Yes, that’s right!  Memberships were disappointingly low - in part because before we’d even got off the starting blocks the one GPL theme we’d uploaded to WordPress.org (which was getting a good head of steam) was removed.  That was a bit of a hindrance as we need the support of the WordPress community to grow.

The work to change over will, we hope, be completed by the 1st of June 2009.

Unlike some of our more established rivals we found ourselves with a hefty disadvantage.  Would it be worth throwing in more money to create top themes if we couldn’t be sure of a market and community support?  After much thought we decided not to fight it and go to the service model which the GPL model encourages.

This is both good and bad - product lock-in is what helps make people a good living.  Think about it - an originator earns no more money from sales than a vendor.  In other words, it’s generally more profitable to sell GPL product than it is to write it.

On the upside, GPL can lead to a larger market share.  It’s also very tolerant of SaaS.  Consequently we have two plans.  One is to run this as a paid WordPress and Spectacu.la theme forum, where you can get help and assistance, and the other is to run a WordPress service for a particular niche we’ve been eyeing up.

The biggest downside is that because of some IP issues, we will be removing Caribou for the time being.  It’ll be back later, in a modified form, but for the moment it has to go.  To make up for it we’ll be releasing a new version of Grassland 2 which offers javascript effects, threaded comments and a new way to page a WordPress blog that makes it dramatically easier for visitors to go back deep into your content.

We’d like to also take this opportunity to apologise for the lack of updates on this site for the past few months - we’ve checked in daily to make sure all members are supported.  We’re also going to reward those of you who invested in us in those difficult early days.  Everyone who joined up until now will receive forum access for the next two years (or until we close, whichever comes first) at no extra charge - even those of you whose memberships have expired.  We haven’t set prices, but membership is likely to be set at between £35 and £70 per year.

And here’s another promise - whether you are a member or not, we will make all themes available either through the WordPress repository, or through our site, for free, for as long as our bandwidth charges allow.  What you definitely won’t see are GPL themes that aren’t freely downloadable - that, we believe, isn’t in the spirit of the GPL.  We may give members advance access to themes before they go to the repository, but that’s as far as we’ll push it.  Promise.

So, join us on our new adventure… but not just yet!