WooThemes

Mobile Officing Extreme

04. Mar, 2010 by Mark Forrester in WooThemes News

Late last year I was sitting at the barber shop, getting a haircut. The barber felt obliged to ask me what I do for a living. I tried to explain to him, in a non-technical way, how I “designed websites”, and managed the business with my 2 business partners in Norway and Cape Town… who I’d only met face-to-face a handful of times.

Of course the conversation went dead then as he was obviously a little confused by this internet thing I did. I quietly kept thinking about our rather unique business, and how completely mobile we actually are. Why don’t we really take advantage of the perks of mobile officing?

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WooNav: Integrated in WP 3.0

15. Feb, 2010 by Mark Forrester in Blog, WooThemes News

Two weeks ago when we launched the WooNav, we knew it was something special and would be well received by our users, together with our recent release of WooFramework V2 our theme development was certainly hotting up. Then, out of the blue, we were contacted by Jane Wells of the Wordpress Core UX development team who was planning the final iterations of the menu management system’s core features for Wordpress 3.0. Unbeknown to us Jane had been playing around with our WooNav functionality:

We have a developer working on it, and have gone through several rounds of community feedback and iteration, and it strikes me that what we’re probably going to end up with is a lot like what you guys have in your Custom Navigation option, so I thought I’d get in touch with you guys to talk about it

After a few emails it was pretty obvious that this made perfect sense for both us and the core team. It would save the WordPress developers hours of coding to build something that already existed and did the job well, and WooThemes would finally be acknowledged for it’s work in furthering WordPress theme development.

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Write me a postcard

28. Jan, 2010 by Mark Forrester in New Themes

So you are about to head off on an adventure around the world, or perhaps just an extended road trip up the east coast? You’ve promised postcards to friends and families, but what a mission, post offices are so last century!

See you’ve decided to buy a domain, install Wordpress and this really cool theme from WooThemes instead. Friends all around the world can track your progress, see exactly where you’ve been and the photos you’ve taken. They’ll share the experience with you, leaving you comments and advice of where and what you should be doing.

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Postcard

28. Jan, 2010 by Mark Forrester in Multimedia, Personal Blog

Optimize your Wordpress

15. Dec, 2009 by Mark Forrester in Blog

Today is a pretty big day for us at WooThemes. Firstly, because we can finally launch this theme that has been so hyped and received such glowing feedback from our beta testers, and secondly because it is our first theme sporting our brand spanking new theme option’s panel.

Optimize is another pixel perfect business theme conceptualized and coded by the Magatron. Living up to it’s name Optimize has been lurking around, behind the scenes, being tested by our wonderful beta testers for a couple weeks now, with lots of new features being added and optimized according to the feedback we have been given.

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We Will Rock You

10. Dec, 2009 by Mark Forrester in New Themes

It is with great pleasure that we can FINALLY announce the launch of our awesomely unique niche blog design for bands and musicians, entitled Backstage.

Backstage was first conceptualized by the talented British web designer extraordinaire – Elliot Jay Stocks way back in June. We thought Elliot was well suited for this kind of design as he himself is quite a musical genius.

Fox has spent the past few months, off and on, hard at work creating powerful widget goodness and theme options for Backstage. With custom category templates for the discography, latest news, video and image archives this theme really helps empower artists and bands with the tools they need to promote themselves. An upcoming shows widget helps manage your events, whilst a home page featured slider can easily be enabled/disabled via the theme options panel.

It’s probably best letting the images below, and the demo, do the talking don’t you think?

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Backstage

10. Dec, 2009 by Mark Forrester in Multimedia

Unique Features

These are some of the more unique features that you will find within the theme:

• A home page slider showcasing band/musician photography.
• A home page dedicated module to the band/musician biography.
• Unique page templates for your discography/music archive, and image & video galleries.
• Neat theme integration with media attachments.
• Custom Woo Widgets for use in the sidebar and in the home page widgetized zones: A media widget showcasing images, videos or music, a recent news widget, an upcoming shows widget, Flickr and advertising widgets amongst others.
• 7 stylish alternate colour schemes to choose from.

The Rockstar Foundation: Giving Back

09. Dec, 2009 by Mark Forrester in WooThemes News

A few months ago, Adii started talking about a new charitable organization that he wanted to create that would benefit amazingly talented, yet underprivileged young girls (through educational opportunities, love & great support structures) in South Africa. Last week, the dream took another step closer to formalizing when Adii & his team launched The Rockstar Foundation.

In October, we managed to raise more than $5k for breast cancer awareness. But going forward, we’ve decided we’d like to be more involved in helping worthy causes. So we’re teaming up with The Rockstar Foundation, where we will be sponsoring all of their general overheads & day-to-day expenditure on a monthly basis.

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f0101

28. Oct, 2009 by Mark Forrester in Personal Blog

Unique Features

These are some of the more unique features that you will find within the theme:

• A beautifully illustrated male or female figure to the left of the website, that can be inter-changed, replaced or removed in the theme option’s panel.
• Complete control over excerpt vs content being displayed in the home pages blog posts, and archived posts
• 12 custom woo widgets to have complete control over your sidebar and footer regions, packed full of loads of functionality including a social profiles widget highlighting all your online profiles.
• 10 delicious alternate colour schemes to choose from, 5 male and 5 female.

Royalle

28. Oct, 2009 by Mark Forrester in Personal Blog

Unique Features

These are some of the more unique features that you will find within the theme:

• A beautifully styled featured posts area on the home page with the number of posts controlled in the theme option’s panel.
• An optional horizontal page/category navigation with the sidebar navigation also customizable.
• A neat social profiles widgetized zone in the header section, where you can link to all your social network profiles.
• Complete control over excerpt vs content being displayed in the featured posts, other home pages posts, and archived posts
• 10 custom woo widgets to have complete control over your sidebar and footer regions, packed full of loads of functionality.
• 5 delicious alternate colour schemes to choose from and select in the theme option’s panel

Therapy

08. Oct, 2009 by Mark Forrester in Personal Blog

Unique Features

These are some of the more unique features that you will find within the theme:

• A social profiles widgetized zone with custom widgets to display your Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, Flickr, etc, profiles in the sidebar
• A home page featured/about module editable in the theme options with a dedicated space for your profile image/gravatar, or 125 x 125 ads.
• An optional 3 column, widgetized footer space.
• 12 delicious colour schemes to choose from!

Wish you were here

28. Sep, 2009 by Mark Forrester in Theme Concepts

If WooThemes were a work desk, it would be one of those really messy desks littered with sketches and papers at the moment. We have so many theme concepts we are currently working on both in-house and with theme collaborators. It’s most certainly a creative place to be.

A couple weeks back I opened up Photoshop and dusted off the toolboxes to start experimenting with a travel blogging theme design, fresh after my recent holiday to the Greek Islands.

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The Daily Edition design process with Liam McKay

18. Sep, 2009 by Mark Forrester in Blog

Liam kindly spent some time with us chatting through what was involved in his recent collaboration with WooThemes on the Daily Edition theme.

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Daily Edition – Read all about it!

15. Sep, 2009 by Mark Forrester in New Themes

I’m excited about this theme! Almost a month after teasing you with some original screenshots of Liam Mckay’s awesome design we have finally completed the conversion to a flexible, neatly coded Wordpress theme. You commented, and we listened and built some awesome functionality into this theme.

Breathing some new life into the incredible success of Gazette Edition we wanted another news/magazine based theme that was minimalistic enough to let your content speak, whilst customizable enough to brand however you like. We approached our friend Liam McKay as we thought this was just up his alley, and did he impress!

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Daily Edition

15. Sep, 2009 by Mark Forrester in Magazine / News

Unique Features

These are some of the more unique features that you will find within the theme:

• A neat javascript home page featured slider, with thumbnail previews of previous/next slides on hover over the dots.
• A “talking points” home page that can display posts according to tags, in order of most commented to least commented. A great way to highlight posts gathering dust in the archives.
• A customizable home page layout with options to specify how many full width blog posts and how many “box” posts you would like to display.
• A javascript home page video player with thumbnail hover effect.
• 16 delicious colour schemes to choose from!

Antisocial

27. Aug, 2009 by Mark Forrester in Magazine / News, Personal Blog

Unique Features

These are some of the more unique features that you will find within the theme:

• vCard and hCard facilities for accessible contact details.
• 3 completely widgetized zones with 5 custom widgets including a neat re-usable social profiles widget and dedicated zone.
• A neat AJAX calendar widget that is beautifully styled – this plugin required.
• A unique comment form with a JQuery plugin that grabs your Gravatar without a page refresh – plugin available here.
• 10 amazing colour schemes to choose from!