Students registering for the January session of the blogging studio course, Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune will have the opportunity to win a free premium theme from StudioPress. Over the holidays, StudioPress had a contest for a free premium theme and I won! Lucky me

I already have a Pro Plus All Theme membership for my freelance work so I already own all of the themes. So, I asked permission to transfer the theme to a lucky student and StudioPress graciously agreed. On January 16, I will randomly select a student from the Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune class to receive a free premium theme. The lucky student will be able to select any theme from StudioPress that best meets their needs.

In the Blogging Basics course, we focus on the widely available free themes but there are some situations where a premium theme can be advantageous. This is particularly true for photoblogs and for when you want your blog to be an integrated part of your web site. You can utilize WordPress to control your entire web site with one of these quality themes.

These themes retail for an average of $60, so don’t miss out on this opportunity. Registration closes on January 6th, so register at LVS Online today!

Many of you have asked for a class on how to customize your WordPress theme. Unfortunately, I just don’t have the time to write and teach another course right now. I did spend a chunk of my summer helping Jeramie rewrite the PHP 101 class. We have totally redesigned it so it truly has a web developer focus versus a generic programming focus. In addition, I have made sure that we address all of the basic skills that you would need to customize the code of your WordPress theme. Want to change how your posts are displayed? How about making sure the author’s nickname always appears on the post? Or maybe you want to make sure that your comments have gravatars and that your readers can subscribe to the comment feed? No problem! Those are just a sample of the things that you can do with your theme once you understand PHP.

You can read more about the course, Anita’s and my discussion about how this PHP course is different and also register via this blog post on the new MySQL/PHP blog.