All the latest news and announcements, straight from the WooThemes HQ!
Today’s Headline Teaser
25. Sep, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in Theme Concepts
We’ve told you this before and this won’t be the last time you hear it: but Magnus is a machine… Lovingly called Magatron within the WooTeam, Magnus has a knack of creating something from absolutely nowhere and more often than not those creations / ideas are top-notch stuff.
So with his new magazine-type design – titled Headlines – he completely took the team by surprise, as we didn’t know he was working on a new design. Whilst Headlines hasn’t reinvented any wheel, the team has been very impressed by the design and the feedback we received from the teaser we posted on Facebook seems to confirm our early positive feelings about the design. So let’s take a closer look at the new theme…
Headlines - Homepage
Headlines - Inner Page
As with all of Magnus’ designs, you’ll notice that his signature style comes to the fore in a very prominent manner. But you’ll also see that he’s tried to break that mould a bit and the most apparent deviation from his signature style, is the “around-the-corner” ribbons & navigation items. Generally though, Headlines has been designed on the same basis that has made Busy Bee & Fresh News our two most popular themes ever.
Layout-wise, we’re hoping to develop Headlines in a very customizable way. One of the most important features we’d like to include is the ability to effortlessly switch from a left sidebar (as on the mockup) to a right-aligned sidebar. The main reason we’re keen on this, is the fact that most of our themes seem to adhere to a content+left sidebar layout and we’re just hoping to mix that up a little (in the process further diversifying our magazine themes collection).
So what do you think? Features wish list? Specific functionality we should include? Shoot away with suggestions, feature requests, functionality demands etc. and we’ll try our best to evolve this theme into a real beauty when the time comes to release it.
Note: Keep track of the themes we’re working on, on our Themes in Progress page.
94 Responses to “Today’s Headline Teaser”
25 September 2009 at 7:59 am #
I really like it, very nice and clean – EXCEPT for the faux-3d stuff. Faux-3d is to 2009 as Wooden-backgrounds were to 2008. Very overused trend at the moment!
25 September 2009 at 8:05 am #
Agreed. It’s too much like CNET.com.au.
25 September 2009 at 8:13 am #
What do you mean Alex? Is the design too much like CNET?
25 September 2009 at 8:15 am #
Ah see the 3d banners on single page: http://www.cnet.com.au/audi-r8-spyder-339298764.htm
I think they look great! And I don’t see them on too many designs.
I kinda got the inspiration from Mainstream http://woothemes.com/demo/mainstream/ which has proved to be immensly popular, so I thought why not?
25 September 2009 at 8:10 am #
Darn! And I’m trying to come up with something new, and it’s already overused
Might be popular though, since it’s overused?
25 September 2009 at 9:04 am #
FWIW, I like the 3D wrapped ribbon things myself. Of course I’m using Mainstream as my them so I guess that kinda goes without saying.
25 September 2009 at 1:30 pm #
Right, but I don’t see you designing anything with a wooden background and justifying the decision by saying that it’s popular
25 September 2009 at 5:43 pm #
True
But a wooden background is a bit more than a couple of 3d banners 
So it would change the whole design. These can easily be turned off with some CSS and the theme wouldn’t look that different, if that is what you like. I think it gives the design a little edge.
30 September 2009 at 3:10 pm #
While I had the same first reaction to the 3D ribbon thing — i think he has implemented it very well. Could grow on me.
30 September 2009 at 3:18 pm #
I’m coding the theme now, and I haven’t yet decided if I’m keeping the 3d ribbons… will have to flip a coin when I’m done coding
30 September 2009 at 3:23 pm #
I especially like it on the very top nav area — that’s pretty cool and different, yet it is subtle along with the palette. I prefer it when the colors are more neutral and I can always change them later. Happy coding! I’m sure it will be great.
30 September 2009 at 3:50 pm #
Well the top nav has been changed, so don’t get to used to it
http://jepson.no/u/headlines-reddy.png
Moved it down because I never felt the old style.
25 September 2009 at 8:03 am #
Theme looks good. Only suggestion just now is use some more colour. It looks quite washed out. Too much grey imo.
25 September 2009 at 8:07 am #
Yeah I like to keep it simple on the initial mockup, but I’ll add many color schemes so there is something to fit every taste
25 September 2009 at 8:50 am #
Hmm, what’ll happen if you’ve too many categories? Just wondering about this cause I’d say generally bloggers have more than 4 categories?
25 September 2009 at 9:23 am #
Just like with Busy Bee or any other theme of ours, you’d use drop down menus
25 September 2009 at 9:05 am #
I notice that it looks like there is an author information box. Is that part of the theme options or is that a Woo Widget? Either way, I like it. Keep up the good work.
25 September 2009 at 9:24 am #
That will probably be hard coded in the single page sidebar, so it will be above the normal widgets.
25 September 2009 at 10:29 am #
Looks very clean and professional. Another great theme in the works! Will it support 300×250 ad widgets in addition to the 468×60? If so, it may just pull me away from using Fresh News. Any approximate timeline at this point?
25 September 2009 at 11:38 am #
Thanks, It will have all the usual ad spaces that both Busy Bee and Fresh News have. Theme hasn’t been coded yet, so no timeline.
25 September 2009 at 10:34 am #
Magnus, you rock! I’ll take the little wraparounds, thanks. *tucks this one into my downloads folder and runs*
Wait, when are you letting this one out of the bag? Can I have it like yesterday?
25 September 2009 at 11:39 am #
Thanks Nikole
If I had coded it before I designed it, you could have had it last week!
25 September 2009 at 11:05 am #
Very nice, particularly in the details. I wonder though what the banner looks like for someone who doesn’t have ads. Seems like it would have a gaping hole (as in not-user-interaction-effective-whitespace).
25 September 2009 at 11:40 am #
That space will be a combo ad, latest tweet, site description, so you should find some way to fill it
25 September 2009 at 2:33 pm #
I love it. I like the left sidebar on the homepage while the content is on the left of actual postpage. With all these category nav themes its nice if there is an exclude feature in the settings. With the amount of flexibility Woothemes offer it should be a standard to have the exclude pages and categories on all themes.
25 September 2009 at 5:41 pm #
Yep that is standard in all our new themes
25 September 2009 at 2:34 pm #
It’s not bad looking but not to my taste… I’m still awaiting news on mystream theme
25 September 2009 at 2:51 pm #
I like the fr links on the very top. Will there be a section on the theme admin that lets you choose which links go on the left and which ones go on the right?
25 September 2009 at 5:41 pm #
I was thinking that the page menu go left, and the RSS go to the righ, like all other themes…
6 October 2009 at 11:30 am #
Awesome. I NEEEEEED this theme.
25 September 2009 at 6:18 pm #
When I first looked at the thumbnail, I was like, “meh, rehash of Object”.
Then I clicked to the full version and KAPOW! Looks like a very versatile template!
Nice placement of all the site elements.
My only suggestion would be to make the “Pages” navigation *pop* more. Right now it doesn’t seem to stand out enough in comparison to the categories navigation.
26 September 2009 at 5:24 am #
They do pop more I promise, it’s just that the WooTeam forced me to use font smoothing in my preview, so it all becomes slushy
It will look better once coded and you see the sharpness of the font
26 September 2009 at 12:32 am #
So is it Facebook junkies who get the latest news these days rather than members ?
26 September 2009 at 4:36 am #
Nope. You’d see that we only posted a sneak preview of Headlines of Facebook, whilst the first preview of Delegate was posted on here. So we’re doing this to create an incentive for our fans to also join us on Facebook and help us spread the brand virally on there.
26 September 2009 at 2:23 am #
I don’t see you designing anything with a wooden background,its rubbish.
26 September 2009 at 3:21 am #
After watching CNET from Comments. I feel the Share Buttons from CNET would look cool here too..
The design is Cool but no way gonna compete FreshNews or even BusyBee.
Just one suggestion, why don’t u guys do built-in Author Highlight as you already do Threaded Comments ?
“Bye Bye Rounded Corners and Right Sidebar, Welcome Left Sidebar !?
”
26 September 2009 at 5:22 am #
I’ll try to add the author highlighting
26 September 2009 at 5:26 am #
And why won’t it compete with FN or BB? It’s a mashup of the two, with a much asked for featured tabber and possibly a gazette slider option. Plus I’ll make the BB and FN colors come through on the alt styles
27 September 2009 at 2:14 pm #
Well, FN and BB are like masterpieces (for me atleast).
Something else would have looked great than that “Out of the Box” effect.
I just have a feeling the styles, effects/css used here aren’t going to grab attention of FN and BB lovers. *like me
. Though, they are Good !
27 September 2009 at 2:31 pm #
My main goal with this theme is not to steal BB or FN buyers, but to give an alternative to those two
I do not intend to replace those, as they are pretty good as they are now.
26 September 2009 at 10:31 pm #
Looking nice. I like the changes thus far. Some things on my wish list would be:
A separate twitter widget so you could run the banner in the header and have latest tweets.
A “News Flash” area would be cool. It would show post titles from a news flash category via jQuery. I would be glad to show several examples of this.
Featured/Latest videos area perhaps like Fresh News.
Calendar stylized to match theme
Can the tabber show Popular, Latest, Comments & Tags like in Daily Edition?
Banner advertising capability in-between posts AND on the single post page
Having the search integrated into the nav bar limits the number of categories which typically will be 8 – 10 or more on a news site. If you did a news flash area below the cat nav, it could be integrated there.
Not asking for too much am I?
BTW – Love the social sharing and the comments styling rocks.
27 September 2009 at 7:14 am #
Twitter widget is going to be included.
Please show some examples of news flash areas, and where it would fit in the theme.
I’ve still to add a video widget, but might add this as an optional area above, below the posts as well.
Tabber will show same as DE.
Banner ads, will try to accomodate for that.
I can make a search widget, and have an option to disable the search in navigation, if you want to use the full space for categories.
Thanks for the input
28 September 2009 at 12:11 pm #
best example of a News Flash or Breaking News would be something like this:
http://demo.gavickpro.serwery.pl/joomla15/sep2009/
See top bar
28 September 2009 at 2:05 pm #
I could add something like this at the top bar now that I’ve moved the page nav down
27 September 2009 at 12:03 am #
the theme looks pretty awesome ilove the way the navigation appear
looks pretty
idont like the category navigation i feel it big
27 September 2009 at 7:10 am #
The cagegory nav can be made smaller by removing the description below the Category title.
27 September 2009 at 6:33 am #
Feels like a partially-dissolved BusyBee to me. Not a fan. I especially donlt like the floating panels of the left-sidebar. It just leads to two columns of unaligned boxes. To be brutally honest: bland & characterless.
27 September 2009 at 7:09 am #
Maybe you’ll like it better with some more colors that I will implement in the alt styles. I might even use a different style as the default, as it seems that the consensus is that it’s a bit bland and minimalistic.
Not sure I know what you mean about the left sidebar. The theme will have option to have your sidebar aligned left or right.
27 September 2009 at 11:58 am #
I like it! Looks very smooth.
28 September 2009 at 12:12 am #
I’d like to see an option in the backend options panel that lets you change all of the in-content links to traditional blue with underlines without affecting the other links on the site.
I know it’s possible to change with CSS but I’m a simpleton and like to KIS and just use the options panel.
28 September 2009 at 3:38 am #
Why don’t you include the video panel from your last theme in all the templates? maybe as a widget?
28 September 2009 at 2:02 pm #
Video widget will be included like other themes
29 September 2009 at 4:15 am #
i don’t mean “widget”, but a video panel as seen on your theme “Daily Edition”. It would be great to include it in all your theme options
29 September 2009 at 8:02 am #
Gotcha. We might just include this in the final release version.
28 September 2009 at 2:01 pm #
I’ve modified the theme a bit more now by restyling the page nav, and moving it. Also added some colors: http://www.jepson.no/u/headlines-colors.jpg
28 September 2009 at 2:05 pm #
Will you be including the original “clean” theme colors? I liked the simplicity of the colors in the original. Also, it could be cool to do a “Fresh” style with the browns that you’ve used in the past on Fresh News and other themes.
28 September 2009 at 2:10 pm #
Yeah I’ve got 15 total colors, including white, silver, gray, fresh and busy (FN and BB standard colors)
1 October 2009 at 1:51 pm #
Looks nice with the color additions!
One suggestion would be to add a “Twitter subscribe” link option with bird icon up under the header next to the email and posts subscribe links.
I find myself subscribing to people’s twitter feeds more than their RSS feeds these days
1 October 2009 at 4:29 pm #
Good idea, will add that… You can also click the Twitter icon in the tweet bubble: http://www.jepson.no/u/n5xbmx.png
28 September 2009 at 2:25 pm #
Is the “Share” functionality at the end of posts something new for WooThemes? This kind of plugin is available in all kinds of places, but it would also be nice to have it prepackaged with themes.
28 September 2009 at 3:23 pm #
Yes im going to integrate that in the theme
29 September 2009 at 9:08 pm #
This theme looks great! It has a crisp, clean, polished look that I really like. I came here with the intention of purchasing Busy Bee but I think I’ll wait until this one is released.
Great job, Magnus, I hope this is released soon…
30 September 2009 at 1:57 am #
Thanks Ed, it’s taking shape in the coding, but it will probably be a few weeks before it’s released
4 October 2009 at 5:34 pm #
The new stylin looks better. But I must say again how much I hate the two-layer navigation. Separating pages and categories may make sense to Wordpress developers but for everyone else in the world it’s just stupid and confusing.
I know you explained in the past the difficulty in combining them – but that’s why there’s always a place in the world for clever people to solve these issues. It seems like Woo has given up on this aspect. But please try to see this from a everyday user point of view – they rightly ask “why are there two nav bars?”
My clients aren’t interested in technical excuses when requesting what appears to be absolutely standard functionality on most of the world’s websites.
5 October 2009 at 12:27 am #
Wow… That’s a pretty scathing attack on our abilities right there…
As mentioned to “imtiedup”, there are plugins that can accomplish this and we’re also hoping to include a combined, custom navigation in our WooFramework in future. That said though, I’d still probably argue that there’s a difference between a page & a category (irrespective of anyone knowing the exact lingo), because once you click on either, you access different kinds of content. So maybe it is logical to actually split them?
5 October 2009 at 9:58 am #
With the greatest respect (and I sincerely mean that), the page and category differences mean * NOTHING * to a real-world shopfront business owner who just wants a nice looking website.
I have the greatest admiration for your designs, excellent framework, clear documentation and absolutely first class support.
But (for me at least) the nav issue is a real pain.
If a plugin can solve the issue then tell me and I promise to shutup !
5 October 2009 at 9:59 am #
Oh, OK, I see a later reply. I wait with hope.
5 October 2009 at 1:44 pm #
NavT solves the problem.
4 October 2009 at 7:16 pm #
I’m not sure if you have seen the following plugin for navigation, but it allows you to mix and match your pages and categories.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pixopoint-menu/screenshots/
Obviously most everyone is not going to want to use a plugin that relies upon another server, but it may give you some ‘inspiration’ on how to include this type of functionality in your own themes. I know that I am personally interested in figuring out how to do this on my own.
b.t.w. –Love your themes
Have you ever considered writing some ‘how to’ type of articles? Maybe teaching us how to do things like your 3d banners and some of the other trick stuff your themes do?
5 October 2009 at 12:24 am #
I haven’t seen Pixopoint Menu before, but I have tried Navt which does the same thing. You’re correct in saying though, that we wouldn’t want our themes to rely on a 3rd party plugin… So we have been considering this functionality into our WooFramework and we hope to make this available in the near future.
8 October 2009 at 11:23 pm #
LOVE the NAVT plugin but get the feeling the developer is moving on to other projects and not updating as much…. would love to see it forked as it is a bit buggy currently…. just sent email to him to offer to pay for some debugging….
5 October 2009 at 9:56 pm #
I think that the theme thus far looks great. I initially purchased the Busy Bee theme to serve as a foundation for one of my “keystone” sites but since I saw the teaser for Headlines, I may change my mind.
I think that changing the ability to have the widgetized sidebar on the right versus the left is a great option. Every site is different, but if you’re interested in ad monetization, ads in the right sidebar (again depending on the site) can turn out to be more productive.
I would love to see an option at least for the homepage for both a 2 column and 3 column layout.
As one of the commentators mentioned previously, I would like to see the ability to better manage/place ads within the theme (whether its within the post, header, footer, etc…)… Maybe include a plug-in similar to advertising manager for more precise ad placement, rotation, support for more banner sizes, and reporting.
The featured post section looks very similar to The Station, so I’m assuming/hoping that not only will it have the same tab functionality but that it will also include an option to cue the slider functionality.
I am a huge fan of video and certainly plan to incorporate as much video into each of my posts/pages as possible. Therefore the video widget would be great and although I like the video integration previously mentioned in the Daily Edition, I would caution the team to make sure that video is allowed to shine in an individual post as much as it is in a widget or centralized part of the theme…better yet allow both. I know that I have personally had to make some changes in Busy Bee to facilitate this.
I think that the navigation looks good. Better than Busy Bee out of the box. I think that in many themes, the category navigation tends to overpower the page navigation. I think that most publishers lean towards using categories more but pages are equally, if not more important, especially if they lead my visitors to a great forum, classifieds section, ecommerce area, or legal section. I’m satisfied with the most recent page vs. category navigation but if you could include an option to highlight specific pages on the nav bar to direct/increase traffic to a particular page that would be great.
Functionality similar to that used in The Station to allow the publisher to easily change the copyright info in the footer at least in the developer’s version. This would be a big time saver for me.
That’s a quick 2 min. request. I may have more later. Thanks again for all the hard work and I look forward to the release!
6 October 2009 at 1:00 am #
Thanks for the (very thorough) feedback! I’m sure Magnus will be working through this and he may need to include some tweaks in the final release version!
6 October 2009 at 1:25 am #
Yep thanks for feedback. I’m definately going to get a tabber/slider featured option in there, as I know the tabber won’t be everyones first choice.
6 October 2009 at 8:55 am #
Still loving the look of this theme and waiting anxiously…
The banner ad in the header — will there be an option to rotate a series of banners so that a different one loads with each refresh? I’d like to add pointers to 4-6 ads using the admin page and have them pop into the ad placeholders randomly.
6 October 2009 at 8:58 am #
Hey Ed, I don’t think that will be an option, but it should easy to custom code something like that.
7 October 2009 at 8:39 pm #
Any approximate time-line for release? Obviously it sounds like you still have to complete coding and then beta…end of Oct.?
8 October 2009 at 1:49 am #
Magnus has been making good progress and Headlines should probably be available in the first week of November.
16 October 2009 at 6:54 pm #
Great beta. Will it be possible to use video on the homepage within the post excerpts and within the slider functionality for the featured posts?
18 October 2009 at 6:24 pm #
This looks very much like what I’m working on for the re-design of our theater website. Now I’m just inclined to let you guys do the work and just purchase this when released!
Can’t wait, looks like a great theme!
19 October 2009 at 4:00 am #
You can all view the demo for this theme now. It will be sent out to beta testers soon and then should be ready for release early next month.
http://woothemes.com/demo/headlines/
19 October 2009 at 3:00 pm #
Hi Magnus!
The theme looks great. Can’t wait to check out the various styles and features. By the way, is it still going to support 300×250 ads and, if so, where? Thanks!
19 October 2009 at 4:40 pm #
Yes there is a 300 ad as widget. Sidebar or footer
21 October 2009 at 11:15 pm #
Magnus do you mind me asking how someone becomes a beta tester for woo?
22 October 2009 at 12:46 am #
Contact us via mail to find if we have any vacancies
21 October 2009 at 11:15 pm #
Love it, whens it coming out, which month? I need it now LOL
22 October 2009 at 12:45 am #
Early next month
21 October 2009 at 11:20 pm #
i just saw the demo, it looks different to the original picture, i prefer the 1st draft
22 October 2009 at 12:44 am #
The first is still there, but we voted and decided to use the darker style as default, as it has a wider appeal.
http://woothemes.com/demo/headlines/?style=silver
http://woothemes.com/demo/headlines/?style=orange
I’m assuming it was the color you reacted to? Don’t think anything else is different except image size in featured, which can be set in options panel.
22 October 2009 at 2:45 am #
Looking great. The featured area looks much better with the wider photo.
Do you think you’ll implement the “Breaking News” area we talked about further up in the comments? Could have it pull from a specific cat and rotate with some jQuery goodness.
22 October 2009 at 4:41 am #
I haven’t gone any further with the braking news jquery… not sure if it fits this theme or is a much asked feature
22 October 2009 at 8:57 am #
This theme is hot. No two ways about it.
5 November 2009 at 8:08 am #
It’s out! Looks awesome, will be purchasing today…thanks Magnus!
5 November 2009 at 8:21 am #
Thanks Ed!