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…
2.0 Features
These are the new goodies that you can expect in version 2.0 of Inspire & Optimize:
- Custom Post Types integration for Homepage Slides (Inspire only), Mini Features / Info Boxes on the homepage, Portfolio Items & Testimonials (Optimize only).
- Upgrading of the Portfolio items, which enables you to upload multiple images for every portfolio item (see screenshot below).
- A clean-up of the theme options (as we now need less options, since the custom post types optimizes handling of these areas) for the above features.
Upgrading to 2.0 is as easy as re-downloading the theme and installing it on your server. Do however note that you will need to manually migrate your existing content to the new custom post types.
The Upgraded Portfolio
Multiple images for every portfolio item.
Our 2.0 Strategy
Before you ask us when we will be upgrading themes X, Y & Z to 2.0, we wanted to answer your questions in this regard… 
At this stage we are trialing this strategy with the 2.0′ing of Optimize & Inspire to see how well this works for you guys & girls, as that will allow us to adjust the strategy (if needed) with regards to the other themes. Our main (albeit minor) concern at this stage is with regards to the updating process which isn’t seamless and requires some manual input.
If the trial however works out well, then we do plan to update all of our business themes, as custom post type integration is a definite advantage to users who uses our themes in this regard. So we’re looking forward to your feedback on this!
21 Responses to “2.0′ed: Inspire & Optimize”
Nice
Thanks! Just what I was looking for — I’m planning an upgrade this weekend!
Nice!
Not only does this show you listened to our feedback, but you acted on it with impressive speed!
2.0′ed is definitely the way to go! I’ve got my eye on a couple old portfolio themes that could use some shinin’
Takk! Which ones?
Uh oh, feel like I should play my cards carefully on this one, so I’ll just name one: ProudFolio.
This theme had me enchanted from the start with its simplistic structure yet intricate visuals. It also suited me very well as an aspiring game designer (read: producing text, not visuals), as it provided that one eye-catcher for the front-page but didn’t demand any more custom visuals besides that to make a good first impression.
A couple features I’d like to see in a 2.0:
- Completely standards compliant: I reported some issues earlier about various ways I ended up braking text formatting, especially for the portfolio posts.
- Custom post types: Because
- Improved typography/ post styling support:
* Things like TypeKit/GoogleFont support could be big.
* Some other ideas could be customized tables, pre-made div templates and things like that to pretty up elements in your post.
* Easy way to make nice floating divs: Your front-page elements ([pic][heading]-[text]) and theme features ([pic]{ [heading]-[text])
(Erm, that was me just trying to quickly explain the structure I was talking about, but maybe it’d be possible to create some cool div-wizard of sorts with shortcodes like that, heh)
Nice to see that older themes get attention as well!
One question regarding the portfolio screenshot above; why have separate images for the Portfolio Thumbnail and Portfolio Large when you could define images sizes in functions.php and use the Featured Image function? Then just echo the correct size image for the different areas.
Also, in Optimize, you could use a Custom Post Type for the Testimonials section? That would allow the flexibility to have many testimonials and just randomly select a few which display and rotate?
Hey James,
The two custom fields allows you to upload exact dimension images for the portfolio item and large image.
There is a CPT for Testimonials in Optimize
Excellent!
That was a VERY quick turnaround from comments I read just yesterday.
Woo ninjas are quite nimble!
Big Easy!!! Man, I loved that theme when it came out
– And I’m primed to use it again after my webby changed direction and is gonna serve a more portfolio specific function 
I would LOVE to see this 2.0′ed
Lovin ya woothemes!!!! x
Guys,
I´ve just updated http://www.poeticasvisuais.com/ to Inspire 2.0.
About 1 hour work to migrate all my personalized stuff e codes to the new theme. Not a big deal actually.
Just few thing that I noticed:
1 – The featured.php file uses a custom query_post [ query_posts('post_type=slide&order=ASC&orderby=date'); ] to sort the Slides. If functional, but in my opinion you should give a VISUAL organizing option (similar to wordpress image galery sorting option… a imput box to define the ORDER of the slides).
2 – The same VISUAL order option to Mini-Features.
3 – The function woo_twitter_script output date are ENGLISH only? eg: 40 day ago, 1 hour ago, etc.
I mean… it´s easy to translate the strings in this file… but EVERY time when I update the FRAMEWORK all the work is gone… is there some possibility (or some JS function) to translate this strings using the .PO file?
For now, that´s all.
Ah, I forgot to mention another little thing:
- I´m using Inspire in pt_BR. The front-end translation is working pretty well. But the backend (http://img834.imageshack.us/img834/6815/inspireptbr.jpg) has some strings still in english – as Highlighted in the picture.
Thnks,
you will need to grab the lang/inspire.po and translate the new strings.
so good!
Magnus,
I already did this! already translate the New .PO file with 168 lines.
But, backend is not translation is not working (as picture shows)…. only front end…
Could you please open a new topic about this in the forum?
thanks
DOne. http://forum.woothemes.com/topic.php?id=26898
Any plans to add these features to other themes, portfolio or otherwise? SophisticatedFolio seems like an obvious choice, since it was release within a couple of weeks of Optimize. Some older business themes like Coffee Break or Overeasy could also benefit from this treatment. Keep up the good work, Woo Team!
Yes we have plans of doing that
http://ideas.woothemes.com/forums/72423-ideas/suggestions/1001095-custom-post-types-existing-themes-?ref=title
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