone just looking for an early copy of 3.0

I’m sure you get the point. If you are ready for the challenge, please register below. You will be sent a confirmation email as soon as you register so please click on the validation link to complete the reg process. Also make sure to enter the email address you used when purchasing ClassiPress. We will be validating all registrants against our customer list to ensure you qualify.

Once the beta program is ready to begin (and you qualify), you will receive communications from us and expect to begin the beta test script. We can only take a certain number of beta testers so I apologize in advanced if you aren’t selected.

UPDATE 3/5/10 - Thank you for your interest but we have reached the maximum number of applicants and are no longer accepting any new beta testers. If you have already registered you will be contacted the week of March 8th for further information.

For example, say you have a WordPress category called “Cars” and you want to have fields called “Year”, “Make”, and “Model” that are all drop-down lists. No problem. Just create each custom field, add the drop-down values, and then add those fields to your “Cars” custom form layout. That form will only display when someone is posting a new ad under the “Cars” category.

In this video demo I show you how to create a custom form for a category called “Electronics”. Then you’ll see how it dynamically shows up on the ad form page. It’s that easy to create your own forms and fields all from within the WordPress admin.

Well, as you can read from my forum response, there are several reasons but that won’t stop us from working hard on getting it completed and released as soon as we possibly can.

If you haven’t already purchased ClassiPress and are holding out until 3.0, I recommend you get in now while the prices are still low. They will increase once 3.0 comes out so even if you don’t want to install 2.9.3, you can lock in your price and just wait for the free 3.0 update. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

In the meantime, I wanted to treat you to a sneek peek at what the new ClassiPress will look like. This is a first hand look of never before seen screen shots. There will be 5 different color variations so don’t be upset if you don’t like this shade of blue.

The inner pages are still being finalized but i will post them as soon as they are finished and approved. When will ClassiPress 3.0 be available? Read the forum post link included above to find out the details.

Any feedback of this design is of course welcome but it’s already pretty much locked and loaded at this point.

You might be wondering how this transition will affect current and new customers. Well I can tell you in one short sentence the answer to that. It won’t. There will be some lag time before I am completely up to speed on operations and the product but customer support will only get better over time. I also plan on taking ClassiPress to the next level by turning the first and already most popular classified ads theme for WordPress into a better product with each release.

As you can see the ClassiPress site has been redesigned and built out to provide more detailed product information including a new support forum. This is the first step of many things yet to come for improving ClassiPress. Our next step will be to release several new features for version 2.0.8 which is due out April 6th. Some highlights include:

• Native WordPress tag support (you will be able to add tags to each classified ad)
• Users can edit/delete their existing ads
• Multi-lingual support
• Several new color schemes

I look forward to getting this release out in the coming weeks. I know several of you have been waiting for these features. Those who are existing customers will receive an email with the latest version attached. For suggestions on new features or fixes, please post them in our forum.

The rest of this year will be very exciting for ClassiPress but I cannot share the details with you yet. Stay tuned for more announcements and I encourage you to provide any feedback via the comments below or our new forum.

~David