The WooThemes Blog

WordPress theme development has, over the years, become a much more involved industry than it was during years past. Themes have gotten more intelligent, more feature rich and, to sum up, far more robust in their offering. It is not uncommon today for a theme to, for example, include an advanced theme options screen for tailoring a theme without code, or a selection of custom-developed widgets to showcase content is a specific manner or of a specific type.

As with scaling in any context, expanding one’s offering is vital to maintaining the status quo and “keeping up” with industry competitors. At WooThemes, this expansion is generally handled within the WooFramework (the engine that powers all of our 120+ themes) by creating and adding features such as a shortcode generator (along with a wide collection of popular shortcodes), a collection of popular social widgets, SEO settings via WooSEO and a system to create custom sidebars via the Sidebar Manager. This expansion is also, at times, handled using our popular “Theme Options” screen, where settings specific to your WooTheme of choice are controlled.

As one can imagine, adding theme option after theme option could easily get out of hand, creating a long list of settings you’d need to run through to customise your theme. This brings us to the question we posed during a development discussion at WooHQ last year- “are theme options always the answer?”.

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WordPress 3.3 “Sonny” has been released. Frantic updating ensues… Right?

We’ve been testing WP 3.3 internally for the last couple of weeks and it’s already running on all of our demo’s. We’re happy to report that we’ve not found any issues with our themes running on WP 3.3, which means you are safe to update and take advantage of the new goodies included in Sonny.

We did however notice that in some rare cases, the spiffy new media uploader seemed to be broken when using a WooTheme. This is however solved by clearing your cache and refreshing your WP admin page. So don’t be alarmed if your first image upload doesn’t go as well as planned.

If you’ve already upgraded to WP 3.3: What is your most favourite new feature?

The WooAffiliates widget options.

Over the past few weeks we’ve been brainstorming ways of helping our affiliates advertise our themes in an efficient, professional manner. Previously, you’ve been limited to advertising banners and text links that you can manually place anywhere in blog posts, text/adsense widgets, sidebars and footers. Today we launch the “WooAffiliates” plugin that takes this a step further.

Available from the WordPress plugin repository you can now download and activate this light plugin that then enables a “WooAffiliates” widget. This widget comes with numerous simple display controls and a place to add your WooThemes username that automagically recognizes you as a WooThemes affiliate. Place this widget in a widgetized region and voila, you can proudly market WooThemes and start making money from sales referred from your site.

With version 1 of the plugin you can display a specific theme, the most popular in the past 30 days, a random theme, or the latest theme. Place this widget more than once if you like to highlight different themes in different areas of your site.

The code wranglers Matty and Warren have loads of plans to make this plugin/widget even more powerful and useful as a sales tool for you, all the while giving you complete control as to what and how you want to display it – subtly or more prominently.

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Our Canvas BuddyPress child theme has, to our surprise, been one of our most downloaded themes recently, yet we are guilty of not giving it the attention it deserves. It’s been ignored partially because of our capacity in-house, or lack thereof, and partly because of our lack of knowledge/skills with the plugin. We therefore thought that it would be a good idea to partner with top-notch BuddyPress specialists to take care of ongoing support, upgrades and fixes.

Enter Paul Weingartz and Jon Van Rooyen of Guntribe, two Cape Town based developers with a wealth of knowledge on BuddyPress. Over the past couple months they’ve been adding new template pages, including a widgetized homepage and new settings pages, fixing styling bugs and making the child theme is 100% compatible with 1.5.x. With 2.0 development already underway.

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The observant, who have downloaded and installed yesterday’s release, would have possibly seen a new tab under the WooThemes “Framework Settings” panel. If you haven’t don’t be alarmed, all is explained below.

The PressTrends "Framework Settings" options panel.

We were recently approached by George Ortiz, a member of the Storefront Themes team, about his new project called “PressTrends“.

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Here at Woo, we’re constantly looking out for new features we can incorporate into the WooFramework (the engine that powers all of our 104-and-counting WooThemes). Along with looking out for new features and enhancements, we feel it important to not “code and ignore” a feature, but rather to maintain each feature on a regular basis, to ensure the code evolves along with the WooFramework and our themes.

One of the most popular features across our themes is our custom typography options, which afford website administrators the option of customising the typography settings across their website with a few simple clicks in the WooFramework “Theme Options” screen. When customising the typography settings, the administrator makes changes, hits the “Save all Changes” button and then visits their website to see how the typography has changed. The process, therefore, consists of 3 steps: setup, save, view- until today.

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Good news – especially in the light of the recent vulnerability found in TimThumb – is that we recently worked with WordPress Lead Developer & Security Expert, Mark Jaquith, to do a complete security audit of the WooFramework. This is what Mark said about the audit:

WooThemes approached me to do a security audit on the framework that powers their themes. I ensured that WooFramework is using secure WordPress coding techniques, and gave their developers pointers on keeping it secure going forward. WooThemes understands that security is a process, and a commitment to users, so I will be doing a followup review at a later date to continue the security vigilance.

Matty & Jeff have worked tirelessly to implement all of the feedback that Mark provided and we’re happy to say that the WooFramework is now more secure than ever. Considering that the WooFramework powers all of our 99 (!!!) themes, this was a very important exercise for us in making sure that our code is as secure as possible. 

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This morning we were made aware of a security flaw within the Timthumb image resizing script, which is utilized in our themes for dynamic image resizing. It is also widely used in other WordPress themes and plugins.

As a result of this security flaw, the author of TimThumb and the author of WordThumb have worked together to release TimThumb v2 which fixes these security issues.

We’d highly recommend that you update your WooFramework like described below.

How to update your theme

Update TimThumb with WooFramework v4.4.2

You need to update to the latest version of the WooFramework (v4.4.2), as we have now moved thumb.php into the framework so it is easier to keep updated. There is also a new function in the framework which will remove your old TimThumb from the theme.

To update your Framework, simply go to your theme menu and select “Update Framework” (see our tutorial on the topic).

Need further help?

We have created a dedicated forum for TimThumb issues in our support forum. Please make a new post in this forum and we’ll be along to assist you. View the new forum.

Preface

Kris Millsap

I’m Kris Millsap, a web developer and video editor with New Media Samurai (NMS3 for short). We provide creative services (web development & video production) for companies looking to enhance and develop their brand/persona across the internet. We’re Affiliated Woo Workers and active users of WooJobs.

I am a super fan of WooThemes and the WooFramework. The flexibility and functionality combined with forward thinking of the WooFramework has enabled us to build client friendly sites at a much faster pace while keeping up with the latest and greatest trends on the ever evolving web. Canvas has become our boilerplate for almost all of our projects and the launch of Canvas v4 held as much anticipation and excitement for me as awaiting the latest iThing… well… close to that level of anticipation and excitement.

Adii recently asked me to translate a design from Chris Rowe utilizing Canvas v4 for use on his personal blog. It was a tremendous opportunity and the development of the Child Theme took me deeper down the Woo rabbit hole than I had been to date.

Canvas Layout: Before & After (design by Chris Rowe)

The following is a loose chronicle of my journey (I almost said Woo Journey, but thought that to be a bit Woo Much).

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I’ve been doing a bit of thinking lately about which of our themes & individual theme features are most valuable to users and I’ve come to a very simple conclusion: sometimes it is the least glamorous feature that is also one of the most valuable features.

I was specifically thinking of our “Custom Logo” function, which is included in every single theme and allows the user to quickly & easily replace the theme’s default logo with their own. No frills, no fuss. This isn’t a very glamorous feature and as far as usage goes, you’d probably find that almost all WooCommunity users have used it. The development that went into the feature is also minimal, since it’s not the most complicated function that ever needed coding. This obviously also means that support enquiries for this feature is pretty much non-existent.

Could this be the perfect feature? Maybe.

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A portfolio module has been one of the most popular requests for our Canvas framework theme. We’ve however always been cautious adding such heavy functionality into the theme and bloating the code. At least we have been until now…

With the recent launch of Canvas 4 a couple months back we are now hugely confident in Canvas’s codebase. Matty has spent countless hours refining the structure into a more modular design, flexible enough for child theming, and custom hooks, filters and functions to be added.

The Canvas portfolio page template.

As seen in our popular business themes, Canvas now boasts a full portfolio component for keeping track of all the awesome work you do and showcasing it to prospective clients and collaborators.

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We recently released Editorial, a magazine theme that aims to mimic familiar features of traditional print media, like newspapers and magazines. This post takes a look at the thought process that went into designing Editorial, and the implementation and development of some of those ideas.

Editorial’s design is very much inspired by traditional newspaper layouts, focusing on the content. The center aligned header, slightly textured background, strong sans-serif headlines, serif body copy and drop-caps all help to give the design a more traditional aesthetic. But the theme’s real strong point, the feature that sets it apart from other magazine themes, is it’s single post layouts. Users have the option to choose from a number of different columnized post content layouts, allowing each post to be styled uniquely.

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Independence Day was celebrated in style at WordPress headquarters with the launch of their latest version of WordPress 3.2 (dedicated to noted composer and pianist George Gershwin), that after 15 million downloads of WordPress 3.1!

If you haven’t already seen what the faster, cleaner version 3.2 offers watch this great video by WordPress which summarizes it’s new features and optimizations nicely.

Well done to all the core contributors!

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When we initially sat down to discuss features for FaultPress you may imagine the words “bugs, tickets, milestones, priorities” being thrown around a lot. And you’d be right. But beyond which functionality we built into FaultPress we were keen to ensure it’s usability was as good as it’s feature set. Not only on desktops, but on a variety of different devices.

“Responsive design” were two other words which kept cropping up. Mobile perusal of the web is an increasing trend and we decided to embrace this by delivering a device agnostic design. In Laymans terms this means that whether you’re checking out FaultPress on your desktop, your iPad or your smartphone, content is delivered to you in an intuitive and appropriate way.

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As our flagship theme, Canvas has seen many enhancements and additions since it’s released early last year. The response to Canvas’ flexibility and ease of use from users at all levels has been incredible. With this in mind, it was time to give Canvas a bit of a tune up under the hood and overhaul the code for even more flexibility.

When approaching a task of this nature, which concerns users of all types and skill levels, it is important to take that into consideration as a primary pillar on the project- users of all skill levels need to be able to take advantage of the new features. Enter the Manager modules.

The Manager modules, “Layout”, “Hooks” and “Meta”, provide users with an easy-to-use interface for making use of advanced functionality in Canvas (such as it’s bundled hooks via the “Hook” Manager and filtering common areas via the “Meta” Manager). This means that, without understanding too much about what a hook or filter is, a user can make use of them. Therefore, at a basic level, these advanced functionalities no longer seem daunting and unapproachable. More advanced users can, of course, still make use of a standard coded filter in their child theme, once comfortable with the concepts of what hooks and filters are.

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In the last couple of months, Canvas has well-and-truly become the flagship product here at WooThemes. Canvas is absolutely feature-packed with some of the best awesomeness we’ve ever developed and if you consider that Canvas was first released in March 2009, it boasts a truly mature feature set that has definitely been tried & tested.

We’ve noted recently that the WooCommunity has become more & more adept at modifying the heck out of WooThemes (especially Canvas) and in the process are creating some mind-blowingly beautiful websites. The recent re-launch of Wishlist Member was just another amazing example of the power & flexibility of Canvas.

This prompted us to sit down (using this user-submitted idea as the basis of our discussion), take some time out of our regular release schedule and attempt to work some magic into Canvas. We wanted to release a new version of Canvas, which would make your life easier in enabling you to create more unique, beautiful websites easier. Simple as that.

To that extent we’d like to announce that Canvas V4 is now ready for purchase (or for download to existing users / club subscribers) and we simply can’t wait to get your feedback on this release. Below we’ve given you a proper overview of all the new functionality that has been included int he new version of Canvas…

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