It is our greatest pleasure to give you what you want. Since the very first signup, WordPress.com bloggers have wanted to edit their themes. Today is your day.
With the release of the Sandbox theme, you have a clean slate with some of the best markup ever generated by WordPress. Add to that our new Custom CSS, our first paid upgrade, and you are on your way to creating a blog like no other. You can purchase Custom CSS under the “Upgrades” link in your Dashboard.
The Sandbox theme’s skins can help you get started by providing flexible layout options; it comes with one-, two- and three-column themes with sidebars on either side. Or you can select No Stylesheet and do it all yourself.
For those who need help with their CSS and those who like to help, we have created a forum topic for CSS customization. (Podz is very talented but he can’t be expected to debug your CSS for you.) We expect there will be a growing supply of unique Sandbox stylesheets available in the wild, so be sure to show off in the forums when yours is ready!
Update: You can use Custom CSS to improve on any theme on WordPress.com. Sandbox is the most flexible theme but it’s all right if you want to just change a few things about your existing theme.
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great job guys!!! way to go for controlled customisation for wordpress users! 😉
Wow, thanks
that is really great for our iranian bloggers which mainly write from right to left
wow
yahoooooooooooooooooo
You guys are the greatest!
Amazing. Just amazing. I am in heaven, and running off to do some CSS.
wow!, this is awesome, now rly, this is great, can’t wait to try out that new theme with a css stylesheet
Woohoo!
Excellent! Now I can go break my blog 🙂
So many gifts today!
Wait, do you have to pay in order to activate this ?
“Purchasing the upgrade entitles you to edit CSS on one blog for one year.”
Yes it’s a paid upgrade. Our first, actually.
Very useful tool, but don’t you think that $15 is a high price ?
Please reconsider the pricing policy.
We gave a lot of thought to the pricing, and I think it’s reasonable. (And the response has been really good thus far.) All in all it works out to about $0.04 or 4 cents a day. With less than the change from your pocket you can get an incredibly powerful customization feature and support WordPress.com at the same time. And no one is saying you have to buy the upgrade either, it’s a power user feature.
If we buy this upgrade for a year what happens when that expires? Do we just lose the ability to edit our CSS styles, i.e. can we still use the ones that we have configured, or do we have to go back to using one of the other themes?
Best news I’ve ever heard in a long period of time 🙂
Well,.. but how to purchase this service? I can’t see any relevant link to this.
Open Source is changing to Paid Source?
I don’t like this feature, well, not the Custom CSS. I don’t think that we have to pay for Custom CSS, you can offer 1 Mbyte free for all users and we can upload in this Mbyte our Custom CSS.
This feature would be the best, but pay for Custom CSS is a horror!
Bye!
15$ is sooo NOT a high price. I mean, come on… it’s for a year! (a Flickr pro account costs 25 bucks, for example.) There’s a blog host here in Germany that charges, like, 4€ a month – and their service and support are really sucky. Well, I’m not planning to get the WP upgrade since I have no idea about webdesign etc., but if then I’m sure it would be a good choice. (And NO, I have nothing to do with WordPress. I’m just a regular blogger here 🙂
Good point… however I think $10 would have been better…. entice more people to come onboard… I guess there is a fine balance between numbers/price… if you don’t want to pay the $15, I guess you can pay in GBP 😉 or just learn CSS/PHP 🙂
Very nice. 😀
Thanks again!
It is great having the option, even it being commercial.
And for the price, the market will tell – I would guess guys from Automatic have done careful thinking about it.
Listen…one more reason that I’m so stuck with Word Press.com 🙂 Can’t even think of moving to another Blogging platform.
Thanks a universe to our beloved WordPress.com team. You guys are the best.
So people who have no credit card etc have to suffer with boring themes?
I long for my own server ^_^
Hmm, I’m really going to consider this. I’ve made a couple CSS pages b4, so I can handle it, only thing I’m concerned about it the header, adding a picture, background and title position . . .
So what will cost us 25 credits? With the current upgrade offer, giving us the option of buying 15 or 30 makes more sense.
Thank you! So this is why I just began learning CSS? I knew there had to be a good reason.
Also, the pricing seems most reasonable to me — especially given all else here is free. Thanks again.
As the first paid upgrade, you might point out where one purchases such upgrades. It took me a few minutes; I was expecting a link from here to an actual store URL.
(To any others who are still looking, it’s in your blog’s admin area under the “Upgrades” tab. Pretty obvious once you know, huh 🙂 )
luckhurst, after one year you can either renew or your custom CSS is deactivated until you do.
Would it be possible to buy credits for no advertising by WordPress on one blog?
societiq, we’ve been considering what else to offer as paid upgrades, I’ll pose that question in another post.
Interesting. WP has to pay for itself at some point.
Great news for wp.com blogs. With the Sandbox, you’ll be able to style your blog like a wild person.
I’m a newbie to CSS, so I’m not sure what is the scope of blog features that this paid upgrade encompasses. If you are clever enough with custom CSS, can you go beyond presentation changes to including widgets, counters, adsense, etc. (as long as they are hosted somewhere else, and visible by URI)?
Neok, Open source doesn’t mean “without cost”. I’m not planning to buy credits now, but I think its a smart idea to support WP.
WoooWho!
WordPress Paid Service
Nic, still remember last few month we are talking wordpress paid service. Let blogger paid a little fees to upgrade thier advanced service such Adsense? Now wordpress.com has been start this service. It’s sound pretty good feedback. For coming month I…
Pretty cool. I’ll have to look into this.
Fantastic – can’t wait to start experimenting!
Wow, another great option from the guys at WordPress.
The price for CSS upgrade a bit steep in my opinion. Think about other paid upgrades that will be coming at $10-$15 a piece, that would put users at easily $30-$45 a year if they had to go for like 3 upgrades. Is this a good strategy overall? I think not, the high price is going to push away mass adoption of css upgrade.
So back to basics
$15 * 10000 adopters = $150000 a yr VS
$4.99 * 50000 adopters = $249500
Great… I love it
Thank you! I will use this, I love it!
You need a way for someone to “sponsor” someone else’s paid extras (as a gift, etc) like livejournal and others do.
IMHO $15 per year is a tad steep for just css.
Completely customized hosting is just a few dollars a month at some places so consider that.
Here’s a thought: you could allow externally hosted stylesheets for free. There is no security risk with a variable url put into a link rel=”stylesheet” href=
_ck_: Completely customized hosting also requires that you do all your own uploads and upgrades and backups and a slew of other things. WordPress.com does all this for free.
Oh, and stylesheet links are subject to all kinds of malicious scripting tricks. Browser bugs and advanced CSS features force us to filter any CSS that affects wordpress.com.
The Best Things in Life Are Free …
If you really need to customize your blog that much, you could use blogger.com.
I did use them pretty recently but moved away from them just because they are NOT open source, and the XHTML they use for their search bar on all their blogs, makes your content NOT W3C compliant!
Now that I switched to here, I am pretty happy with the way that WordPress keeps their blogs with some web standards. The pages load faster and it looks more professional. Keep up the good work guys 🙂
I have to say, this sounds neat…but as a person who holds NO CREDIT CARDS, and have no bank accounts…isn’t there another way to pay for this CSS other than a credit card? Maybe money orders or something like that. There are people out here who don’t like credit cards and wish to handle everything with cash.
-Robert-
Sorry, it’s pretty tricky online to accept payments without using a credit or debit card.
Well done. I will give a look for my next upgrade.