2010 has been an amazing year for us and whilst it has totally flew past us, we’d like to recap on both our proudest and most challenging moments. Expect quite a few links to internal blog posts about the things that we did this year and know that we would not have linked these up if they weren’t really significant in terms of the journey that we undertook in 2010.

As a bonus for sharing this trip down memory lane with us, we’ll include a few teasers of the stuff you can expect from us in 2011. So here goes…

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Our WooTumblog plugin has been downloaded over 2700 times already, and our Express app for iPhone has already been purchased by over 500 people, which proves that “tumblogging” is a very popular niche nowadays.

We contacted James McDonald and asked if he wanted to design a Tumblr theme for us a while back, and he produced the stunning and detailed Auld for us. With the popularity of WooTumblog, we decided to release it on WordPress instead of Tumblr. The theme was a perfect fit to use with the jQuery Masonry plugin, which allows the post blocks to align perfectly on the homepage in a two column fashion. Check out his Dribbble page for some more great visual design by this up and coming designer.

Auld Tumblog theme by James McDonald

Most of the WooCrew will now take a long sought after Christmas break, and we’ll be back in the new year with more awesome goodies for you! From all of us at WooThemes, have a merry Christmas and a happy Woo Year!

This one has been in the oven for a good few months and teased numerous times on the blog, but today we can finally introduce you to Listings – a directory based theme with an advanced content builder.

Ever since we released Estate in July of this year we had the intention of taking it’s advanced niche functionality and making a more generic, yet equally powerful version of it that could be used for any type of niche whether you be a book publisher, a recruitment agency, a car dealer, an art gallery, a photographer’s portfolio site, the list is endless.

When I first conceptualized the design and layout in Photoshop I had no idea ultimately how cool it would turn out thanks to some serious development time on it by Jeff and Matty, with Kirstin taking care of the HTML / CSS and initial WooFramework integration. As you can see it’s been a collective effort by the team.

The Content Builder

At the core of Listings is it’s most impressive feature – the content builder. The content builder allows you to create custom post types, then taxonomies for those post types and custom fields for the posts within those taxonomies. This all thanks to WordPress 3.1. To say this theme is cutting edge would be an understatement. I’d go out on a limb and say it is one of the most advanced content-building themes on the market today.

Hopefully that has excited you as to the theme’s capabilities. If not have a look over the home page modular design and start thinking how you can use this theme on your next project.

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Unfortunately this promotion has now ended.

It’s almost Christmas and WooHQ has closed it’s doors for the final time in 2010, but don’t worry that doesn’t mean we are going to disappear. We’ve been busy wrapping up our present for all of you, and seeing we are quiet an impatient group we want you to unwrap it now before you go off on holiday.

Our Christmas present to you

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We won’t blame you for thinking that this week’s “theme” here on WooThemes is all about microblogging / tumblogging (after this post), but heck, let’s just say that we’re pretty excited and proud of the work we’re currently doing in this space.

Shortly after releasing Express.app about two months ago, we invited all designers & developers to develop themes that took advantage of the free WooTumblog plugin (2500+ downloads already) and thus also supported Express.app. And now we’re starting to see a flurry of amazing themes by other developers being released.

Here’s a couple of our favourites thus far, which compliments our own tumblog themes rather nicely! Check them out:

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Some might have noticed we haven’t released any new themes for Tumblr in a long while. Instead, we’ve been focusing our attention on expanding our tumblog themes for WP, in addition to our (free) WooTumblog plugin and Express.app.

Our strategy has been pretty simple: we’re making a *big* push to enable Tumblr -> WordPress migrations, and make WP a viable option for micro-blogging. We’re doing this for two reasons:

1. On WordPress you get to own and manage your data completely, which is always beneficial; and
2. WordPress is open-source and as a result it will always be more flexible than Tumblr.

Before we could however set off on this journey, we kinda needed a beacon to know from where we needed to start. So I was the one tasked to be the lab rat / crash test dummy for migrating my own blog from Tumblr to WordPress.

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It’s been almost 6 months in development since the WPBundle guys – Liam and Spencer presented their exciting project on Kickstarter in July of this year. Although the initial funding was unsuccessful, there was huge interest on Twitter and within the WP community so we approached Liam to see if they’d be open to a collaboration. We believed we could help market their WordPress bundle to a much more targeted market on our site rather than on Kickstarter, where potential backers are not so WordPress savvy.

Today we can finally announce that all their hard work, late nights and caffeine fuelled brain storms has become a reality. WP Bundle is now available and offering some game changing, hugely unique WordPress themes that we are quite certain you would have not seen anywhere else before!

Here are some tasters of what Liam and Spencer have cooked up for you. What is important to note is that all the WPBundle themes are built on the solid and ever improving codebase that is our WooFramework. That means if you are familiar with our themes and experimenting with our code in WooTheme customizations you’ll have no problem at all with the WPBundle themes. You should also be able to chop and change bits of functionality between the themes if you are feeling up to the task in creating dream sites for your clients.

As was mentioned in WPBundle’s newsletter WooThemes users will be eligible for very attractive discounts on the $250 WPBundle:

• WooThemes club subscription members can get the WPBundle for only $100
• Any other WooThemes customers that have purchased theme packages in the past can get WPBundle for $150

To take advantage of these special offers login to your WooThemes account and on the “Add Products” page look for the WPBundle offer, purchase the themes directly from there and you’ll be in business in no time. To find out more about WPBundle go to their beautiful site – www.wpbundle.com.

Last week’s sharing of some of the WPBundle teasers seems to have gotten you guys & girls even more excited about the upcoming launch of this great new collaboration between ourselves and the WPBundle crew. So here’s the second 5 (of 10) themes that will form part of the first bundle going on sale soon…

Essence: Sell Your Portfolio

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One of the things that our development team has experienced this year, is that themes with more advanced, specific (and non-standard WordPress) functionality simply take more time to develop, test and maintain. We are constantly trying to push the boundaries of WordPress whilst it strives to push it’s own boundaries in becoming more of a content management system, but there’s a trade-off to achieve this: more time.

In the past year, we’ve developed a few themes that would fall into this classification:

• Estate, which was miles ahead of any other WP real estate alternative at the time and still the only theme to support IDX / MLS integration;
• Diner, with it’s advanced booking functionality, and also the only of it’s kind in the WP community;
• The WooTumblog plugin, along with all of our tumblog themes and of course the Express.app, which have been a major commitment on our side to bring a Tumblr-like experience to WP (we take pride in pioneering this);
• Listings, which is coming up and already looking likely to be another game changer;
• The existing WordPress Custom Menu’s which we developed as part of the WooFramework initially and then committed to the WP core; and
• More recently the Sidebar Manager which adds a truckload of customization value to every single WooTheme.

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