Object Theme
Since we showed you the beta preview of Object exactly a week (and 83 comments) ago, Magnus has been busy implementing some of your suggestions in the final, release version of the theme. So whilst slightly unexpected and unplanned, we’ve decided to push Daily Edition‘s release back by one week in favour of making Object available immediately. So onto the theme…
Object is a flexible photo- & videoblogging theme, which has been crafted using Magnus’ signature and slightly minimalist style (the same style that spawned bestsellers such as Fresh News & Busy Bee). So I’d doubt that anyone will question the potential, flexibility and awesomeness of this theme.
If you wanted some more proof of the flexibility of the theme, consider that you can use it as a 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 column design with 15 different styles and an extremely elegant interface to publish BOTH photos and videos. Magnus also spent quite some time perfecting the image gallery functionality on single pages, which uses a very pretty jQuery slider.
All-in-all we wanted to release a theme that does a great job at publishing videos & photos, because we felt that there was a slight gap in our (multimedia) themes collection. And on top of that, we figured that Magnus’ design style was perfectly suited to create an easy-to-customize, superbly coded, flexible theme.
What do you think? Not convinced by our words yet? Then have a look at the demo and the short screencast and leave your feedback in the comments.
41 Responses to “Objectified”
Looks nice as per usual. Gotta try this one out later on.
noticed this on the demo (style: Dark)
http://img.skitch.com/20090908-dct8bd5hywwee2mi2tjjpmyu6p.jpg
The tags don’t show up very clearly.. I’m not sure if I’m mildly color blind or if my monitor is kaput, but that color on that background just doesn’t seem to be very good.
Otherwise, nice work!
Thanks for noticing… I’ll tweak the link color on dark
Love this different kind of theme. I miss your regular elegant style in this one but functionality wise, you have really nailed it.
Also accommodating video in this photo blog theme, auto capturing first image from the post are all a thoughtful process. Well done.
Do you think this isn’t my regular style?
Nope. simply looking at the design, I can not say this is done by Magnus ( When I see 200 x 200px preview of coffee machine, I can )
@Adii – Yeah, I have noticed the speed. One day, he sits at his home whole day, experiments photoblog design and after just few days, theme is released. It’s passion that drives the excellence.
This is probably more indicative of Magnus’ signature style than anything else he’s done of late… Not only in terms of design aesthetic, but also in terms of unexpectedly and very quickly coding & releasing the theme…
For everyone that hasn’t noticed by now: Magnus may not say much, but he’s a freakin’ machine!
I like the automatic JQuery-Slider. This makes “Object” a better theme than “Groovy Photo” which I bought the other day. Now I have to buy this one too. I hate you guys.
Great work,Magnus. Simple but efficient!
Hate is such a strong word!
You could always become a member of the WooThemes club and then you won’t need to hate us so often…
To me the little “info box” at top left is in prime space, but is mostly just forgetable info. Is it possible to get rid of that, or move it under everything else in the sidebar ?
Sort of seems weird to me that the title is top left, but the post text is disconnected to that under the picture.
You can easily tweak that in the template files by copy/pasting a few lines of code
Should have known
Your themes always win the prize for bext to tweak.
But one other question. I am looking for a theme to handle a big illustration portfolio. The images are all different sizes and shapes. How does the preview image work ? Does it take a slice from the middle, or top left. What if it is an extreme vertical image etc ? Just wondering how it handles the preview….
We use the timthumb script, which basically resizes the image to either the maximum width or height and then crops from the center outwards for the other dimension.
arrrggghhhh
I was actually prepared to purchase the membership just for this one theme, until I saw you use timthumb.
I use wpmu and unfortunately timthumb does not work with mu. Have you applied the new ‘fix’ to timthumb so that we can use your themes?
btw
it sounds like wordpress 3.0 or 3.1 is going to be the mergepoint between wp and wpmu, so by then all themes will have to solve this problem using timthumb.
might want to get ahead of the game on this one.
Timthumb actually works with WPMU, but requires some tweaking…
And in terms of getting ahead of ourselves… I don’t think we’ll be worrying about Timthumb and future versions of WP too much for the moment, as there’d be too much speculation, which is never good. It’s also been mentioned that future versions of WP will include their own image editing & resizer, so we may be able to stop using Timthumb completely in favour of core WP functionality.
Until anything happens though, we’ll happily stick to Timthumb.
are you able to provide the needed tweaks to timthumb if I purchase the theme, so that I can use it with wpmu now?
Yes sure. We’d be able to suggest some tweaks which you can try. WPMU is still a mess though, so if we can’t help you out, we’d happily refund you.
Ben Gillbanks the author of timthumb.php is going to update us on how to properly make it work for image resizer: http://www.binarymoon.co.uk/2009/09/new-elemental-wordpress/comment-page-1/#comment-22033
BUT, you don’t need the image resizer at all to make this theme work, as it can resize the images without it, but it will only look good if you use portrait images for the thumbnails on the front page. So to clarify, this theme works perfectly fine without the thumb.php image resizer
That said… The theme is pretty flexible and with a few minor tweaks you’d be able to handle just about any image type (landscape or portrait).
The preview takes from the middle. Extreme vertical image will take a zoomed middle portion on the front page. For the post page it will show the full image though.
Wow… I’m loving this – and I’m not a photoblogger or a video blogger! But I can see some other ways this could be used.
Love the attention to detail, typography, and jQuery effects for the galleries. Very slick. This is my favorite portfolio-style theme yet!
Thanks Adam, for the very nice feedback
Looks great! I see you have implemented most, if not all, of the suggestions from the preview of Object.
Nice work, Magnus!
That’s just how we roll!
In some cases, we’ll take the lead and do what we think is best. But with Object, we really wanted to know what our users would’ve liked for us to include and that’s why Magnus put up the beta preview and asked for suggestions. Ultimately I think we have a better theme thanks to everyone’s suggestions!
You people are scary fast sometimes! Ha ha. LOVE IT! Thanks!!
I have to say I really enjoyed watching the process. The comps, a beta preview, revisions to the beta, and the final product. I have to say, another brilliant wooTheme!
Really photo style theme, I like it on my theme photo website.
Photo gallery theme, But i can use for movies theme, hehe It’s great!
Is it somehow possible to add more videos to a “gallery” and flip through them like the photo gallery/slider?
That would be killer!
Cool theme.
Jay
I agree, that would be a really great feature to have. I know that when I purchase this theme I’ll be posting many short clips from my travels, and it would be great if I could have a video gallery from location A, B, etc.
Another quick question – can that text space in the upper right right of the header be tweaked to a twitter feed like Mortar?
There is already a twitter option for showing your feed instead of the description
Mmm… That may be a stretch a little too far, but I’m sure Magnus will look into it.
I’m sure he could pull it off
And the twitter feed – I’m sure it’s a simple-enough thing to do, but I’m very limited in my php/css skills (which is why I’m oh so close to joining woothemes, as your support seems next to none).
Twitter already in there
Photo-video theme, great!
Once again you’ve outdone yourself! Wonderful theme, thanks.
I suppose it’s two weeks too late, but I’d like to see a sort of pyramid structure to the homepage pic display: one pic on the top row; then two, then three; four; five; six. Or variations for a better geometric look: 1; 2; 4; 4.
Yeah that would be pretty cool, so I’ll see if I can figure something out in the next update
Fantastic
Really gorgeous! this kind of design makes me cross the line and get my membership. Is it based on the 960 grid?
That is great to hear! It was designed with a grid overlay, but not coded using any grid framework, as we have found they have a steep learning curve our members, so we are trying to use our own code.
Thanks for the good news about timthumb. As wpmu ‘is a mess’ right now, I’ll just go ahead and hold off until I hear the issues have been resolved with wpmu.
On an unrelated note about object:
I noticed that you are using a transparency of .9 on the image field but for the life of me I can’t figure out how you are doing the ‘transparency release’ upon hover. Do you mind sharing the technique?
I was trying to apply the same technique to a section in my own theme, but so far firebug and google have not been my friend on this question.