The Station has been one of our most popular themes since we released it about 7 weeks ago and as you should be now expect from WooThemes; we like to add value for existing users. So a few weeks ago, I contacted all of the current users of The Station, to suggest some improvements and new features and got a whole lot of great ideas…

New Features in V1.1.0 of The Station

Here’s a brief run-down of the new features in The Station, which you can also see live on our demo:

Integrated Woo Framework Backend & New Theme Options

So The Station is the first “older” theme to restrospectively get the brand-spanking new theme options backend we’ve been rolling out in our last few themes. Here’s a little video to show you how this looks and explain the new options we have implemented:

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A lot of new things happening over here at WooThemes HQ… Along with the pending redesign of our back- and front end, we’ve also been working on a new themes framework, which will most definitely enhance your experience when using our themes.

So what’s this “themes framework” thing?

Basically we’ve just developed a new core theme, which will now be used throughout all of our themes. This core includes the most important features / functions that are currently used throughout most of our themes.

So in terms of our users, nothing much changes, but we have now enabled ourselves to update our themes more regularly (and easily), along with the fact that every theme will be much more standardized in terms of the way it is coded.

The new framework / backend is currently only available in Aperture, Metamorphosis and myweblog, but as soon as we’ve squashed the last bugs, it’ll be integrated into all of our older themes.

Uploading Post Images & The “auto image” option

If you haven’t seen the preview of the new backend in action, I suggest you view this video first.

There are basically two new features we’re using for post images (thumbnails or featured images):

1. Upload an image directly to a custom field i.e. you don’t need to upload, then copy / paste the image URL anymore.
2. The “auto image” option automatically pulls the first image within a post (to display it as the post thumbnail or featured image) if there’s no custom image specified.

But why believe me? Here’s a little video to show you what we’re doing:

* The little intro snippet was created by our good friend, Richard Bolland.

So when the WooThemes team met up at FOWD at the end of April, we brought along a very special gift: a limited-edition WooThemes T-Shirt (only a 100 got printed). Now, whilst we know that we’d look extremely sexy modeling these shirts, we thought that we’d get everyone that was lucky enough to get a shirt, to model them for us…

This is what you need to do…

For this next week (Monday, 18 May – Sunday, 24 May), we’ll give you a free copy of any of our amazing themes, when you take a picture of yourself wearing the WooThemes shirt, post it to Twitpic (or similar service) and tweet the link (include @woothemes in the tweet, so that we can pick it up).

What’s more, is that we’ll give the most creative image + tweet combo, a free 3 month subscription, instead of just a single theme. So we dare you to be a little creative and maybe even a little a silly…

We look forward to seeing the sexy, new WooThemes models!

For you. Personally.

We’re happy to release our 33rd theme (yes – we already 33 themes…) and the theme in question, is the personal blog theme – myweblog. The theme has a similar style to our most popular, personal blog themes, like Fresh News & Busy Bee and in that regard myweblog is sure to be a winner!

And myweblog also has the privilege of debuting our new stable Woo Framework backend, which we’ve been going on about recently. Both Aperture & Meta-Morphosis was released with beta versions of the backend, but myweblog includes the backend that we’ll be intregating into all of our old themes very soon.

So instead of me harping on about how cool this new backend is, have a look at it for yourself:

And then just before I let you leave… Go ahead and view demo, read up on myweblog’s features and then consider buying the theme and joining the WooThemes camp in the process.

Unique Features

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

• Colour-coded categories;
• Ability to use sticky posts with featured post highlighting;
• Integrated Lifestream;
• Dedicated blog category template and home page module;
• Widgetized sidebar with multiple myweblog-specific widgets; and
• 5 great colour schemes to suit your site identity.

Check out their new website

The guys at Web Designer Magazine have been keeping busy revamping their website. With it now running off none other than WordPress and it sporting a beautiful new theme design, with lots of new content it is definitely worth a visit.

Last week we recorded a podcast interview with Web Designer Magazine which is now available for your listening over on their website.

Podcast Episode 4 features:

CSS legend, respected author and standards consultant Eric Meyer talks candidly about  how he  got into the business and  what the future holds for CSS3. Plus, we catch up with Mark Forrester of WordPress design team WooThemes and ask whether CMS-based blog building is good thing or bad thing for the  modern art of web design.

Also if you missed our feature in the magazine in March that is also now available on their website .

We’ve been fortunate enough to travel up to the UK to attend Future of Web Design last week and were even more fortunate to get the opportunity to meet up with Ryan Carson & his wife, Gill, in their hometown of Bath today.

As the founders of a very successful company, Carsonified, the whole WooThemes crew have loads of respect for both Ryan & Gill, which means that it was really great meeting up with them. They use our Fresh News theme over at ThinkVitamin and according to Ryan, they’ve been really happy with the theme thus far.

So here’s a little “Hi!” and endorsement from Ryan…

Ryan Carson says Hi! to WooThemes from Adii Rockstar on Vimeo.