One of the ideas that has been getting a lot attention of late (after our Open Forum two weeks ago), is turning Canvas into more of a theme development framework, which would empower our developers even further in terms of building 99% of their WordPress-powered websites with Canvas.

Our opinion is that Canvas is a semi-framework (for lack of a better description) already and it should thus not be that hard to include a few additional features & functions according to your needs. Judging by the amazing Canvas modifications you are putting out there, we also don’t believe that it’ll take a lot of work to turn Canvas into a truly amazing, fully-fledged framework.

Continue Reading »

I was tempted to use “Beauty & The Beast” in the title to announce our two new Drupal themes, but whilst (for a moment anyway) it sounded like fun, I decided against it…

For this month’s Drupal releases, we’ve chosen a timeless classic, along with a more modern, trendier companion. Considering that we only started doing Drupal themes when we already had 50+ WordPress themes available, it’s quite a challenge every month to pick the cream of the crop from that collection to be ported to Drupal. But we believe that regardless of that challenge, we’ve chosen a pretty cool mix for you this month…

Continue Reading »

We received a rather sad, but inspirational testimonial from Robert Craig about 2 weeks ago that we were in two minds about posting on our blog – given it’s sensitive nature. After speaking to Robert though he wanted us to publish Bob’s story…

Continue Reading »

Perfect for lazy bloggers

It sounds like Europe and North America are coming to terms with the fact that the days are becoming shorter and the air crisper, whilst us fortunate ones down south are enjoying quite the opposite – sun and blue sky….

Where was I going with that. Agh yes. Crispy. This one is dedicated to our northern hemisphere friends.

Crisp is the latest theme to join our growing portfolio of popular tumblog themes that we teased a few weeks back. Ideal for bloggers who love the ease of use of Tumblr, but want the flexibility and ownership of their content on their own WordPress website.

Jeff has been providing continual tweaks to the underlying code of our Tumblog themes after recent feedback from Mr. WordPress himself – Mr Matt Mullenweg. With a new tumblog section added to your WordPress backend once the theme is installed powered by it’s own custom taxonomy, we’ve brought a simple and fast publishing form to your dashboard.

Continue Reading »

We’ve always believed that it is important for WooThemes – as a brand, company & community – to have a prominent, united & unified voice in terms of all of our external & internal communications. In this regard, we’ve thus been building & refining this voice since the very first day that WooThemes launched and we believe that after 2-odd years of this, we’ve become very good at this.

Having a brand or company voice means (this is our interpretation) that we are consistent in what we say, what we promote and the value we add across the board. I think it’s amazing that we are able to interact with existing & prospective users in such a way that has almost become expected from us, because we have associated great core values such as reliability, efficiency & uniqueness with the way we conduct our business. So when we release a new theme, you know that you can trust the quality & awesomeness thereof.

Continue Reading »

Canvas is currently our most popular theme (by far too) and we believe there’s one reason for that: it’s flexibility & customizability.

Serving as a semi-framework, Canvas can be modified & adapted in any way imaginable by seasoned WP developers. But the beauty of Canvas is the fact that you don’t even have to touch the code to modify it; you can just use the extensive list of design controls available to you.

We thought that it’d be a fun exercise to compile some of the best Canvas modifications that we’ve seen lately just to show how flexible the theme is. So below there’s a list of 11 superb modifications which clearly shows how diverse the different implementations of the theme are…

Continue Reading »

After careful and continued research we’ve realized our users love a WooThemes promotion every now and again… In fact, we’re pretty sure that you’d love a WooThemes promo every single day, right?

Unfortunately that’s not the case, BUT…

In the last year, Adii has been working on his new book – Rockstar Business – which is due out in 2 weeks’ time. Adii explains the book as “…a look at how I’ve turned myself into a self-branded Rockstar…”, which may have some merit, but this also means that Adii has been on the receiving end of quite a few “Rockstar” jokes from the WooTeam… The WooTeam is probably not the best, nor most objective book critic though… *chuckles*

On a serious note, we’ve seen a few snippets (you too can do so here) and knowing Adii we’re sure the book will be a really fun read. So we thought it would be a good idea to get you in on the action…

Continue Reading »

So… We’ve actually been working on some real innovation (not *this* kind of innovation) with regards to our ever-expanding list of tumblog themes (currently there’s Unite, Retreat, Cinch & Slanted with Crisp coming next week) here on WooThemes.

All of these tumblog themes were released prior to WP 3.x being available, which means that we didn’t have the benefit of using custom post types or taxonomies, even though it would’ve been perfectly suited for this. We recently had a discussion with Matt (Mullenweg) though about this and he suggested that we implement a standard custom taxonomy for the tumblog type posts, as he wanted the rest of the WP community & theme developers to adopt this as well. This lead to us implementing & trialing this when we released Unite two weeks ago.

The “beta” of this functionality has gone really well and the feedback on Unite has been great. So we have just gone ahead and upgraded the other tumblog themes with this functionality as well; so you’re able to rock some custom taxonomy love in your WooThemes tumblogs.

Continue Reading »

Custom Goodness 2.0

After reaching a lot of praise for the inclusion of custom post types in our last business theme – Sealight – we had a bit of a chat within the WooTeam and it was decided that it may be a worthwhile strategy to update some of our most popular, but older business themes which doesn’t sport this functionality yet.

So we set out to trial this new strategy with the extremely popular Inspire & Optimize themes…

Continue Reading »

Things never slow down at the WooHQ, and to add some more fire to our bellies, we’d like to announce a new joint venture that is coming to WooThemes… We’ve been working behind the scenes to negotiate a collaboration that would see us working with the incredible guys over at WPBundle, which means that you can expect some amazing themes (all bundled) coming your way in the next month or two.

After we heard that WPBundle’s Kickstarter project failed to reach its goals, we contacted Liam (lead designer & co-founder at WPBundle, who we had worked with a couple of times already) about helping out with the project and making sure that it actually launches. The end-result of a few hefty discussions is that WPBundle will now officially be “powered by WooThemes” and we’ll be working side-by-side with their team to bring you even more awesomeness!

Continue Reading »

After seeing the discussion on our latest theme release (Sealight) explode, we decided that it would be a good idea to engage with our users, and potential future users, about what you would like to see from us going forward.

For those that didn’t follow the conversation, we’ll quickly provide a bit of a recap:

• Opinions on the latest theme release range from it being great, to it being not so great (this is specifically being leveled at the design of the theme and not as much the functionality which most consider to be awesome);
• The criticism seems to be that we aren’t being innovative enough with our themes – particularly our business themes – and that other theme providers are doing this much better than us;
• Our strategy is to release themes that meet the requirements of as many of our users as possible, and as a result we try to avoid going overly niche when designing new themes;
• Furthermore, we always need to find the balance of the features that should be included in a theme out-of-the-box versus what should be left for custom development should single users require very specific / unique functionality.

That’s been the discussion up until now (you may want to read through it yourself to catch all the little bits). So what now?

Continue Reading »

Miami Ink. I mean Byron Rode.

A brief introduction

I am a Web and WordPress Developer and have been living in Cape Town for a little over 3 years now.

I have been working in the online/development industry professionally for about 6 years, but built my first website about 8 years ago. In my 3 years in Cape Town I have worked for a large internet outsourcing company, worked with another locally run theme development company that focussed on Joomla and was the initial lead backend developer for their theme framework and ran and maintained a small web development agency focussing on outsourced development and consultation. I have strengths in PHP, MySQL, CSS as well as few other programming languages and like to dabble with Objective C (Cocoa) and Cocoa Touch.

Continue Reading »

Sealight - Perfect for businesses showcasing their products and services

We’ve just released a great addition to our business theme portfolio called Sealight that we teased a couple weeks ago – with some new features seeing the light of day.

Sealight was originally conceptualized and designed by the talented Mr. Chris Rowe, who we have worked before with on numerous occasions – the personal blog theme aptly named “BlogTheme, and the magazine themes “Spectrum” and “Gotham News“. So it was only a matter of time before he designed us a business theme.

Sealight boasts introduces some unique features to our business theme portfolio.

For the featured slider that we have used in a few of our themes before – instead of using posts/pages tagged with a specific tag, it know uses a custom post type called “slides”. Simply add new slides and they’ll appear in the featured slider. Similarly the home page has a module dedicated to information boxes that can house features/services your business/product offers and a cross-fader testimonials module quoting happy customers/clients – both of which have a custom post type dedicated to them (“Info Boxes” and “Testimonials”).

Continue Reading »

We’ve seen many comments about WP shortcodes on Twitter, and on a few blogs lately, so we figured whilst everyone was talking about it, we’ll just get going on implementing it.

The latest update to the WooFramework (which now takes it to version 2.9) features the addition of shortcodes for a variety of buttons, info boxes, related posts, as well as some social bookmark buttons. The idea behind the shortcodes is that it makes it easier for you as publisher / website admin to re-use certain popular elements within your blog post, without having to worry about re-doing large sections of code (that’d just be mundane).

An overview of the elements you can create using our new short codes

Continue Reading »