If you’ve been using our Theme Documentation of late, you would’ve been noting a few new videos which we’ve recently added to (hopefully) improve your experience with us. And if you haven’t spotted them in the docs yet, here’s two direct links for those:

An example: WP.org vs WP.com

Other screencasts by WordPress101 for WooThemes

• How to Install WordPress
• Installing a WooTheme

More to follow soon!

We have worked with Shawn from WP101 to produce these videos as improvements of our old stuff. So we hope that you’ve been finding it beneficial.

First off, we hope that everyone that celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday experienced a truly blessed time. And then we hope that we can also sneak into your Black Friday shopping list with an amazing special…

So here we go…

The 20%, 5-for-1

We haven’t run one of these in ages, so we’ve figured it needs to make a much-needed comeback. But instead of going same-old, same-old we’ve decided to spice things up a bit. So not only can you get 5 themes for the price of 1, but we’ll further discount that 1 theme by 20%.

Confusing? This is what the prices look like:

• The Standard Package: 5 themes for only $56.
• The Developer Package: 5 themes for only $120.

That is amazing value for money there, especially considering that you can pick any 5 themes from our collection of 81 awesome themes!

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Sheesh, that title sounds like an infomercial, right? But we just can’t help it, because that probably best sums up our latest theme, Elefolio.

Chris Rowe – who also designed Spectrum this year – is back with another absolute beauty in Elefolio, which is designed to be both a blog and a portfolio. In the past though, our portfolio themes would’ve just included your traditional blog, but since we’ve been making such a splash on microblogging of late, Elefolio has been enhanced to function like that instead.

Elefolio thus adds a bit of uniqueness to our portfolio themes collection, which is perfectly suited to the designer that wants to showcase his / her content & portfolio in the most trendiest of ways.

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Since announcing our collaboration with WPBundle, this has been one of the most anticipated WordPress releases of this year. So whilst Liam & Spencer have done a great job in teasing some of their progress, we wanted to step things up a notch as we get ready for launch.

Launch date is imminent (no exact day has been decided yet) and we can confirm that the initial bundle of 10 amazing themes will be selling for $250 (lifetime updates & support, along with the PSD’s). So here’s a look at 5 of those 10 themes (the next 5 will be teased next week), ranging from magazine / news publishing to personal and microblogging to business & photography. It’s all there…

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It’s not often that we get the opportunity to release a theme that has a proven & very successful track record. For example – if we were ever to re-design our own website, and released this design as a theme; we’d be able to say that you’d be buying a theme / design that has indeed been very popular & profitable.

But with today’s release of Chapters, we get to do just yet…

Chapters was originally designed by uber-designer, Tim van Damme, and was used to to promote & tease my book: Rockstar Business (which has since been re-designed to gear it towards it’s post-release marketing strategy). Having sold more than 1000 copies of this self-published debut book, I’m happy to be a *tad* biased, and suggest that this theme definitely played quite a big part in the success of the book.

You could be selling your book with Chapters.

How it works

When I started writing my book, I knew I wanted to create a mechanism, and channel by which I could start promoting the book, so that once it was ready for release, it would’ve already gathered quite some traction. The biggest stumbling block in this regard, was obviously to convince people that my book was worthy of pre-ordering… And the only way to do that was to share teasers / previews of some of the content.

And that’s where Chapters steps into the fray: it’s perfectly designed to help you tease snippets of your upcoming book, whilst allowing you to make some proper progress on writing the rest of it.

In addition to teasing the content, the rest of the design also features enough space for a few pre-order banner ads to get those sales rolling in (which is a great way to keep you motivated through the writing process, which can become pretty lonely at times). What’s better than having all this great publicity take care of itself, before your book is even launched?

But it can also be something else

Don’t have a book to sell? Chapters is still perfectly geared to help publish blog content in a non-traditional, yet hugely usable manner. Tim seems to have a knack in re-inventing the wheel when it comes to navigating website page content, take his early css-revolutionary design 24ways.org as a prime example of that.

The table of content menu structure of Chapters

For those of you who want to publish your WordPress blog posts and have them displayed with more of a book/case study layout, bundled with a table of content menu system it could be a very good fit for you.

To get a sense of just how awesome Chapters is, have a look at the demo or find the full theme listing with details here.

A few months ago we set out to make a move in to the e-commerce space, from the get-go we decided we were always going to target the three most popular platforms: WordPress (which will always remain our personal main aim), Shopify and now: Magento.

Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform, which has grown in leaps & bounds in the last couple of years offering one a really stable and extremely feature-rich platform. But… unfortunately – as many designers & developers will tell you – it is also not a simple & easy platform to develop on, as there is quite a steep learning curve… So that’s where WooThemes steps in & makes your job that little bit easier…

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Along with a little teaser (for some unplanned & unexpected new functionality) we posted earlier today, we’d like to show you what Jeff has been working on for the Listings theme that we previewed a while back.

In the screencast, you’ll basically see Jeff creating a new custom post type, taxonomy & custom field on the go via the WooFramework, without touching a single line of code. Without giving away too much, we’ll just say that the idea is that you can roll your own directory with Listings, albeit a book directory or a car dealership. Check it out:

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Here at WooThemes we use a script for dynamic image resizing in all our themes which is called timthumb.php (thumb.php in our themes). One of the main reasons why we haven’t replaced our dynamic image resizing script yet, is because we feel it is superior to the WP post thumbnails that were introduced in WordPress 2.9.

The reason it is superior to WP Post Thumbnails is because it can dynamically change the size of your images. It is widely used amongst WP theme developers, but it also has it’s problems (mostly setup and server performance issues).

We noticed a WP trac ticket (hopefully it makes it into a future WP version) which had a nice function to use the built in re-size functionality which already exists in WP core, and have now added this function to our framework (v 3.1.10) to see how it works.

We have also updated Canvas with a new option to enable the re-size function if you use WP Post Thumbnails, so you can test the new functionality today!

Native image resizing for WP Post Thumbnails

PS! We also have some new framework functionality coming soon which will update the way you upload images in your options panel/custom settings… Stay tuned!

Update!

We have deployed version 3.2.0 of the WooFramework which now uses native WP upload functionality for uploading in the options panel and in custom settings field. Grab it now by going to YourTheme > Update Framwork.

In most situations in life, it’s easy to skim over the finer details as most of us don’t have to time to look much deeper than the service. And this is probably the case when you – as an outsider – have a look at our progress & respective releases; it just doesn’t look *that* impressive, right?

If you consider that when we released Continuum last week, it became our 79th theme, making is by far the single, largest (in terms of theme collection at least) WordPress theme developer** around. Now if you’re not a theme / plugin developer yourself, you may not realize how much time it actually takes to maintain & support a theme collection of that size…

Yet regardless of the effort involved, here’s a few updates & things we worked on (in October only) that we didn’t blog about and you probably didn’t see (as they’re supposedly minor compared to the big stuff: new themes, iPhone apps, new platforms & collaborations etc.):

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A couple of weeks ago we published some good & bad news with regards to WooCommerce and I guess that today you can expect a bit of the same…

Judging from our blog, I’m sure you’d agree that we can’t be criticized for being inactive, lazy or slow; instead we’ve done quite a bit of work at quite a pace in the last couple of weeks. Yet, it’s the elusive WooCommerce that still evades release. There are a couple of reasons for this:

• We want WooCommerce to be stable, and as perfect a V1 as it possibly can be. This means that we’re probably adding a few more features than we normally would have for a V1, but we want WooCommerce to be a great & viable choice for those of you that will inevitably switch from one of the alternatives currently available.
• The templating engine is taking a little more time and we wouldn’t be WooThemes if we didn’t place a big emphasis on this. We’d rather postpone the development of a few fancy features in favour of making sure that our commerce themes are just as customizable as our other stuff.
• Eventually we want to release WooCommerce as a separate plugin that will work with any theme. So there’s a lot of considerations to take into account to make sure the initial structure allows us to do that without having to do a major re-code.

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