As we prepare to bombard you with some absolutely amazing new themes in 2010, we wanted to give you at least a little bit of a sneak preview of the new stuff before we close out the year.

Our new batch of themes (i.e. these are designs that have been completed and are ready for development) includes collaborations with the likes of Sam Brown, Liam McKay, Ryan Downie, Mads Esjing, Kirstin Pauk & Chris Rowe; so there’s bound to be something you like in the new year.** The batch also includes themes across all of our ranges i.e. magazine, portfolio, business & personal blogs.

Here’s a very sneaky preview (we’ll follow up with more detailed previews closer to the respective theme’s release dates)…

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When we – as a company, young(ish) startup & team – reflect on the past year, I’m sure we’d all agree that 2009 has been extremely hard work, but that we’ve been greatly blessed at the same time (which means all those late nights answering support queries has paid off). So as we close out the year now, we thought that it would be great to actually reflect on the past year via the blog, as then we could recap on all of the highlights with those that matter most: all of you guys & girls!

But where to start? Since we pride ourselves on being a close-knit team (and have as a result developed real friendships, which result in late night discussions and sharing a few beers), I think we’ll start by looking at the things that influenced our team the most…

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Merry Christmas everyone! We hope that you have an extremely blessed day that you spend with family & friends. Hopefully none of you are working today or trolling our support forum (as we’re definitely not there).

And then as a little “gift” from us on Christmas Day, we’re extending our WooFestive Season 5-for-1 & 20% off Promotion until the end of the year (i.e. 31 December 2009). So get in on that action now.

Our Active Projects

As you know, the WooTeam is located all across the world; so managing all of our activities effectively, and making sure that we’re all on (approximately) the same page at all times, is quite a challenge. To help us lighten the management-load a bit, we – just like most other web-savvy geeks – use Basecamp to track our daily activities & tasks on one, easy-to-access platform.

So we wanted to give you a bit of an overview of how we use Basecamp for internal management, as well as interacting with all of our outside collaborators. At any given time, we’re interacting with 10 – 20 different people, on different areas of our business, with different WooTeam members in charge of managing the respective processes. It is thus quite challenging at times, but I’d like to think that we have a solid system in place, which has allowed us to keep most of the important things on the radar.

Here’s how we do it…

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As most of you probably already know, WordPress released version 2.9 last night, with some nice new features added. None of the new features affect any of our themes, and we have updated all our demos to 2.9 and they are working without any problems.

We recommend everybody to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. If you believe that you have found a bug or compatibility issue with 2.9, then please make a post in our forum, so we can quickly determine if it is caused by the new version.

2009 just wouldn’t be complete without another crazy promotion from the WooTeam, would it? And this time around, we’re truly getting into the festive season mood with (arguably) our best special of the year… So no excuses for not cashing in on some WooLove for the last time this year!

Running from today until the 24th of December, you can get 5 themes (on both Developer or Standard packages) for the price of one. That really is 5 themes, whilst only paying for one.** So if you’re the indecisive kind, you can now pick 5 themes all at once, without having to make up your mind on which 2 / 3 would suit your projects / needs best.

In addition to this, we’re also offering 20% off our subscriptions. This means you can pick up our Standard Subscription for only $100 USD and our Developer Subscription for $160 USD. Check out the pricing here.

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Today is a pretty big day for us at WooThemes. Firstly, because we can finally launch this theme that has been so hyped and received such glowing feedback from our beta testers, and secondly because it is our first theme sporting our brand spanking new theme option’s panel.

Optimize is another pixel perfect business theme conceptualized and coded by the Magatron. Living up to it’s name Optimize has been lurking around, behind the scenes, being tested by our wonderful beta testers for a couple weeks now, with lots of new features being added and optimized according to the feedback we have been given.

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As we have mentioned in the last week, we’ve been working on a new version (2.0) of the WooFramework, which we’ll be releasing with Optimize tomorrow. The integration of WooFramework 2.0 with Optimize, serves as the public beta of the new framework and we’d like to fix all of the possible bugs first, before we integrate it into all our older themes (all 54 of them).

So all of our subscribers who will get access to Optimize tomorrow, will have the opportunity to play with the new options panel & framework. For the rest, the following preview video will have to do the trick…

It is with great pleasure that we can FINALLY announce the launch of our awesomely unique niche blog design for bands and musicians, entitled Backstage.

Backstage was first conceptualized by the talented British web designer extraordinaire – Elliot Jay Stocks way back in June. We thought Elliot was well suited for this kind of design as he himself is quite a musical genius.

Fox has spent the past few months, off and on, hard at work creating powerful widget goodness and theme options for Backstage. With custom category templates for the discography, latest news, video and image archives this theme really helps empower artists and bands with the tools they need to promote themselves. An upcoming shows widget helps manage your events, whilst a home page featured slider can easily be enabled/disabled via the theme options panel.

It’s probably best letting the images below, and the demo, do the talking don’t you think?

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Unique Features

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

• A home page slider showcasing band/musician photography.
• A home page dedicated module to the band/musician biography.
• Unique page templates for your discography/music archive, and image & video galleries.
• Neat theme integration with media attachments.
• Custom Woo Widgets for use in the sidebar and in the home page widgetized zones: A media widget showcasing images, videos or music, a recent news widget, an upcoming shows widget, Flickr and advertising widgets amongst others.
• 7 stylish alternate colour schemes to choose from.

A few months ago, Adii started talking about a new charitable organization that he wanted to create that would benefit amazingly talented, yet underprivileged young girls (through educational opportunities, love & great support structures) in South Africa. Last week, the dream took another step closer to formalizing when Adii & his team launched The Rockstar Foundation.

In October, we managed to raise more than $5k for breast cancer awareness. But going forward, we’ve decided we’d like to be more involved in helping worthy causes. So we’re teaming up with The Rockstar Foundation, where we will be sponsoring all of their general overheads & day-to-day expenditure on a monthly basis.

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Some of you might have already seen this, but for those of you that don’t follow us on Twitter (or in fact- the whole WooTeam), we’ve decided to make it a little easier to get in on some optimized action…

After the rip-roaring success of Magnus’ Coffee Break design (which is probably our fastest selling theme of 2009), he opened up his Photoshop for one last hurrah (for this year anyway) and got designing on another cracker of a business theme. Since we launched WOO2 back in June of this year, we’ve been getting so many requests for us to release our (custom btw) design as a theme, so with Magnus’ new design, we needed to take that into account as well (since we love giving you exactly what you want).

The result is a slick new design entitled Optimize, which builds on Coffee Break’s success, as well as the popularity of our own design. Take a look…

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We love being first at introducing new things to our users.

Way back in the days of Premium News, we were the first guys to release WP themes with theme options (and we’ve continued to build on this success). We were also the first company to introduce proper club subscriptions (ala “Software as a Service”) & an amazing themes club. And at this stage, I’d bet that if all goes well, we’ll be the first to a few more things moving forward.

Today however, we have something new to introduce and if we had asked anyone to guess beforehand, I’m sure no one would’ve gotten it right. In conjunction with the guys over at Payoneer, we’re releasing a brand-new WooThemes Mastercard for our affiliates & members.

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Sometimes it happens that we tend to drag our feet a little with a theme once we have previewed it; and that is exactly what happened with SophisticatedFolio (unfortunately, because it is a great theme!).

SophisticatedFolio was designed by Tony Geer and when we approached him about a collaboration, we wanted him to create something that was similar in style & function to his own, awesome portfolio. The result is a – erm – sophisticated-looking portfolio design, which includes more than enough “space” for your blog posts & information pages.

We think SophisticatedFolio makes another great addition to our range of portfolio themes and hope that you’ll enjoy the 3rd last release of 2009 (yep – there’s only two more themes coming after this one). Read up on the theme’s features or check out the demo right away.

Unique Features

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

• Tell the world about yourself or company in the intro text and upload an image to show off your work in a stylish fashion on the home page
• A seperate custom category for showing off your portfolio
• Custom Woo Widgets for use in sidebar and footer: Work With Me, Testimonial, Twitter, Subscribe, Contact, Flickr, Twitter, Search, 300×250 ad, 125×125 ad
• 10 stylish alternate colour schemes to choose from