So you are about to head off on an adventure around the world, or perhaps just an extended road trip up the east coast? You’ve promised postcards to friends and families, but what a mission, post offices are so last century!

See you’ve decided to buy a domain, install WordPress and this really cool theme from WooThemes instead. Friends all around the world can track your progress, see exactly where you’ve been and the photos you’ve taken. They’ll share the experience with you, leaving you comments and advice of where and what you should be doing.

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One of the most commonly asked questions by Woo users is how to modify the navigation in the theme, by excluding items, adding external links etc. We recently added Jeff to our team, and started him off with a project we had been planning for a while; A new custom navigation admin page, where you would be able to really build your own navigation without touching any code.

It didn’t take long for him to come up with the wireframe, and then Cobus added some nice styling to the UI, and we can now proudly present it to you! We’ll start off slow by adding it to our newest themes first, and we hope to get feedback and squish any possible bugs that should appear before rolling it out to all our themes.

Woo Custom Navigation admin panel

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We really love and nurture our WooThemes brand.  It would be ignorant for us to ignore how proper branding & marketing have helped us to create the WooThemes that we are today. Maybe it’s because we’re a creatively-focused bunch, which when mixed with some (hopefully) shrewd business decision-making, you get a proper, longer term strategy that can prove to be sustainable for the brand.

So it’s great when we get to see, that we’ve influenced people’s perception of “Woo”; but not just the way we use it – but the word as a whole. Last night on TechCrunch, they covered a new startup called WooRank, in the comments on that post some people believed that we were behind this new startup. Pretty neat, hey?

Now this post isn’t intended to gloat, but I’d like to point out two reasons why I think we’ve had this success in “owning” the “Woo” enterprise online (if not completely, we have a massive share of the “woo” market…).

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Delegate

A quick glance of our Theme Leaderboard shows that our business themes are extremely popular with the WooCrowd. With today’s release of Delegate, we’re pretty certain you’ll appreciate this theme.

So as we described Delegate when we first previewed it last year, we wanted a simple, but shiny, new design that could compliment VibrantCMS. We believe that Cobus has done a bang-up job of really building on VibrantCMS’ success, but more importantly modernizing & improving it.

Built on the new WooFramework Version 2, Delegate includes a handful of different page templates and Delegate-specific widgets to create a true business canvas, where you can truly create something that is representative of your business. We’ve tried to include a lot of functionality, without bloating the code, to make Delegate a truly customizable theme. So it’s definitely worth your time to check out this beauty…

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We’re glad to announce that all of our themes (yep, every single one of them) have now been updated to the latest version of our WooFramework. Version 2 of the WooFramework (which we first previewed last month), includes a complete re-design of the theme option’s panel, as well as the inclusion of a new basis for us to deploy more features in the next couple of weeks.

In the last couple of weeks, WF2 had been available in a handful of our themes and we are extremely happy about the feedback that we had gotten from both our beta testers and the users of those themes. All of the major bugs have been squashed properly and at the time of writing this post, we aren’t aware of any other bugs that have not been treated. So you can upgrade with some peace of mind!

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This definitely took us a while longer than we expected, but one of the biggest and most ambitious days in our history is finally here – we’re proud to announce the addition of ExpressionEngine themes to our collection. With that we hopefully welcome a whole lot of first time visitors to our site, and ExpressionEngine evangelists.

If you have been following us, you’d see that this is the first of the “bigger” things that we’re announcing this year and hence why we’re so excited & slightly nervous at the same time. ExpressionEngine is obviously a relative unknown to us, but for months now we’ve earmarked our expansion to this platform as a top priority. Today, months of hard work and extreme patience (whilst we waited for EE to roll out version 2.0) comes to fruition at last.

So to kickstart things, we’re releasing two paid EE themes – Coffee Break (our fastest selling theme in 2009) & Fresh News (our best-selling theme ever) – and one free theme in Bueno, which is fast becoming one of our most popular free releases.

To produce these themes, we teamed up with one of our friends & EE developer extraordinaire – Bjørn Børresen – who will be responsible for all the development & technical support work associated with our EE themes. And for those concerned: this means that our WordPress work and the capacity to release themes & new stuff for WP, won’t diminish, as we have added Bjørn to the WooTeam for added capacity.

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Streamin'

Our new year is now well and truly under way with the release of our first theme for 2010 – MyStream.

This theme spent quite a bit of time in development (we first previewed it in September last year), but not because it was difficult to develop; instead we decided to hold it back a little due to it’s similarities with Therapy (which was also designed by Izuddin Helmi).

So as with both Therapy & Antisocial, we’ve focused our intentions on social media & lifestreaming in MyStream, as that is what you guys & girls seem to be wanting from us these days! We’ve also included the new WooFramework with MyStream and regard this as another step closer to actually integrating it with all of our older themes.

MyStream may not be our most unique release this year (we’ve got some smashing plans for the next couple of months), but judging by the many requests & enquiries about its release, we’re sure you’re gonna have a ball playing with it!

View the demo now and check out all of the theme’s features here.

As we start finding our feet in the new year, we – as a company – are making plans not only about growing the business, but also about improving what we have and adding further value (as we have already demonstrated with the increase in our permanent X-for-1 offer). So whilst this may seem like a pretty standard exercise for most companies, we’ve tried to really delve deep into our ethos and ambitions in formulating our strategies for the year ahead (with a sneak peek of what’s to come in early 2010 here).

The “Small” Stuff

One of the things that has become more & more evident as we’ve grown & learned more about our customers (and how they use our products), is the fact that the seemingly minor improvements are generally those most appreciated. We’ve found that you don’t necessarily want us to release 10 new themes a month, but that you’d be happy for us to balance new releases with fixes & improvements to older versions too.

To put that into a little context for you… We will continue to develop, evolve and add new functionality to our WooFramework. Having announced a new version of the WooFramework in mid-December, one of our biggest priorities in January is to deploy this to all of our themes. We’ve also already started working on some pretty extensive & unique new functionality so watch this space.

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We’d like to start this year off with a bang, and a quite a loud one at that.

Since… forever, we’ve been known for our Permanent 2-for-1 special (which evolved to 3-for-1 on our developer theme packages) and we’ve seen many others emulating our offer to some extent. We’ve always felt that this offer, along with our huge range of themes, made WooThemes rather unique, and it is indicative of our wish to add as much value to your purchase as possible.

So as of today, we will be increasing our Permanent 2-for-1 to a Permanent 3-for-1 (on Standard Packages) and 4-for-1 (on Developer Packages). That means you can now grab 3 Standard Package themes for only $70 and a whopping 4 Developer Package themes for $150. We think this is a nice way to combat the supposed inflation that economists always tell us about…

Go on then: no excuse not to indulge right now.

After being a rip-roaring success in 2009, we’re bringing back the 2nd Season of our Showdown later this month.

The Showdown aims to feature the best modifications submitted to The WooThemes Showcase and put them in the ring against other “competitors” in a fun, interactive competition to be crowned the best WooThemes modification. Our Showcase already features some amazing modifications and the Showdown is further aimed at increasing the visibility & usability of the Showcase (more great modifications, means more inspiration for existing WooThemes users looking to customize one of our themes).

We’ll be presenting some awesome prizes this time around (we’ll even try to get some prizes sponsored outside of WooThemes stuff), so make sure to submit all of your WooThemes modifications to the Showcase ASAP, so that you can be considered for the new season.

Welcome to the first day of 2010!**

After an amazing 2009, we’re extremely excited about the journey that lies ahead this year. We’ve been working behind the scenes, to get our ducks in a row and figure out what our goals & dreams are for 2010. So whilst all of these will be made public in the next couple of months, you can rest assured that we’ll be cooking up some ambitious ideas this year.

We’d also like to pass on our best wishes to every single customer & fan of WooThemes: may you too achieve all of your goals this year and have a great time whilst doing so! We hope – as always – that you’ll join us for the ride, as without you guys & girls, that road just isn’t as awesome.

May this year be even better than the last…

** For those a little bit tired after your celebrations until the early hours of the morning, we’ll extend the welcome to the second day of 2010 as well!