We’ve reached the end of the January and the first month of what is already an action-Woo-packed 2009. On all fronts, January has been amazing and we can’t wait to continue building on this momentum. The Permanent 2-for-1 has been a rip-roaring success and it seems as if many of you have cashed in on that amazing offer!

New Themes

January saw us releasing three new and very niche themes in Geometric, Foreword Thinking and WooTube (which is also our very first multimedia theme). If you haven’t seen these themes, we really think you’ll benefit from having a look at them here.

Our theme releases for February has basically been finalized and you can expect the releases of Cushy, Newsport, myweblog (view previews here) & Productum next month, whilst the Groovy Series themes & The Station (view previews here) are also coming along nicely and scheduled for release in March.

So as you can see, we’ll be releasing more “mainstream” and multi-purposed themes in February, with a few more niche and multimedia themes in March. Our ultimate goal is to diversify our themes range, without sacrificing the quality of individual themes, as we believe that both our club members and individual users will extract the most value from such an approach.

Theme Updates

If you don’t frequent our forums, I’d suggest that you login and view the theme documentation for the themes you own. We’ve been working very hard (Magnus especially) to update our themes and add some new features. We’ve also added the ability for you to view the changelog of the respective themes from the theme documentation.

We’ve been trying to balance our time in developing new themes, whilst also improving and adding onto our older themes (as the current crop of themes are what made us popular until now). Our business is thus definitely not only aimed at getting new users, but also enhancing life of our existing users (through upgrades to old themes & improvement of support resources).

Get in touch!

As always, we’d love for you to get in touch with us, tell us what you’re liking, as well as where we can improve. 2009 is a big year for WooThemes and we’d really like to take you along with us on that journey. Facts are facts; and we simply CANNOT IMPROVE if you don’t give us feedback and don’t engage with us in a conversation about your current & future needs. So fire us an e-mail or post messages to our forum; do anything, just make sure we get your message!

(BTW… As a little sidenote… We have incredibly exciting news that we would like to share with you, but the time just isn’t right now… So subscribe to the blog or follow us on Twitter to get this exciting news first… We’re probably make the big announcement in middle-February!)

You remember when the first TV’s started entering our homes back in the 1930′s and we all sat glued to the screen, as if watching TV was gonna change our lives (I’m improvising here, since I wasn’t born until about 50 years later…). Well, all I can say is that we’ve probably come a long way since then and we’ve even come as far as WooThemes finally releasing a video theme of their own… *gasp* *shock* *horror*

WooTube by WooThemes

WooTube is our first attempt at creating a video theme and will also serve as the basis of our collection of our new multimedia themes collection. This has been a long time coming and many of you have requested more multimedia themes from us; unfortunately until now we’ve been so swamped releasing themes in other niche fields.

So WooTube is another design by Magnus and you’ll see a very strong Busy Bee influence on the design front (purely because Busy Bee has been so darn popular). Functionality-wise, we’ve tried to create a theme that allows you to post video blogs on a daily basis – that’s it. No frilly bits; just a superb code-base to allow you to create & publish your videos.

The great thing about WooTube is that you’re not limited to using any specific video embedding service and that it is ultimately super-easy to use. Along with a few nice additions in the little video slider (sidebar) and the integration of a ratings plugin, we think we’ve covered all of the most important bases in enabling you to become the next video blogging rockstar.

Your feedback is obviously always very important and since this is our first multimedia theme, we’d love to talk to you about the theme itself and where you’d like to see us take our multimedia themes in future. WooTube serves as a marker that we’ve put into the ground and to which we’ll measure our “progress” and innovation in this field in coming months.

So please switch of your TV, read more about WooTube , check out the demo and get talking about the theme!

Even though it was designed to show videos, this theme can be used for multiple purposes like a photo gallery, CSS gallery, portfolio and even personal blog. The options allow you to disable the latest post to get that gallery look, and you don’t even need to add videos to your posts, so they will just be plain simple posts.

Unique Features

These are some of the more unique features that you will find within the theme:

• Super-easy functionality  to create video posts;
• Videos are resized automatically and WooTube even publishes the embed code for your readers;
• Integration of the WP-PostRatings plugin for some added fun & interactiveness;
• A completely widgetized sidebar with custom widgets included in the theme packaging. No third party widgets required; and
• 7 amazing colour schemes to choose from!
• NEW! Optional homepage layout (see update info) gives endless possibilities for usage of this theme e.g. gallery, portfolio or blog.

Foreword Thinking is a theme that as the name suggests has a home page that serves as an introduction to the rest of the website. My initial idea was to create a home page that resembled a magazine’s table of contents page with well presented blog post excerpts drawing you deeper into the content on other pages.

With alternating vibrant colour blocks (with colours that can be set in the neat theme options) for the featured posts and the date blocks the home page design never gets tired, together with minimal image styling your website should load super quick. If you flick through our 10 different theme styles you should find one that tickles you fancy. If not, customizing a style is a doddle – by changing the background image for example on the wood style to any other image can give your website a completely fresh and unique feel with the bear minimum of effort.

Framed neatly with a colour co-ordinated border around the browser window the theme design has almost a print design feel to it.

A clean, corporate white style

A completely widgetized sidebar, that can be housed on the left or the right of your content, means you have complete control of what functionality and navigation you want on you website. The theme comes packed with 7 custom Woo widgets, and has two home page modules available below the “table of contents” section where you can pull through content from any two wordpress pages you have created.

Wooden style with right sidebar and 4 featured posts

What more can we say, the theme should speak for itself so head on over to the demo to have a play or follow us to the purchase links below.

Unique Features

These are some of the more unique features that you will find within the theme:

• A custom home page with a “table of content” designed blog section, featured posts and two available page modules that can be set in the theme options;
• Randomizing colour styling for featured posts and date blocks with colours editable in the theme options.
• A completely widgetized sidebar with 7 custom widgets that you can use;
• Ability to interchange between a left and right sidebar;
• 10 different styles to choose from

Firebug is a great add-on extension to the popular web browser Firefox. It can help you make CSS changes in real-time and will help you locate where the CSS rules are defined and where in the file they are. It makes it even easier to customise any WooTheme. This tutorial is going to go through the basics of editing a style with Firebug, and then editing the CSS to save the new styling.

Video Tutorial

Downloading Firebug

You can download Firebug by visiting the Add-ons Repository here. You may need to restart your browser after installing it.

To change a style in Firebug, right click on the area you wish to change and choose the Inspect Element option. The Firebug window will open up at the bottom of the screen, and you can see the HTML of the page on the left, and the CSS of the element you clicked on on the right. You can change any of the CSS and it will automatically update the page so you can see your changes in action. When you’re happy with them, you can add it to your CSS file.

We will be attempting to change the link color of our Gotham News theme, with the default style, to a color of your choice.

Finding the CSS

You’ll need to open Firefox and go to your WordPress installation with Gotham News selected as the theme. Choose the default style for now, you can do the same techniques here to other stylesheets later.

Considering we’re going to change the link colours, right click on any normal link (ie. in a post or page), and choose the Inspect Element option. The Firebug window should open and show you all the CSS styling for the link.

Right click the link and select Inspect Element

Click on the color: attribute and you will find that you can change the colour. Change it to whatever you like, you can visit this site for a colour wheel with the relevant codes. When you change the colour in the Firebug window, it automatically updates on the page, so you will find your links all changing to match the new style.

Click on any value in the CSS edit window

However, these changes are not permanent yet! If you refresh the page, you will find that your changes are lost, because Firebug is only editing on the client side (eg. your web browser) and not on your web server. Let’s go and add those into the stylesheet.

Saving your changes

So, we would like to save our changes to our CSS files. The first step is to find what CSS file our styles are defined in. As in the screenshot, take a look at the right-aligned text above the a element in Firebug. That is the file our styles are in – style.css – and the line number of the styles – line 46.

Find the correct file to edit

You can now view the style.css file from your theme editor ( Apperance -> Editor ) and find line 46, and you should find the following there:

a {
	color: #006DAD;
	text-decoration: none;
}

Copy this style to your custom.css file. Any style you define in custom.css will override the styles in style.css. You can read the Best practices when customizing a WooTheme tutorial to learn more on how to best customize your theme.

Doing a bit more!

You can use Firebug to make changes to almost anything in your themes. For example, you could use it to change the background image of the header, you could use it to add extra padding around a picture, or change the background colours of the sidebar tabs. Firebug is your CSS buddy when it comes to WordPress!

In times when the financial going gets a little tough (I think the media has recently been referring to this as an economic recession of sorts), it’s wise to cut costs without compromising your business goals & objectives. So in an industry (web design & development), where there’s an ample amount of top-notch skills available (at differing prices to suit different budget constraints), why would you consider going with one of our themes vs getting a custom design?

I think that everyone would agree that a custom WordPress-built site will cost you lots more than any of our individual themes or subscriptions, right? The reason in this is purely in the time that a designer / developer needs to spend servicing one client, whilst we can spend that same time but then give multiple clients access to the same development. That’s just the way the two different business models work and both will bring their own pros & cons to the table.

Now, I’m not suggesting that custom design / development beats getting a template (since I also own a thriving custom design / development agency), but a template – when used correctly – can offer you great value-for-money; especially in times like these… When I browse around our showcase of WooThemes modifications, I see more and more great examples of how our themes were used as a framework and not an out-of-box solution. Looking at examples like Brad Ruggles, Anne Jackson, GoMediaZine & Resume Bear – it is hard not to see the value in customizing one of our themes. So why doesn’t everyone do it?

Another great example (to prove my point) is the recently redesigned ThinkVitamin website from the Carsonified crew. Even though I’d have loved for them to customize the theme more, it’s still great to see such a respect company using one of our themes; instead of having to develop one from scratch. So why would Carsonified (an established and hugely succesful company) use a WooTheme, when they could’ve done this on their own? Here’s why I think they did (and why others are doing this too):

• At $70 a pop, our Single License themes are a steal and a fraction of the cost of a custom WP theme;
• Our themes already have a bunch of non-standard WP functions built-in;
• Maybe they didn’t feel as comfortable with WordPress as they do with other platforms;
• Their design + CSS skills are top-notch, which is all they’d need to deploy to customize one of our themes.
• They wanted to launch the redesign ASAP and didn’t have the time to develop a custom theme; and
• They knew that we’d provide them with fast and efficient support on any queries they might’ve had whilst installing / tweaking the theme.

I know that for designers / developers using a template as a basis of their projects seems like “cheating”, but even Magnus is using one of our themes (modified though) on his own blog. So why when our themes offer you a fast, efficient and value-for-money solution, would you decide to go custom? For me the bottomline is a “horses for courses” approach in terms of going the custom route only when you need to; if you can however service all your needs with a modified WooTheme, why look elsewhere huh?

As Adii mentioned last week there are some really exciting themes to look forward to over the next few months.

Lately I’ve been fairly quiet being more involved in creating alternate styles for other designer’s woothemes, then designing themes myself, but over the last few weeks I’ve managed to find some time to work on some designs of my own. The latest being Productum which is a theme dedicated to promoting your product or service.

Click on image to see full size preview

Packed into a neat 16 column grid structure this theme comes bundled with a neat product image slideshow, a featured content block, recent news/blog posts and some widgetized modules available on your home page. As always it will be available in a variety of colourful styles. With all these features you should be able to customize Productum enough to have a very slick, professional marketing tool. Might I add this theme is not an e-commerce theme, but will have theme options to easily link buttons to payment facilities.

This theme should be available for purchase in late March/April.

Constructive feedback and feature requests are much appreciated, but we obviously cannot guarantee to accomodate all of them.

It feels weird to be writing a blog post about a new theme release on WooThemes, when it’s my own theme – since I was only blogging about other designers’ themes on Woo for the last couple of months. The last time I blogged about my own theme release on Woo, was way back in July 2008 when we launched WooThemes and I released VibrantCMS. And yes – I concur – that’s waaay too long to wait to release a new theme… But onto this theme now…

Geometric is a blog + portfolio hybrid that enables you to showcase both your written and visual content within one template and one WordPress installation. I spent a lot of time to make sure that there was a seamless integration between the two different types of content on the site, which wasn’t really the case with our previous portfolio themes. For example, on a date-based archive page or search results page, the template automatically picks up what type of content it should display (written vs visual) and then makes it look easy and stylish at the same time.

The design itself is slightly more minimalistic and is defintely heavily inspired by my recent fascination with shapes and how they interact with each other (thus the name: geometric). You can also see a similar line of thinking when you visit my own blog.

The feature that I am however most excited about is the completely customized homepage of Geometric. If you’re used to widgetized sidebars or widgetized spaces in sections of the theme (we’ve implemented both these in previous themes) – you can prepare to be amazed, because your whole homepage on Geometric is widgetized! So basically we’ve developed a bunch of custom widgets (12 in total!), which you can move around on the homepage (and in the sidebar) – so you have total control over how you utilize Geometric to best serve your needs & ideas.

I trust that you will find value in these release, since I really enjoyed developing it. Also – this is my first release in a very long time – so go easy on me… But right now, you should head on over to the demo and have a play around the theme. After that, I’d really appreciate some compliments or just general feedback ya’know…

Notice: Geometric has already been upgraded to version 1.1.0 to accomodate 5 more colour schemes and an option to switch between a left- & right-hand sidebar [12-01-2009].

Unique Features

These are some of the more unique features that you will find within the theme:

• Geometric is a hybrid of a blog + portfolio and thus enables you to run both these as an integrated offering on one WP installation;
• A custom home page, which is completely widgetized and thus allows you to move different widgets (for blogging, portfolio & social profiles) around as you wish;
• A completely widgetized sidebar, along with 12 custom (Geometric-specifc) widgets that you can use;
• Ability to interchange between a left and right sidebar;
• Styling for both blog and portfolio items that are carried forth throughout the site (category, date-based and tag archives, along with search results); and
• The ability to publish all of your social profiles throughout the site; allowing you to connect with more of your users.

In this video we show you how to find your category and page ID’s, which is useful for setting theme options or for using when you want to exclude or include with wp_list_categories or wp_list_pages in the template files.

The video will show you that you can find your cat/page ID by hovering over the link on the manage categories/page page in WP admin. You will see the link in your browser statusbar like this:

The browser status bar reveals page/cat ID

If you follow us loyally, you’ll know that we’re pretty good at teasing you with new theme concepts, before we end up releasing them.

So with that in mind, here’s some of the themes that we’re working on at the moment. All of these themes will be released in the next 3 months – we might change this slightly – depending on whether something comes up and we replace one of these with another concept – and in no specific order. All of these themes are currently in various stages of development and we’ll probably schedule their release as soon as they near completion (we’re not like those corporates with 1 / 3 / 6 & 12 month plans…). Here they are (click on the thumbnails for larger previews):

Geometric by Adii

This will be our first theme release for 2009 and it has been scheduled for tomorrow (if all pans out as planned). The theme is actually already completed (see demo here) and I’m just working on adding a few different colour schemes and styles (go here for more previews).

The theme is a blog & portfolio hybrid and I’ve tried to take everything we’ve learned from you about our previous portfolio themes (Fresh Folio & Proudfolio). So this is a new take on an older idea, whilst the custom, widgetized (!!) homepage is also something new for Woo. Check back tomorrow for a more complete demo & run-down of Geometric’s features…

Continue Reading »

First up, we’d like to wish everyone a very prosperous 2009. We are extremely excited about the year ahead and we hope we can count on all of you to join us on this journey. And with a new year, always comes the need to tweak things in order to improve on how we’ve gone about our business before…

So since our previous two sales promotions (the 3 for 1 Halloween & 4 for 1 Xmas Special), being wildly popular – we have decided to take what we have learned from these promotions and integrated it into a new Permanent 2 for 1 Special.

This means that from today onwards, you will be receiving a bonus, free theme (either Single or Developer license, depending on which you have purchased), when you purchase any one of our great themes. With this offer, you will essentially be getting double the value, without having to pay anything extra. This offer also does not have any time limit and will be in place all year long (even though we will definitely do another “4 for 1″ – or maybe even a “6 for 1″ - later this year).

This is just another way that we’d like to show that our users are the most important aspect of our business, whilst we really want to continue increasing the value to our customers. Hope that this latest-value-add will impress all of you even further!

PROCESS

To take advantage of our permanent 2-for-1 offer you simply select the theme you want from our themes list and click on the “Buy this theme” button.

After clicking this button you will be taken to our signup process:

First select either Single or Developer License

Fill in your details and select the bonus them you would like