PliablePress is going to be a purveyor of quality WordPress themes, particularly ones that “aren’t simple little themes that you can turn out in a weekend.”

The themes will all be based upon the custom “Chameleon” framework. It offers some functionality along the lines of Thesis or the WooFramework, letting the end user make customizations without digging into the template files.

Even though all of our other themes use Chameleon as a groundwork, you can use it on its own as well.

On its own, Chameleon is an ultra-clean, professional looking site. You might find that it’s already everything you want in a web design

I’m looking forward to seeing what the PliablePress themes, and the framework itself, will be like. It should be interesting.

Companies aside, what criteria do you usually use when looking for a commercial theme? Is price the most important factor? Is support critical? Do you want the PSD files, so you can use the theme as a starting point for your own design?

Take a minute to answer the poll. You can choose as many responses as necessary.

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Are there plans to simultaneously develop a free version with the paid version or will the free version be discontinued in favor of the paid one?

I do plan to more-or-less discontinue the free version as far as features. However, I will continue to check the WP Extend version to make sure it works with the latest WordPress version.

Will the plugin continue to be licensed under the GPL?

Absolutely. What we’re trying to do with the new site is provide automatic upgrades (very similar to Gravity Forms), priority support, and affiliate opportunities.

A 5-domain license starts at $10/year for now, though the price will be going up to $50/year after January 31st.

On one hand, I like seeing more plugin developers make some money from their work. On the other hand, I think the pricing will put the plugin out of reach of many of its long-time users.

What exactly are they doing? They’ve set up a site reminiscent of the WordPress.org plugin repository, but for commercial plugins. As a customer, you can browse potentially useful plugins, and pay a flat fee (which the author chooses) to download the files. You can also opt to pay a subscription fee to gain access to an exclusive support forum, and instant access to upgrades to the plugin. (Those who pay the one-time fee instead of subscribing have to pay for the upgrades.) The plugins are all GPL, as WP Plugins requires it of all submissions.

As a plugin developer, you can put your plugins up for sale for a price you choose. You set the download price, and a subscription price if you wish to offer the option, enter a description, and then upload the plugin. WP Plugins takes a 10% cut of the sales, and you keep the rest.

What do you think? Is this a good option for commercial plugins to do with? It certainly takes a lot of worries away from individual developers, and could potentially put a lot of plugins in one easy to find place. It doesn’t necessarily seem too bad for the consumer either. I think it’s interesting, and I’ll be watching the site to see how things develop.

I’d like your opinion on the slow, but definite growth of paid WordPress plugins. Are you glad that developers are finally getting serious about developing and supporting plugins for the long term, and making a business of it? I am.

Note: If you’re reading this in an RSS aggregator, you may have to click through to see the poll.

Personally, I think commercial plugins will greatly increase the quality of available WP plugins, just as has happened with themes.

There has been a lot of talk about a new WordPress plugin called Gravity Forms lately. It’s one of the first major premium WordPress plugins, costing $39 for a single-site license and $99 for multi-site.

What does it do? It’s a bit like the ever-popular cForms plugin, but with a lot more polish, and plenty more features. The interface is a breeze to use, letting you create new forms with ease. You just click a button to add a new form field, then you can adjust it live in the form preview.

You can try a demo of the backend here, though some features (such as saving) are disabled for security reasons.

It has a few unique features, such as form submissions being dumped into the database by default, with a convenient admin menu for reading and managing them. This would work well for a support form or survey, as you can read the postings right from within WordPress. It also offers the ability to create a form that would allow users to create new posts on a blog with your form.

Other nice additions like reCAPTCHA support and some hooks for other plugin developers to tie into are included as well.

Gravity Forms seems like a good plugin, though I haven’t purchased a copy myself. It’s nice to see a serious attempt at a large-scale premium plugin. I’ve been making plans to go in a similar direction myself in the future, though I won’t go into the details here.

Affiliate Link: Gravity Forms.