If you are a web designer who sells via the Envato / ThemeForest marketplace, increase your theme sales by integrating your themes into Apex! It's absolutely free of charge, and only requires minimal work to integrate each theme. Apex fully integrates with Envato via their API, allowing you to integrate your themes into Apex, which will then be listed in each user's Maintenance->Theme Manager menu of the admin panel as an available theme.
When a user decides to use your theme, they will be required to purchase it via ThemeForest. Upon purchase, they will obtain their license key with purchase code, which they must enter upon downloading the theme from the Apex repository, which is verified as a valid purchase via Envato's API before the download is allowed.
First you need to visit the Apex Registration Form, and signup for a free account. Next do an installation of Apex on your local server, and in termins update the repository with:
./apex update_repo apex-platform.org
When prompted, enter the username and password you created your Apex account with. That's it, you are now ready to publish themes to the Apex public repository.
Integrating your themes is very simple, and once you have Apex locally installed, choose a theme you would like to integrate, and create it within Apex. For example, if creating the theme named "mycooltheme", at the prompt you would type:
./apex create_theme mycooltheme
./apex change_theme public mycooltheme
Next, open up the file located at /themes/mycooltheme/theme.php, and update the variables as necessary. Make sure to define the three Envato based variables, as they are required in order to force users to purchase your theme from ThemeForest before being allowed to download it.
Next, go ahead and integrate your theme by following the steps listed in the [Integrate Existing
Themes(themes_integrate.md) page of this manual. Since you've already changed the theme to your via
change_theme command, you can always via the current look of your integrated theme at http://localhost/.
Once integrated, simply publish the theme to the main Apex repository by typing the following at terminal:
./apex publish_theme mycooltheme
That's it! Your theme is now listed within the Maintenance->Theme Manager menu of all Apex users, with a link to it on ThemeForest. If any user decides to use your theme, they will first be required to purchase it from ThemeForest before being allowed to download and install the integrated theme into Apex.