All the latest news and announcements, straight from the WooThemes HQ!
Your Blank Canvas
09. Feb, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes
We’re very happy to finally introduce you to our newest creation – Canvas.
In the last couple of weeks Magnus has been spearheading a project to develop a brand-new theme that would add a few touches of uniqueness to our collection. Along with the odd contribution from the rest of the WooTeam, we managed to create a new & improved starting point for your blog.
Canvas started out as a re-write of the starter theme that we were using with WooFramework2, to develop all of our existing themes on-top off. But we seemingly got carried away a little bit and Canvas truly came into its own right, serving its own purpose and satisfying some of your more specific needs.
What is Canvas?
In a nutshell, we could say that Canvas is a clean & minimalistic theme with a whole bunch of easy-to-use, backend design controls, which literally gives you click ‘n play carte blanche to tweak most of the CSS properties of the default design.
What we’ve tried to create is a theme that is perfectly suited for the “enthusiast” developers (i.e. those of us that know just enough code to be a danger to our own blogs) in that they would be able to tweak & experiment with Canvas without having to touch one line of code. So changing colours, font-styles, borders etc. really is a breeze with Canvas. Here’s a few of the design controls available to you:
- 90+ options to tweak colours, borders, font-sizes, font-families etc.;
- Upload background & header imagery via our backend;
- Easily modify the width of your site (choose between 5 presets) or pick between 6 different layout options.
Sound good? Watch this video in which Magnus brings his paint bucket to Canvas…
Painting on Canvas
It’s for *Real* Developers too…
We’re hesitant to use the word “framework” in the same sentence as Canvas, as that is not what it is and that’s not what we’re trying to sell here. BUT – Canvas is the closest that WooThemes has come to releasing a real developer-type framework theme.
At the moment, Canvas includes 25 hooks, which means that if WordPress child theming is your thing, you would now be able to use those to customize the theme without having to tweak the code of the parent theme.
To give you an idea of what is possible if you use Canvas along with a unique child theme, have a look at this Fresh News-inspired design that Magnus built on top of Canvas (as a child theme i.e. the core Canvas files stays unmodified):
Fresh Canvas child theme for Canvas
So on this front, Canvas also presents some new possibilities for newbie & advanced WordPress developers alike. If front-end tweaking is your choice, we’ve got your covered via all the design controls in the backend and if you’d rather get your hands code-dirty, we have all those hooks to sink your teeth into.
The Final Goodies
If you have a look at Canvas’ full theme features, you’ll see that it includes all of the custom Woo widgets as always and has been built on the immaculate WooFramework2. Canvas users will also be gushing about the fact that the theme already has built-in support for the recently developed WooNav; so beyond your design tweaks, you also have complete control over your navigation.
You can also consider this release to be a proper V1 release and whilst we plan to add some awesome new things to Canvas in the coming months, it’s a rock-solid release already. So if you start to get acquainted with Canvas now; your relationship will only get better in the months to come.
If you’re still not convinced, have a look at Canvas’ beautiful design on the demo and then consider purchasing Canvas for your next project.
9 February 2010 at 10:17 am #
Hello,
I’ve downloaded this theme but there is no .po or .mo in the lang directory. So, I can’t translate it in french, so bad..
9 February 2010 at 10:21 am #
Ah always forget something… will add po file now
9 February 2010 at 10:24 am #
Don’t be so rude with you. The others people do it for you
Inform me simply when the .po will be uploaded
9 February 2010 at 10:26 am #
It’s uploaded now
Thanks for spotting it!
9 February 2010 at 11:01 am #
French translation is done. I’ll send you
9 February 2010 at 10:17 am #
All I wanna say is “this is awesome!”
9 February 2010 at 11:25 am #
Looks really good guys. Will take a proper look later but I think you have just secured a new customer
9 February 2010 at 12:04 pm #
Remember to have a play over at the WooThemes Playground first.
9 February 2010 at 11:32 am #
Perfect. Hope to see more like this for us developers.
9 February 2010 at 12:03 pm #
What else would you like to see? Any suggestions?
9 February 2010 at 1:33 pm #
The options look really great for a blog theme! Can we get this same framework idea incorporated into a theme like the Station? That would change everything! For me at least… Cheers!
9 February 2010 at 2:15 pm #
Probably not, purely because design controls like these can never replace actual design & custom HTML & CSS. The Station’s design (for example) is also much more “complicated” to Canvas’ design; so there’s another reason why the design controls won’t work there.
10 February 2010 at 11:11 am #
Hi, Adii!
Magnificent new theme, downloading it now and will check it out today. Is there the ability to replace text “Read Full Story” links with graphic badges? How about a tutorial for us newbies on how to implement the child theme Fresh Canvas?
Looking forward to the implementing of the jQuery slider.
10 February 2010 at 11:24 am #
You would have to either modify the “Read Full Story” directly in the theme or create a child theme and modify it there unfortunately.
There is no hocus pocus for adding Fresh Canvas, simply add it to your themes directory, go to Appearance -> Themes and activate it
9 February 2010 at 11:57 am #
I’m impressed. You’ve done a great job building a “framework” type theme. What a pleasant surprise this morning!!
9 February 2010 at 12:02 pm #
Instead of teasing you guys and previewing our themes months in advance, we prefer to go for a little surprise every now and again. Canvas is definitely one of those surprises!
9 February 2010 at 1:38 pm #
Love it – great idea -super admin. Wow Woo!!!
Some questions:
(some may be obsolet because I haven´t been so much into it yet)
why not use jquery slider? featured option
Google maps like Postcard?
About section
how about making some parts transparent with alpha?
just ideas – you asked for…
thanks guys – this is brilliant
9 February 2010 at 2:13 pm #
jQuery slider has been reserved for the next development phase, Google Maps integration is too niche and I’m unsure about what you mean with the “about section”…
9 February 2010 at 2:36 pm #
Hi Adii
In some themes (like Therapy) there is an “about section”, where you can add some lines, pics …
It´s also nice and elegant in theme “Therapy” with those transparent layers.
If you add a grafic behind a page and if you could decide to make your page transparent, you could work very stylish.
Is it possible to center the grafic and tell margins from top?
10 February 2010 at 12:12 am #
Gotcha with regards to the about section… Whilst this isn’t supported by our default theme at the moment, this would be extremely easy to add via a child theme that simply hooks into the layout wherever you want.
9 February 2010 at 2:58 pm #
Canvas seriously rocks! I can see myself using it as my new default theme for new projects. I quite like the clean, minimalistic approach. Glad I signed up for the dev subscription, just keep them coming
10 February 2010 at 12:11 am #
Ditto. New stuff is on their way as usual.
9 February 2010 at 2:59 pm #
This is an awesome themes, perfect and very usefull for anyone who like to modify wordpress themes, thanks alot!
9 February 2010 at 5:48 pm #
1 step forward guys I love this theme
preparing the indonesian translation
9 February 2010 at 6:42 pm #
I am definitely going to do some work with Canvas this week.
Spent the weekend working with Studiopress Genesis framework on a new site and there are definitely some big pluses and minuses with that.
Will work on the same site now with Canvas to try and judge which is preferable for a ‘quasi designer / developer’ whose skill set leans far more to marketing than coding.
What nearly put me off on initial view of Canvas was that the available demos were all a bit bland and all very ‘bloggy’ as opposed to having a demo version that was more for a business client or a portfolio theme.
10 February 2010 at 12:11 am #
Would love to hear your thoughts on Genesis vs Canvas. We’ve had a little play with Genesis and it’s a great framework; so if Canvas compares well to that we’d be happy!
And we will be adding a few new things to Canvas in the coming months; with the biggest addition probably being alternative homepage templates. So it is definitely coming!
10 February 2010 at 12:28 am #
An optional slider would be an obvious addition
10 February 2010 at 12:37 am #
yep in v2 we have planned to do many page templates with sliders and such
10 February 2010 at 12:40 am #
We wanted v1 to be as vanilla as possible, and have plans for v2 to have more page templates to make it more versatile
9 February 2010 at 6:42 pm #
Looks very impressive – another big win for Woo. After the great advance of your new navigation system, and now Canvas, it’s hard to see how you can keep this run going !
As always though I have found something to niggle you about: describing this theme as “pretentious” in your blurb is probably not a good idea. Pretentious has mainly negative connotations and is commonly used as an insult meaning “trying to claim undeserved status or importance”.
10 February 2010 at 12:04 am #
We like pretentious in this regard, as it is obviously being used in a tongue-in-cheek way…
And keep checking the blog – we’ve got some amazing new stuff coming!
10 February 2010 at 12:10 am #
You like pretentious ? It’s usually teamed thusly “pretentious twat”. But you’re the boss.
10 February 2010 at 3:42 am #
pretentious in the sense that it probably has more options than it needs
ie trying to do more than a theme needs to.
9 February 2010 at 9:11 pm #
I’ve now downloaded and had a play and I’m even more impressed. This is a fanastic starter theme ! Very easy to get a basic site concept up.
Now I’m off to integrate a slider
10 February 2010 at 2:40 am #
Seems a bit of a shame that you can’t modify an existing variation.
Also, perhaps this is finally the theme where Woo might consider user variations in a type of library ? A competition along these lines with some nice first prize would probably give you dozens of excellent designs and another great selling point.
10 February 2010 at 2:48 am #
Not a bad idea about the contest. Definitely adding it to our to-do list, but will probably only put this into play once we have V2 ready, as it will be covering more features.
10 February 2010 at 4:53 am #
Very impressive, I think this is the start of something really great! I really love all the options, this must have taken ages to put together. I would love to see a business theme with these incorporated ideas. Great work.
10 February 2010 at 5:54 am #
I believe you have to modify the default view, not start with one of the other ones…
10 February 2010 at 6:46 am #
Awesome Awesome Theme.. Watched the video, I think its gonna be best selling theme due to the flexibility and customizations it can provide !!
We can change number of footer widgets eh?
10 February 2010 at 7:07 am #
Currently set to 4, but you can easily add 2 and change width by adding a line of code in custom.css
10 February 2010 at 7:24 am #
Magnus is still the king of the WooHill!
Awesome theme, been waiting for this for a while since magnus shown me a screenshot.
10 February 2010 at 8:03 am #
Tjena! Hope it lives up to your expectations
10 February 2010 at 7:40 am #
I think i’m going to take a shot with this, and convert it into a BuddyPress enabled theme as well.. That would be even more awesome!
10 February 2010 at 8:04 am #
If you do so, be sure to let us know so we can maybe incorporate it back into the theme
10 February 2010 at 10:11 am #
WoW
I think this framework will make a revolution in this Wordpress Era
10 February 2010 at 11:21 am #
Hi … Great theme … as a former THESIS user and now a solid Woo convert, I see similarites with hooks, multiple columns, and width settings, etc, but this takes it further … I love the individual post lay-out options.
Presently I use Bueno, before that Daily Edition, but am still looking for the definitive travel-blog-photo-video theme.
IMPROVEMENTS: I would love to see the widget TAB box feature categories (not comments, popular, tags, latest) or other options. Also: a photo feed to Smugmug or BETTER still Zenfolio – a fantastic photo hosting site that leaves all others behind. I would suggest to improve on the sitemap options displayed (I use a plug-in cos I don´t like the limited number of posts listed under a category – as opposed to all posts as a sitemap/index should offer).
I love the individual post lay-out options and the image gallery page – essential for all similar themes – and the contact form gets rid of another plug-in. I suppose I could list my exact requirements but here´s not the place.
BOTTOM LINE: WOO themes are really pushing the WP boundaries to great new heights, once again. Gorgeous themes, flexible frameworks, now child theme possibilities, and all without the coding hassles. Love it !!!
Regards – MRP AKA the candy trail …
10 February 2010 at 12:22 pm #
Fun theme, I am playing with it now behind a theme tester plug-in. One correction: “subscribe” is misspelled in the email/rss feed section in the header. I can fix it on my end, but other users may not catch it after upload.
10 February 2010 at 12:30 pm #
Thanks! Fixed it and deployed new version
10 February 2010 at 3:08 pm #
Wish this was free
, about that when are you going to release a free theme?
10 February 2010 at 3:53 pm #
Dunno… Maybe soon, maybe not…
10 February 2010 at 4:50 pm #
This is an awesome theme…actually it’s more than a theme! The ability to click and “design” makes this a fabulous design package.
You guys rock and have the best themes and support around!
11 February 2010 at 12:13 am #
Thanks for the kind words Debbie; it’s always great to interact with happy customers on the blog!
10 February 2010 at 6:55 pm #
I’ve been using the epanel from elegantthemes for some time now, and I have to say the new canvas system looks much more powerful!
There are a few features that epanel has that I rely upon very heavily within my themes and I would like to request a few additions to canvas so that I can switch over.
1. ability to choose which categories to exclude from the homepage loop (great for themes with featured article slider, so that content is not duplicated on homepage)
2. number of posts displayed on homepage (they extend this to also include #posts to display on category,archives,search,tag pages)
3. set height/width of thumbnail images for the excerpts
4. Add code to the of your blog, same for , before/after posts (makes it easy to add js,stylesheets, adds, etc
5. stylesheet selector — example choose blue/red/yellow/etc allows me to create custom colored stylesheets that the user can select via dropdown.
a final thing that I find nice about epanel is it has a built in slider, where I can select the category to use, set animation, and animation speed. Of course there is also an option to turn off the slider.
I hope these ideas give some extra inspiration for canvas in the future. And I am REALLY happy to see that you have already included image upload abilities for the different areas of the site.
11 February 2010 at 12:13 am #
1) We’ll consider including this in V2.
2 & 3) This is already included.
4) Why not use one of the 25+ hooks that are available to you?
5) This is also something we are considering for V2.
11 February 2010 at 2:05 am #
Thanks for the input. I’ll make sure to take those into account when I work on v2
10 February 2010 at 7:59 pm #
2 quick questions.
1. If I just purchase the theme itself do I gain access to the support forum? (I really only want canvas as I like to build my own, so I did not see a reason to purchase an actual subscription otherwise)
2. playing on the test woothemes site, I noticed that there was no option of setting the background as fixed.. is that an option I am missing somewhere?
on my current theme I use background = #000000 url(images/blue/bg.jpg) no-repeat fixed center 0
but I could not replicate this in the builder admin, so it was making my background not quite right. either it did not repeat and left the bottom of the page background blank, or it repeated, which is not what i was after.
I would purchase this today if tumblr was out, as I did not see 3 other themes that I would use. (I’m more after functionality than theme’s per say which is why canvas is perfect for me)
I have purchased just about every framework out there, and I have to say canvas is right up there with the best of them. GREAT JOB!
11 February 2010 at 12:08 am #
1) Yep, you get immediate access to the support forum and all of our other support resources.
2) The option should be there; if it’s not it is something that we have missed. Once you have purchased the theme, please just make a note of this on the forum and we can help you out from there.
11 February 2010 at 2:11 am #
It’s best if you contact us directly at info@woothemes.com for purchase questions.
1. Yes you do get support, as you can see in our pricing page
2. The BG is top center, so if you want to fix it you will need to add a few lines of CSS. Will try to add this to the next version.
you’d add something like this to custom.css or the custom css field in general options
body { background-attachment:fixed; }
Thanks!
10 February 2010 at 8:02 pm #
Also, Adii were you at Wordcamp NYC in November talking about this?
11 February 2010 at 12:07 am #
Nope – never been in NYC.
10 February 2010 at 8:13 pm #
good theme with clean and minimalist concept but have a lot feature that awesome. Must be try and have it by anyone who work in blogging and web.
10 February 2010 at 8:22 pm #
Does it have a slider or carousel in panel options. When is version 2 coming out?
10 February 2010 at 8:27 pm #
Above in one of the other comments som
eone spoke of test driving the themes options panel please provide url to do that? Is the dynamic Images part of the options panel the carousel or slider.
11 February 2010 at 12:06 am #
You can test-drive any themes on our Playground.
And no – the theme options doesn’t include a carousel or slider for now (it’ll be available in V2).
11 February 2010 at 2:14 am #
http://woothemes.com/playground/
11 February 2010 at 12:06 am #
There is no ETA for V2 at the moment, but it’ll probably be in March some time.
10 February 2010 at 10:56 pm #
Can someone please explain to me why I would want to put a child theme of fresh news on top of another theme (canvas) instead of just using freshnews? I’m just wondering what the benefits are… Thanks
11 February 2010 at 12:05 am #
Just for clarity sakes: we only demo’ed Fresh News as a Canvas child theme, to give you an idea of what is possible with Canvas; the child theme itself is not necessarily a value-add.
In terms of child theming; that is how many WP developers are preferring to develop WP-powered websites these days (if you’re using a starter theme like Canvas). Child theming allows you to create your unique theme without having to modify the parent theme (in this case it’d be Canvas). So if we release an updated version of Canvas, you can upgrade without it affecting your child theme.
11 February 2010 at 2:12 am #
Hey,
There is no slider now, but in v2 we’ll add custom page templates which will use a slider. Hope to have something end of Feb or beginning of March
Stay tuned!
11 February 2010 at 3:24 am #
Everyone wants a slider. Don’t keep your fans waiting. You must have three or four available…
11 February 2010 at 3:38 am #
All in due time
It’s more important to get things right and the slider to be flexible with the rest of the theme, than to just put one in there.
11 February 2010 at 10:14 am #
Yeah, yeah, you’re right of course
But I’ll +1 for the option to exlude categories from the homepage.
11 February 2010 at 11:38 pm #
Hi, if i buy canvas today, will i be able to get the V2 when released?
Thanks
11 February 2010 at 11:40 pm #
Yes definitely; V2 won’t be a separate theme, but would instead just replace the current version.
12 February 2010 at 9:13 am #
This looks great and I look forward to working with it.
One tiny suggestion: “Ambitious” may be the word you’re looking for, not “pretentious”. It is an ambitious theme (framework) for sure!
13 February 2010 at 1:10 pm #
Wow, you guys are making it hard for other wp theme makers
You’re realy good!
19 February 2010 at 8:21 pm #
Impressive! Fills a niche in the themes market between a single theme and a framework/child theme setup for devs. Seriously digging it.
Y’all earned a customer on this one… I’m just deciding which membership to choose.
Playground is a selling tool…. Y’all need to promote it more/more prominently from the main website…. Had I not tripped over this Post and decided to read deep into the comments, I would NOT have decided to buy today… maybe not at all.
WooThemes…. Cool!
24 February 2010 at 10:27 pm #
remind me of thesis. this one is awesome. thesis is also great but the setting interface is unfriendly.
2 March 2010 at 2:47 pm #
Are there any updates on the status of 2.0 with some of the new features referenced in this thread?
Specifically I am waiting until we can exclude categories from the homepage loop, and stylesheet selectors.
thanks
2 March 2010 at 4:53 pm #
Working on new features and hope to have something later this month. Added a Author Blog Widget today in version 1.1
3 March 2010 at 4:28 am #
This theme has sooooo much potential…
I really hope you plan to keep on developing and adding the latest tricks and cool features as time goes on….
I’d even go a far as to say this could well be your most popular theme in the future if you keep on adding things to it every month or so..
I’ll certainly be along for the ride with this one!
excellent work
6 March 2010 at 4:55 am #
I am using Canavas (Mangus), If someone can help me insert the fallowing pluging “properly” I will pay them $40.00 after compelition.
http://www.w3cgallery.com/w3c-css/wordpress-featured-post-list2-with-image-plugins
6 March 2010 at 6:36 am #
please contact a Woo Worker for that.
11 March 2010 at 8:58 pm #
it is great classic theme