It’s been a month since our company retreat to the Austrian Alps where we enjoyed a week of snow, ski, jagermeister and a little bit of work – how we all wish we could be tele-ported back there right now.

We’ve been absolutely astonished by the amount of media attention our company retreat attracted. It even featured on Mashable yesterday with Josh Catone, the features editor, writing an excellent case study on our social media success surrounding the trip.

Not only did the trip itself attract a lot of attention, but we got a lot of people admiring the WordPress tumblog theme we built to efficiently, and very easily, live blog the activities in the Alps. We therefore decided it was appropriate to add some polish to the theme, and add some more functionality, then release it for general purchase.

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We realize that we’ve been “tinkering” with our theme releases as of late, and as a result it may have seemed like we have been in an overly experimental mood. Whilst that holds some truth (we are definitely exploring new niches), we can assure you all that our next few releases will be much closer to our tried & tested methods which have resulted in all your favourite themes being best-sellers.

This means that you can soon expect some more business, portfolio, blog etc. themes from us again. In fact, we have these two beauties; both going out to beta in the next day or two. Boast (the first teaser below) is a business + portfolio type design, whilst Diarise (more of a niche release) will surprise many of you with it’s amazingly, unique functionality… Check out the teasers…

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We’ve been talking about tumblog themes for a while now and you all know that our messages in this regard have been rather vague. Today we actually have something new & significant to add to the previous conversation…

Within the WooHQ, we’ve been discussing tumblogs extensively, and the conversation that we have had with you guys & girls here on the blog is minimal compared to the extended internal discussions on the matter. The only evidence that these discussions have resulted in anything more than talk is the release of Cinch & Slanted (both powered by WordPress) and teasers about an upcoming iPhone app to work with those tumblogs running on WordPress.

Nothing new there just yet… But we finally have an answer to the question so many of you have asked us in recent weeks: Are you making themes for Tumblr?

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In April, I will be presenting at the DIBI Web Conference (my topic: “The Designer Startup”) in Newcastle, UK where I will be joined by Magnus, Mark and our two amazing support ninja’s – Tiago & Kirstin. On top of this, the conference also features other well-known web professionals such as Tim van Damme, Sarah Parmenter, Simon Collisson, Elliot Kember and a few more.

The organizers have been so kind to give us two tickets to the conference, which we’re allowed to give away. If you purchase any themes or subscriptions from us this week (until midnight, 26 March), you’ll be entered into a random draw for these two tickets (so you’d win both tickets and be able to take a friend).**

DIBI is gonna be amazing for sure and beyond the value of the material presented, you’ll be able to hang out with the WooTeam as well as all those other cool people. So get into some purchasing and give yourself a chance of winning those two DIBI tickets.

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We’re once again expanding our operations and our themes collection will soon be sporting some awesome new themes built for Drupal & TextPattern.

So before we’re ready to unleash these new goodies, we need to make sure that we have covered all of our bases, and that they are indeed as top-notch as we think they are! We therefore need two new beta testing groups that could help us out and give us some valuable feedback before the launch.

If you have experience with either Drupal or TextPattern, please drop us an e-mail and tell us which CMS you are interested in, and perhaps link to some projects you’ve worked on (also include a little bit of info on yourself). Once we’ve received your mail, we’ll review your credentials and add you to the appropriate beta testing group.

City Guide - a directory based WordPress theme

In recent theme releases, we’ve been exploring a few niche environments, instead of the standard business or magazine theme possibilities, in the hope that we can grow the long tail of our themes collection. Based on the success of Postcard, we’ve thus decided to give the geo-location arena another go, with the release of the smashing City Guide theme.

City Guide’s design was masterfully crafted by popular web designer, Sam Brown, who we worked with towards the end of last year (yes: quality takes time). The design itself is shiny in all the right places and Sam did a great job of delivering the Apple influences that we requested, without limiting this theme as an open canvas to morph to your own needs.

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So we’re finally back at the office after our week-long “mobile officing extreme” trip to the slopes, which was indeed an amazing time for the WooTeam. If you had been following us, you’d know that there was much fun & good times to be had…

This means that we’re all refreshed and ready to rock again. We gathered some amazing ideas via all of the discussions on the trip, fueled by much Jagermeister, and we’re looking forward to roll those out in the coming months.

But first up, you can expect the release of CityGuide, which should be going out later this week. The theme is basically ready to go, and has been thoroughly beta-tested, so it’s just a matter of wrapping up the little bits & pieces and then releasing what we expect to be another hit. Thereafter we have a few more surprises (these will definitely include these two designs which we teased last week), but I’ll leave it at that…

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Ever since we started WooThemes, we’ve been absolutely fascinated with top notch design and we’d like to believe that this focus has been evident throughout all of our activities (from our themes, to the user experience on our site, our content and also our marketing campaigns). This should also be fairly obvious when you consider the amount of amazing web designers we’ve collaborated with, plus we’re always harping on about how awesome our designs are anyway…

Whilst design is ultimately subjective, one thing that can’t be disputed is the fact that our designer focus has probably contributed significantly to our success. This seems to be confirmed by startup guru, Dave McClure, in a recent BusinessWeek article about the value of design to startups:

“Design and marketing aren’t just as important as engineering: They are way more important.”

So in a very techy industry (the interwebs), there seems to be a lot of room for the more design-orientated folk among us. In the past, you could probably get by if you had a superior & groundbreaking product, but these days your competition is much tougher and you need to fight for every person that gives you their attention (superb design tends to be successful in this regard).

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After the success of Postcard (most notably for it’s niche use and integration of Google Maps), we decided to team up with Sam Brown (another top designer joining our collaborative design team) to produce another epic, niche theme that uses Google Maps.

So below is a preview of our upcoming theme, CityGuide, which went out to beta recently. If all goes well, CityGuide should be released next week, so keep watching this space!

We have just completed the roll-out of a nifty, new feature to the WooFramework, which now includes support for URL Shortening. The basic idea is to offer you a template tag which would output a shorter URL – currently only supports TinyURL (default) and bit.ly (with your API key) – which you can then publish as added meta on your posts.

This functionality was inspired by the implementation thereof on various Tumblr-powered sites (for example: Matthew Buchanan). The benefit of publishing a shortened URL is in minimizing the amount of time that your readers will need to link to your content (i.e. increasing their convenience). So it’s a pretty nifty feature to have we believe!

As mentioned, this functionality is available in the WooFramework now and we’ll soon be publishing a little tutorial with regards to the backwards integration thereof. Both Cinch & Slanted have been updated to include the backend functionality, as well as the publishing of “Short URL” links in the front-end.

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Late last year I was sitting at the barber shop, getting a haircut. The barber felt obliged to ask me what I do for a living. I tried to explain to him, in a non-technical way, how I “designed websites”, and managed the business with my 2 business partners in Norway and Cape Town… who I’d only met face-to-face a handful of times.

Of course the conversation went dead then as he was obviously a little confused by this internet thing I did. I quietly kept thinking about our rather unique business, and how completely mobile we actually are. Why don’t we really take advantage of the perks of mobile officing?

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It’s been a couple of (very busy & hard-working) weeks since we first launched our ExpressionEngine themes and we’re now glad to finally shift WeeThemes into it’s next gear. Considering that we are vastly experienced with WordPress, we’re taking a little bit longer to get accustomed to ExpressionEngine, but both our marketing & education is growing fast.

First change we’ve made is giving ExpressionEngine it’s own home here on WooThemes. You can now get your EE fix there – we hope it now becomes clear why you can (in future) consider EE as an alternative for personal & client projects.

Then more great news is that two of our best-selling business themes – Delegate & The Station – are both now available for ExpressionEngine. This takes our total amount of ExpressionEngine themes to 5, with more coming soon.

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The WPML plugin allows running multilingual WordPress sites and is fully compatible with all of our themes. In this tutorial, we’ll talk about how to offer multilingual support on your website, how to enter translations and how to create multilingual-ready theme modifications.

Setup

Get the plugin and install it. The setup wizard will guide you through adding languages. You can add or remove languages later as well.

The Languages Wizard

Next step is to add a language switcher, which allows your visitors to toggle between different languages. WPML provides two built-in options for language switcher and also makes it possible for web developers to create their own custom language switchers.

The built in language switchers are:

• Language switcher widget (either a drop-down or open list of languages).
• A footer language switcher, as a horizontal list of languages.

Lastly, go to WPML->Languages to choose which language selectors to enable and style them.

Translating

To translate contents, go to either the list of posts/pages or edit individual posts and pages. In the list, you’ll see ‘+’ and ‘edit’ icons below each language. Click on the ‘+’ icon to add new translation or on the ‘edit’ icon to edit existing translations.

The Pages List

In the edit screens you’ll see similar translation controls, which allows you to add or edit translations while editing contents.

Editing a single post

Here are some good practices for creating solid multilingual sites:

1. Make sure that texts and links are translatable.

The following code snippet won’t be translated automatically:

<a href="#">Support>/a>

Instead, you need to modify that snippet to use gettext (more info here) and look like this:

<a href="#"><?php _( 'Support', 'woothemes' ); ?></a>

We’re getting the actual permalink for the support page from WordPress and getting localizable anchor text. WPML will return the correct permalink of the support page for the display language, so the support link will display and link correctly.

2. Avoid using images as text

Some times, folks use images that have texts. These will make maintaining multilingual sites much harder as the translated images will have to be generated manually for each language. Whenever possible, you should use images as background and place text, as normal text, on top of them.

3. Assume texts can be larger or shorter

When you’re designing the site layout, take into account that texts in different languages has different length. For instance, compared to English, German can be 150% larger and Chinese 50% shorter. Make sure that page layout adjusts well. Elements such as graphics buttons, headings and sidebar should display correctly regardless of the length of the text.

We’ve been speaking about tumblogs for quite a while now, so it’s exciting to finally be able to release the two beautiful tumblog themes that are the fruits of our labour. Without keeping you waiting any longer, we’d like to introduce you to the awesomeness of Cinch & Slanted.

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