This year we saw the revolution led by Wordpress Premium Themes, which made lots of blogs go craze about the opportunity of finally have a more ‘professional’ look and feel. For less than a hundred bucks you could buy an stylish magazine template for your Wordpress and make it prettier than lots of respectful sites like traditional newspapers.

But, as it always happen, HTML code can be slurped and modified by anyone with little skills. And so we began to see those templates make their way to the Rapidshare world. Why pay $ 75.00 for a little 50 kb zip file with 8 or so PHP files and some little images?

We all know that piracy is a problem that hurts much more the ones who are working to give free, pleasant options to the others who can’t afford pricy software or content. And we also know that anti-piracy stratagems only hurts the legal consumer whom must face all kinds of crude things to be able to use that thing that he actually bought and financed.

So, it was completely clear, from the beginning, that those wonderful and talented minds that were developing Premium Themes were going to throw a party that wouldn’t be going late night. I myself bought the Revolution Media Theme to experiment and learn from it — I even tried to run this very yours blog using it, but it seems I’m on a very casual mood for web fashion these days.

But it took me completely by surprise when Brian Gardner, the brains behind the Revolution Themes decided to drop all of his Revolution themes and start it all over again by going completely open source — Ha! In your face, script-warez kiddies!

This was really ingenious: you can now grab any of the wonderful Premium Themes from Revolution, which is now reloaded as Revolution Two, for free. Yes, just go there, download, unzip it and upload it. The cost is that: zero, nada, niente, puerra nenhuma. 

Brian have figured it out sooner than everybody: the problem is that everybody wants those templates, but nobody wants to have the very same looks of other sites, and customize those templates are not for the faint of heart. And to do that customization, you gotta have to make tons of questions about issues and even bugs that may appear while you adventure yourself on coding.

So if you want to access the support forums, you have to pay for a subscription. Once you pay, you get all the support you’ll need to customize your template that you got completely free. 

We are seeing lots of professional, vertical forums going this way: you have access to something for free (like SEOmoz Blog and Tools, or QuadsZilla’s SEO Black Hat Blog), but if you really want to have access to the real brains behind it, pay for it. 

That’s not something very new, as Wired’s Chris Anderson already pointed on February ‘08. But I give credit to Brian to came onto this conclusion before all the others.

Let’s hope that he succeeds. I’ll be taking a close eye on this one because I really hope I can benefit from the same model on a near future.

Go take a look by yourself and pay him a visit: www.revolutiontwo.com.

Back then, it was clear to me that something great was going to surface, caused by the mixture of the already established Wordpress publishing platform and some quality stuff, professional design and visual eye candy.

And that’s happening now. Lots of sites are being seduced by the Revolution Pro and its siblings, and I’m already prepared to face a new standard on most professional blogs nowadays — you should, too.

After facing a couple of months on a personal dillema of adopting what’s about to become a (boring) standard among all professional blogs and sites, I decided to give the Revolution Pro a try. After all, even if I lose the opportunity of doing a personalized layout made all by myself (as I kinda did on Submusica), I would surely benefit of knowing the user experience behind one of these premium paid templates.

But I won’t promise that I won’t touch it!

It wouldn’t be different here. However, the main purpose is to finally get all the pieces of my professional life together, so anyone interested to know more about my skills and previous interests can get a quick overview about them. So, for the next few days, expect a huge grown at my portfolio category.

I also plan to write some stuff about me, my personal thougts and views, not only about my professional life, but about other areas and aspects, too.

See you around.