We’re ecstatic to launch the latest addition to the WooFramework – Sidebar Manager.

The Sidebar Manager comes from years of my own personal experience with WordPress themes, having been frustrated with the rigid sidebars and widgetized regions. Blog sidebars quickly become static, boring and life-less when every page renders the same widgets time after time on every page – not giving your users a very dynamic or targeted experience.

The Sidebar Manager gives you the power to create a unique sidebar for specific pages of your site. You can now tailor make each page with specific content and functionality across almost every aspect of the template.

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A customizable and clean free theme.

Today we introduce you to a theme aptly named “Skeptical”. Why should you be skeptical? Because it’s got some pretty neat functionality for a free theme. That’s correct – a free theme.

Skeptical was designed by Nur Fathihah and submitted to us via our “Submit your theme” page, where we often un-earth great designs and talented designers.

Skeptical’s layout is very flexible in the sense that you can display “related posts” next to your latest posts on the home page, OR have a completely widgetized sidebar. Not only that, you can also add your Flickr stream to the footer region and showcase three noteworthy blog posts tagged with a specific tag that you declare in the theme options.

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When you suggested that we add mobile optimization for our themes, we listened and today we get the first opportunity to announce some new stuff in this regard. (This announcement will be only our first announcement of a couple in this space.)

We’ve teamed up with our friends over at Obox to bring you mobile optimization for your WooThemes-powered website via the awesome, new Obox Mobile plugin. In the last couple of weeks, the Obox crew have been busy creating this nifty, new WordPress plugin that optimizes the rendering of your WooThemes-powered site on iOS (i.e. iPhone) & Android handheld devices.

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As promised a couple of weeks ago, we’ve been working hard on upgrading Estate – which is one of our most powerful themes to date and has also become one of the fastest selling themes since release – to V1.1.

Our rationale & strategy with Estate was purely to get a V1 of the theme into your hands, before we would start integrating & adding further features. We wanted to prevent ourselves from having to guess which features you’d like (because admittedly real estate isn’t our specialty) and didn’t want to bloat the theme with unnecessary code.

We therefore took a whole bunch of your suggestions, split it up into viable groups and then plotted these on a roadmap for V1.1, V1.2 (hopefully before year-end) and V1.3 (early 2011). Here’s details of the V1.1 upgrade…

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Rockstar Business designed by Tim van Damme

I’ve been using the above design in teasing my book – Rockstar Business – in the run-up to its release and since it goes on sale next week, I’ll be retiring the design (which was originally done by Tim van Damme, who also worked with us on Antisocial) in favour of a new, sales landing page.

This begged a simple question to be asked: Could we release this theme on WooThemes?

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In the last year, WordPress has undergone a few significant changes in transforming it from a simple content management system to an extremely flexible platform for web development. We’d go as far as saying that you can probably build *any* kind of website, or web application, on WordPress with the only question being how much of the native / core functionality you use/exploit.

This means that – up until now anyway – we’ve prided ourselves in developing WP into a Tumblr-like tumblog website, real estate directory & soon we’ll be doing a theme for restaurants, a complete & customizable directory theme, and the cherry on the cake: e-commerce themes. Because WP has made all of this possible…

But we’ve found – despite a few claims to the contrary – that 99% of WP popularity stems from the type of websites that it was originally intended to help build: personal blogs, news and magazine sites, websites for small to medium sized businesses & designers’ portfolios. So regardless of any new “trends”, our user statistics emphasize that WP is still most popular and most used in those categories.

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In reference to this tweet, you can soon expect to find something new (and ready for beta) in the WooFramework, which will make the management of widgetized spaces on different posts, pages & WP templates so much easier…

Here’s the teaser:

Coming soon to a WooFramework-powered theme near you!

Meet Michael Krapf, WooNinja

You would’ve noticed in the last couple of months that we’ve been focusing on one recurring topic: more value for existing users. And with this latest announcement, we’re hoping to further build on that strategy in the hope that all WooUsers will find even more value & pleasant experiences within the WooCommunity.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve noticed that the forum is being pounded by more & more support requests as the WooUsers kept modifying, tweaking and breaking (!) our themes at an alarming rate. Because this is however our exact aim with our themes (they’re meant to be customized), we figured there was only one way to improve support in this regard: hire another WooNinja.

So with that, we’d like to welcome the newest addition to the WooTeam, Michael Krapf, who will be helping out Tiago, Kirstin & the rest of the WooTeam in making our support function an even better experience!

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And you thought being a part of the WooTeam was all about 4 day work weeks, Apple products, X-Box sessions and Woo on the Slopes expeditions?

Hell no. Each member of the WooTeam has been through a grueling test of mental and physical agility….

A digital designer is rarely caught without a coffee, coca cola, or red bull on their desk. Largely due to the late night rushes before a client deadline, but according to Dr. Downie it also fuels creativity.

After teasing it only yesterday, we’ve cruised through the tweaks and fixes (few of course!) reported by our beta testers and are happy to release the Caffeinated theme today, less than 24 hours later.

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I’m not even sure that title makes sense, but it does somewhat describe the next two upcoming themes, and was the title of the email Cobus sent me with the teaser graphics.

Firstly, we have Ryan Downie’s personal portfolio theme design that he originally designed for his own personal use – fueled by his passion for Coffee, Red Bull and lunchtime pot of noodles according to his Twitter stream.

This theme’s release is literally around the corner and boasts more custom post type integration and a great summize of your online presence on the home page.

Caffeinated by Ryan Downie

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Earlier in the week we asked you how we could make Canvas more of a theme framework and you have responded with some great suggestions. But whilst we have been considering your suggestions & feature requests (and hence our lack of response), we couldn’t help but feeling that either our own message or your expectations were misguided / misaligned.

So we wanted to circle back to a “simple” question: What is a WordPress Theme Framework? The suggestion that initially came up in the Open Forum was for Canvas to be more of a Theme Framework and it seems that some suggestions relate to Canvas as a framework, but most are more straight-forward theme feature requests (i.e. those could apply to any of our themes; not specifically Canvas as a framework).

This is how WordPress.org describes a theme framework (with a bunch of examples too):

A Theme framework is a Theme designed to be a flexible foundation for quicker WordPress development, usually serving as a robust Parent Theme for Child Themes. Some Theme frameworks can also make theme development more accessible, removing the need for programming or design knowledge with options pages.

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