WooThemes

Framework’d: URL Shortening

08. Mar, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in Development

We have just completed the roll-out of a nifty, new feature to the WooFramework, which now includes support for URL Shortening. The basic idea is to offer you a template tag which would output a shorter URL – currently only supports TinyURL (default) and bit.ly (with your API key) – which you can then publish as added meta on your posts.

This functionality was inspired by the implementation thereof on various Tumblr-powered sites (for example: Matthew Buchanan). The benefit of publishing a shortened URL is in minimizing the amount of time that your readers will need to link to your content (i.e. increasing their convenience). So it’s a pretty nifty feature to have we believe!

As mentioned, this functionality is available in the WooFramework now and we’ll soon be publishing a little tutorial with regards to the backwards integration thereof. Both Cinch & Slanted have been updated to include the backend functionality, as well as the publishing of “Short URL” links in the front-end.

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Update: Custom Navigation in WP 3.0

23. Feb, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in Development

We just wanted to give you a quick update on the integration of the WooNav into the core of WordPress 3.0 (final version to be available mid-April).

Jeff has been working really hard to get everything ready and the basic functionality for the Custom Navigation (as it is now being called) has already been included in the WP 3.0 nightly builds (after last week’s WP dev chat). The most significant amount of work centered around moving away from Woo-specific branding, uses of prefixes and coding preferences, which means Jeff had to create a patch using all of the WP core standards & defaults. It is now that patch which is available in the nightly builds.

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Another Tumbling Teaser

16. Feb, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in Development

Since we’re getting closer to releasing our two new tumblog themes towards the end of the month, we wanted to keep the momentum and hype going with another little teaser.

When we teased you with these previews a week ago, we mentioned that the themes would include some jQuery wizardry, as well as progressive usage of CSS3. To give you an idea of what we’re talking about, you can view Cobus’ new design which he launched over the weekend.

We’d like to think that considering that Cobus designed both Cinch & Slanted and that since he’s responsible for the front-end coding, you can expect some similar awesomeness from our tumblog themes. So click around his new site and start anticipating the awesome that we will be releasing soon.

As Things Shift…

01. Feb, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in Development

As I sat down at my desk this morning, I set about doing some catch-up on the conversations that happened via e-mail and on our Basecamp over the weekend, when I suddenly realized that something new & unexpected was brewing within our team & the business as a whole.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve been spending a lot of time working on the new WooFramework and then shortly thereafter we followed that up with the introduction of the new WooThemes Custom Navigation functionality. Now it is especially the development of the Custom Navigation that has surprised me a bit.

See, we’ve always been WooThemes (with the emphasis firmly on “themes”) and with the Custom Navigation functionality, we’ve developed something this isn’t core to the themes anymore (in the sense, that you could previously achieve a similar effect with plugins). So this is a bit of a shift away from our themes-only focused production line, whilst still staying relevant to the core business focus.

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Preview: The New WooFramework (Video)

14. Dec, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in Development

As we have mentioned in the last week, we’ve been working on a new version (2.0) of the WooFramework, which we’ll be releasing with Optimize tomorrow. The integration of WooFramework 2.0 with Optimize, serves as the public beta of the new framework and we’d like to fix all of the possible bugs first, before we integrate it into all our older themes (all 54 of them).

So all of our subscribers who will get access to Optimize tomorrow, will have the opportunity to play with the new options panel & framework. For the rest, the following preview video will have to do the trick…

Tumbling Further

20. Oct, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in Development

Since posting our initial thoughts on tumblog (Tumblr-like) themes back in August, we’ve gotten a little busy with releasing all the new themes we had in the backlog. This is compounded by our #woobs charity & marketing campaign, which means that our lack of development capacity (this is why we’re hiring a new developer soon) results in us having to focus on the more important & time-sensitive things.

The good news is however that tumblog themes have not dropped off the radar and the future (which includes a very early, very sneaky preview of an upcoming tumblog design) is looking very good indeed (there are even rumours of an iPhone app to support our themes).

I’ve personally goofed around with some potential functionality for our first tumblog theme, whilst working away on my own site. So I intend on getting a little technical now, but here are some of my thoughts on functionality…

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Behind The Scenes: SVN & Development

29. Sep, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in Development

We’ve received many questions on our development and how we manage to maintain and update 40+ themes. In addition to reading about our development cycle, the below screencast should give you a good idea of how we roll around here…

Behind The Scenes: SVN & Development from WooThemes on Vimeo.

Could We / Should We Drop IE6 Support?

03. Sep, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in Development

A little while ago the guys over at RocketTheme – who initially served as a big source of inspiration for WooThemes (especially our club subscriptions) – announced that as of 1 January 2010, they will be dropping support for Internet Explorer 6.

Whilst we all know that IE6 is the bane of any web designer / developer’s existence, here’s an interesting look at why this move would be viable:

According to w3schools.com, from the high in November 2003 of 71.2%, IE6 usage had dropped to 32% in January of 2008, and 18.5% in January 2009. By January 2010, this percentage should be around 6-8%. With the introduction of Windows 7 this fall, this percentage could be even lower. (via IE6 End of Life at RocketTheme)

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Have Framework?

25. Aug, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in Development

It’s been a really hard slog, but we’re proud to finally announce that all 42 of our themes now function on the exact same “framework” or WooFramework as we’ve semi-affectionately dubbed it. All of our newer themes (since Aperture’s release) has been using a beta version of the WooFramework, whilst older themes has been updated to 2.0.x to accommodate the framework (for help upgrading an older version of a theme, see this tutorial).

So what does this really mean?

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Our Development Cycle & Release Schedule

11. Aug, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in Development

If you’re an outsider, our development cycle – and especially our release schedule – may seem completely random at the best of times. This is probably compounded by us showing you teasers of upcoming themes and then releasing other themes before those we have showed (which frustrates you, since you want those awesome concepts to be released like yesterday, right?).

In actuality though, our development cycle and release schedule is far from being random; it’s just very, very agile & flexible. So whilst we always have an idea about which themes we’ll be releasing next, we’re more than happy to chop-change that according to the “outside” demands. So here’s a little run-through of our development process…

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Fresh News 2.0

26. Jun, 2009 by Magnus in Development

Fresh News is the all time most popular theme here at WooThemes, so we thought it should deserve to be one of the first themes to receive the new Woo Framework update treatment (see video of new framework). What this basically means is that the theme is now easier to setup and use because of the improved functions in the framework (options panel, new widgets, easier image upload, easier to update in future etc.).

We also reworked some of the coding on the front page of the theme, so it now acts more like Busy Bee in functionality. To be more specific:

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Theme compatibility with WP 2.8

11. Jun, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in Development

We all know that you guys & girls want to update to the latest & greatest version of WordPress ASAP. So we’ve been testing our themes (yes, all 35) in the final release version of 2.8 all day and have found a few minor bugs.

List of known bugs that still needs fixing:

• No known bugs.

This list was last updated: 16 June 2009,11 :18 GMT+2.

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The New Station is here!

26. May, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in Development

The Station has been one of our most popular themes since we released it about 7 weeks ago and as you should be now expect from WooThemes; we like to add value for existing users. So a few weeks ago, I contacted all of the current users of The Station, to suggest some improvements and new features and got a whole lot of great ideas…

New Features in V1.1.0 of The Station

Here’s a brief run-down of the new features in The Station, which you can also see live on our demo:

Integrated Woo Framework Backend & New Theme Options

So The Station is the first “older” theme to restrospectively get the brand-spanking new theme options backend we’ve been rolling out in our last few themes. Here’s a little video to show you how this looks and explain the new options we have implemented:

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Post Images gets an overhaul

20. May, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in Development

A lot of new things happening over here at WooThemes HQ… Along with the pending redesign of our back- and front end, we’ve also been working on a new themes framework, which will most definitely enhance your experience when using our themes.

So what’s this “themes framework” thing?

Basically we’ve just developed a new core theme, which will now be used throughout all of our themes. This core includes the most important features / functions that are currently used throughout most of our themes.

So in terms of our users, nothing much changes, but we have now enabled ourselves to update our themes more regularly (and easily), along with the fact that every theme will be much more standardized in terms of the way it is coded.

The new framework / backend is currently only available in Aperture, Metamorphosis and myweblog, but as soon as we’ve squashed the last bugs, it’ll be integrated into all of our older themes.

Uploading Post Images & The “auto image” option

If you haven’t seen the preview of the new backend in action, I suggest you view this video first.

There are basically two new features we’re using for post images (thumbnails or featured images):

1. Upload an image directly to a custom field i.e. you don’t need to upload, then copy / paste the image URL anymore.
2. The “auto image” option automatically pulls the first image within a post (to display it as the post thumbnail or featured image) if there’s no custom image specified.

But why believe me? Here’s a little video to show you what we’re doing:

* The little intro snippet was created by our good friend, Richard Bolland.

WooTube haz homepage!

20. Feb, 2009 by Magnus in Development

When we first designed WooTube, we only intended it to be a simple video browser theme. Some complained that the homepage looked like a single post, probably because that is exactly what it was WooTube has been out for nearly a month, and it seems like it has been well received, even though there isn’t any fancy homepage layout for it.

But now there is! A few hours of coding, and voila, an optional homepage layout, which you can turn on from within your options panel. This will add post boxes on the front page, and you have the option of showing the latest video, or disabling it and getting that gallery feel on the theme.

This theme can therefore easily be used as a normal blog/gallery/portfolio or whatever you can imagine it to be. There is no need to add videos to your posts, so you could use it to show of your design work, or run a CSS gallery.

If you already own WooTube and want to know how to upgrade, you should study the changelog.txt and first backup your current theme if you have made any changes to the files.

Let us know your thoughts on the upgrade by checkint out the demo, and if there are any more tweaks that we should add.

WooThemes is now running WordPress 2.7!

11. Dec, 2008 by Magnus in Development

We have now updated all our demo themes to the latest version of WordPress! There were no problems at all in the upgrade, so you can go ahead and upgrade! There is no need to update your theme to the latest version if it is working fine on your current installation.

The new version of WordPress sports a brand new admin interface which is incredible in our opinion. Much quicker and better layout than the last one. There are also some new features available in version 2.7 like threaded comments, which we will now start adding to new themes and also our old themes. We are aiming on doing a mass update of all themes with the new features that we believe are worth adding, so stay tuned for an update in the coming week.

Which features would you to see in the future update of our themes? Let us know in the comments below…

Update! We are currently updating our themes to support threaded comments. Here is the list of themes that have been updated:

• Busy Bee v1.1 – (demo)
• Gotham News v1.1 – (demo)
• Abstract v1.0 – (demo)
• Fresh News v1.4 – (demo)
• VibrantCMS v1.2 – (demo)
• Papercut v1.2 – (demo)
• Gazette v1.3 (demo)
• Live Wire v1.3 (demo)
• NewsPress v1.3 (demo)
• Flash News v1.3 (demo)
• Over Easy v1.1 (demo)
• Open Air v1.2 (demo)
• Thick v1.1 (demo)
• Typebased v1.1 (demo)

Please review the changelog.txt in the theme directory for info on which files to update. We are working on updating our other themes and will update this post when they are done.