City Guide - a directory based Wordpress theme

In recent theme releases, we’ve been exploring a few niche environments, instead of the standard business or magazine theme possibilities, in the hope that we can grow the long tail of our themes collection. Based on the success of Postcard, we’ve thus decided to give the geo-location arena another go, with the release of the smashing City Guide theme.

City Guide’s design was masterfully crafted by popular web designer, Sam Brown, who we worked with towards the end of last year (yes: quality takes time). The design itself is shiny in all the right places and Sam did a great job of delivering the Apple influences that we requested, without limiting this theme as an open canvas to morph to your own needs.

The Implementation

Where this theme really starts shining through, is in it’s niche implementation of being a location-based directory.

Using the Google Maps API again, the theme allows you to publish significant landmarks, tourist attractions & restaurants (whatever location you want) in a location-based directory. In our opinion, the theme will work best when used for one specific region, city or even small towns, but it would most definitely also work if you wanted to publish listings anywhere in the world.

The great thing about all of this, is that the extra geo-location bits are integrated into your WordPress write panels, so adding that information just takes a few extra seconds. You can have a look at City Guide’s write panel here:

Your custom City Guide write panel

In addition to the Google Maps functionality, we’ve also integrated the very popular WP-PostRatings plugin. So all of your listings will have an automated rating service enabled if you have the plugin installed.

Making Money

Since this theme sports such a niche purpose, we also believe that the possibility to make money off it is increased. Beyond the different advertising spaces that are scattered throughout the theme, it also offers endless possibilities in terms of selling products & services via affiliate links. Consider this:

If you’ve got a few massive tourist attractions in your directory (powered by City Guide of course), you can include affiliate links to their respective websites and earn commissions when your readers buys some tickets from them.

So whilst we’re definitely not pro’s at affiliate marketing (or creating location-based directories for that matter…), we can surely see a lot of potential here and we’re excited to see some of our users exploiting that!

Mmmm... the City Guide home page design

Enough from us though… Check out the detailed specs for City Guide here or have a little play with the demo. Also – never forget to tell us what you think of our latest release!

This means that we’re all refreshed and ready to rock again. We gathered some amazing ideas via all of the discussions on the trip, fueled by much Jagermeister, and we’re looking forward to roll those out in the coming months.

But first up, you can expect the release of CityGuide, which should be going out later this week. The theme is basically ready to go, and has been thoroughly beta-tested, so it’s just a matter of wrapping up the little bits & pieces and then releasing what we expect to be another hit. Thereafter we have a few more surprises (these will definitely include these two designs which we teased last week), but I’ll leave it at that…

And on the content-front, I’m hoping to expand on the idea of using your own products as a great marketing strategy soon. We will also be working on a “case study” of sorts for the Woo on the Slopes campaign, where we have a look at some positives / negatives of the trip and how those influenced sales & traffic (both of which went up btw). So you can look out for that too.

For now though, we’re just happy to be back and rocking again.

Whilst design is ultimately subjective, one thing that can’t be disputed is the fact that our designer focus has probably contributed significantly to our success. This seems to be confirmed by startup guru, Dave McClure, in a recent BusinessWeek article about the value of design to startups:

“Design and marketing aren’t just as important as engineering: They are way more important.”

So in a very techy industry (the interwebs), there seems to be a lot of room for the more design-orientated folk among us. In the past, you could probably get by if you had a superior & groundbreaking product, but these days your competition is much tougher and you need to fight for every person that gives you their attention (superb design tends to be successful in this regard).

In a recent comparison of microblogging giants, Tumblr & Posterous, the author says (about Tumblr’s popularity):

“Or, to put it another way: Posterous is an engineered product, while Tumblr is a designed product.”

Two posts on the topic and both seems to indicate that a superb design has become a competitive advantage, which may just differentiate you from your competitors (and ultimately bring you success, instead of putting that on their doorstep).

Design.

By now you can guess where we’re going with this: don’t underestimate the value that design can bring to your startup or just any project in general.

Superb design work is admittedly quite expensive, but a mediocre design, user experience & marketing campaign just won’t cut it anymore. If you haven’t been giving this enough thought & energy until now, you need to implement a more design-focused approach in your thinking & strategizing.

We’re just one of the success stories in terms of companies that has been successful with this approach and whilst I don’t think that you can’t be successful without such an approach; I do think you’re giving yourself a massive head start. Bonus for me is the fact that others seem to be convinced that you can design your way to the top.

So below is a preview of our upcoming theme, CityGuide, which went out to beta recently. If all goes well, CityGuide should be released next week, so keep watching this space!

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.

Too Easy

Here’s a little preview of the backend:

WooFramework: URL Shortening Settings

And this is what the function (in the front-end) looks like:

<a title='Short URL for <?php the_title(); ?>' href='<?php echo woo_short_url(get_permalink()); ?>'>Short URL</a>

Instead of thus using a standard WP template tag for the link, we’re now just using one function:

<?php echo woo_short_url(get_permalink()); ?>

What do you think?

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?

It was cold and wet outside, typical London weather. I thought where would I ideally be right there and then? Surprisingly I thought I’d like to be somewhere even colder… The Alps. Skiing.

I went back home and wrote a quick email to Magnus and Adii saying something along the lines of “let’s take advantage of our internet-based business and take it somewhere completely different for a week or two. Let’s try and take the core team with us and have a good team build, brainstorm over our plans for the rest of the year, and watch each other wipe out on icy slopes. All the while documenting the journey for our users, and site visitors, to find out about the other side of our team.”

Naturally they didn’t take much persuading.

4 and a bit months later, after much research, we’ve booked a trip for the 6 of us to the Saalbach resort in the Austrian Alps. We leave tomorrow night.

Yup, it’s short notice. But we are internet based business. We’ll still be contactable over all the channels we usually are. We’ll be answering email, designing themes, supporting themes and working on marketing strategies. All the while having some fun.

We’ve built a site dedicated to the adventure, and it’s built on our latest micro-blogging Tumblog themes. Meaning you can expect lots of bite-sized posts, photos and videos, plus some exciting new Tumblog functionality that we’ll be announced during the week away.

Time to pack.

First change we’ve made is giving ExpressionEngine it’s own home here on WooThemes. You can now get your EE fix there – we hope it now becomes clear why you can (in future) consider EE as an alternative for personal & client projects.

Then more great news is that two of our best-selling business themes – Delegate & The Station – are both now available for ExpressionEngine. This takes our total amount of ExpressionEngine themes to 5, with more coming soon.

What’s Next?

We’d love to know which of our themes you think we should port to EE next? What are your favourites? And which themes do you think will be a rip-roaring success on EE?

Tumblogging Powered by WordPress

Microblogging has seen it’s popularity rise considerably in the last couple of months; probably as a result of information overload and the fact that most people struggle to keep full-on blogs updated regularly. In addition, platforms such as Tumblr & Posterous have made massive strides in making micro-blogging (also tumblogging) more accessible to a more mainstream audience.

So it’s with this in mind that we set out to replicate the extremely easy-to-use functionality of Tumblr & Posterous, and incorporate it into a WordPress-powered theme. Now you can have the benefits of easy & efficient micro-blogging, right on your own server & WordPress installation, with the benefit being that you own & control your own data (i.e. you don’t need to share that on some cloud platform somewhere else).

QuickPress’ing

QuickPress Widget

The most important thing for micro-blogging, is that the process of adding new content needs to be “micro” to save you time (and increase efficiency) when adding new content.

To accomplish this, we have developed a new QuickPress widget (that sits on your WordPress dashboard as you log-in), which is exclusive to WooThemes and our microblogging themes. The AJAX-powered interface allows you to quickly add a variety of different content (videos, audio, images, notes, links & quotes) without having to leave the dashboard or go the default publishing route (Posts > Add New). Also, there is no need to worry about custom fields when using the QuickPress widget, as everything is handled for you. It’s a Cinch to use!

More Exclusive Goodies

In addition to the awesome QuickPress functionality, both Cinch & Slanted include the following features:

• The themes supports a variety of text & multimedia content. At the moment the following post types are supported: Notes / Articles, Images, Videos, Audio Clips, Links & Quotes. These are all handled uniquely & automatically once you have setup the theme & categorization of the posts accordingly.
• We’ve included a bunch of unique jQuery wizardry to allow for cool scrolling / navigation between posts, as well as including hot-keys for frequently-used navigation (Home, Search & navigation), which allows you to use keyboard strokes, instead of the mouse.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Go Micro!

We know you want to; it’s the trendy thing to do!

Have a look at the demo’s of Cinch and Slanted to truly get a feel of how amazing that front-end & jQuery wizardry feels when you use it. And if you want to experiment with QuickPress & the rest of the backend, jump over to our Playground and play with the micro-blogging themes there.

See, when Mark, Magnus & I started WooThemes we had limited experience & knowledge in running a business, and much less in establishing new online brand. To say that we’ve had to learn on the job would thus be a gross understatement; beyond knowing how to design & code, we really don’t *know* much more.

That is why I started off by saying that what you see in front of you today, is a company & brand that has undergone continuous tweaks & changes in the last 2-odd years and the only reason we’ve managed to pull it off is because we have never been fearful of taking a few risks and investing heavily in our ideas, vision & ambitions. Had we however allowed that “fear” to consume us, things may have been a little different… Let me explain…

As an example, I’d like to point to our existing backend system: when we first launched WooThemes, we realized that it had some glaringly obvious limitations and whilst the launch of WOO2 last year went a long way in addressing some of those limitations, we still don’t have a perfect system. Consider the odd login & billing imperfections / glitches in our system and it is clear that we’re a long way off from offering our users a perfect environment. But that’s not the point…

What we could’ve done in the past, was to develop a perfect system from the get-go, which would’ve eliminated those issues now. This would have been a lengthy and costly exercise though, and something that is always easier to say in hindsight. Instead, we opted to embrace the limitations & imperfections of our backend system (and our business as a whole) and just evolve everything as we go. Getting what we want to offer you, to you quicker.

The point that I want to bring across though, is that even considering all of this, we’ve still been able to build a business that is both profitable and becoming more sustainable as time goes on. Irrespective of the lack of experience, knowledge & the massive budget most people think is needed to create a new business, we’ve created something against most odds; the only barrier to entry would’ve thus been the limitations that we set ourselves in our minds.

Don’t be afraid to evolve your ideas and build from an imperfect foundation. There are always ways to rectify those imperfections in the future, and being conscious of those imperfections shouldn’t deter you from gunning for your vision & ambition with utter passion & motivation.

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.

This is what the Custom Navigation is looking like at the moment:

The New Custom Navigation in WP 3.0

Jeff & a few other leading WP contributors will now spend some time with the community in getting their feedback before further tweaks are made (you can get involved on the Trac ticket here). There are still a few obvious UI and then a few more technical things that needs attention, but overall the project is bang-on track and we’re super excited about seeing it rolled out in WP 3.0!

Then we probably need to announce the winner of the shiny, new MacBook that we are giving away… Massive congratulations to Adam Pickering from ThemeCouponCodes who generated the most affiliate sales during the WooLove period. Thank you for the loyal support in promoting our products Adam; you’re MacBook is already on its way!

To those of you that participated, but didn’t win, we’d like to say thank you as well. It’s awesome being entrenched in this vibrant & ever-growing community that is WooThemes, and we really hope that in the future we’d be able to do more of these kind of promotions, where we get to interact with our amazing users & fans!

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.

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.

We are excited that we can give something substantial back to the core after a somewhat hesitant decision to GPL license our themes a few months ago. This proves to us, and hopefully others, how the GPL license should be correctly utilized to benefit others.

Kudos must be given out to Jeff Pearce, who was employed late last year by WooThemes and undertook the WooNav system as his first official development project for us. Not a bad first splash in the water we must say!

What excites us even more about this relationship with the WordPress core team is what Jane said to us in her email:

This year I’m hoping to work on ways to bring the commercial WP-based companies and core closer together, as opposed to what sometimes feels like a weird rivalry, so this would be a nice beginning for that

What’s next?

Jeff has already begun working with Ryan Boren (one of WordPress’ lead developers) on porting the WooNav into “patch form”, which will then in turn be submitted to the core of WordPress. Feature freeze for WordPress 3.0 is this week and we’re hoping to have ported the WooNav to the core ASAP, so that the community may start discussing the functionality, after which we will continue to work with the WP developers and the community on improving and finalizing the functionality for WP 3.0.

“Unfortunately” this impacts our users, since these developments mean we have to delay the integration & roll-out of the WooNav to all our themes. Whilst the implementation thereof will stay 99% the same, we don’t want to potentially duplicate work for ourselves and have decided to wrap-up the porting & development of the WooNav into core WP first, before integrating it with all of our themes.

You can however rest assured that by the time WordPress 3.0 hits your web browser, we’ll have included support for this amazing functionality in all of our themes. So this new awesomeness from the two W’s is not far off and all WooThemes will soon be able to enjoy it in all of its glory.

To celebrate this year’s Valentine’s Day, we’ve decided to create a unique, little promotion that is sure to attract the attention of your loved ones and friends. We’ve been known to do the occasional “X-for-1″ promotion and whilst we know you adore them, we’d like to challenge you to send the WooLove to others this time.

So here’s the deal: We’ve created a new Valentine’s Day section in your user account dashboard which will allow you to send as much WooLove to as many of your friends, family members, and business contacts as you like. This WooLove will be sent out in the form of a special Valentine’s email that will include your details, and more importantly: a unique 50% OFF discount coupon for individual theme purchases for every friend that you send it to!

Pretty cool, huh? We think your friends would really appreciate some of that WooLove… Don’t you?

And we’ll cut you into that deal too… We will include your own affiliate link in the e-mail. So for every friend that clicks through to the site and accepts your invite to become their WooValentine, you’ll be getting 20% of any purchases. There isn’t an easier way to earn some cash than that…

But wait! There’s more…

Oh, how we have wanted to use this phrase in a blog post…

For the whole period that the WooLove promotion will be active (12 – 19 February), we will be checking who of you are the smoothest cupids when it comes to convincing others to be your WooValentine. The person that generates the most purchases amongst his / her friends during this period will win a brand-new Apple MacBook as a prize! You read it right: just send some WooLove to as many friends as possible and you may actually win an Apple Macbook!

Notes & Rules

This is what you would need to do:

1. Log into your user dashboard over here.
2. Go to the special Valentine’s Day page to send some WooLove.
3. Add as many friends / recipients as you like, then customize the message if you see fit.
4. Click “send” and the WooLove will be on it’s way to your friends.
5. Forget a few friends? Go back to step 3 & repeat.

And then just a few rules:

• The promotion runs from 12 – 19 February. That’s it.
• If you win the MacBook, you can always ask us for the cash instead.
• Please DON’T SPAM! Only send the WooLove to actual friends & people you know.

Got it? Now go send some WooLove already!

In the last couple of weeks Magnus has been spearheading a project to develop a brand-new theme that would add a few touches of uniqueness to our collection. Along with the odd contribution from the rest of the WooTeam, we managed to create a new & improved starting point for your blog.

Canvas started out as a re-write of the starter theme that we were using with WooFramework2, to develop all of our existing themes on-top off. But we seemingly got carried away a little bit and Canvas truly came into its own right, serving its own purpose and satisfying some of your more specific needs.

What is Canvas?

In a nutshell, we could say that Canvas is a clean & minimalistic theme with a whole bunch of easy-to-use, backend design controls, which literally gives you click ‘n play carte blanche to tweak most of the CSS properties of the default design.

What we’ve tried to create is a theme that is perfectly suited for the “enthusiast” developers (i.e. those of us that know just enough code to be a danger to our own blogs) in that they would be able to tweak & experiment with Canvas without having to touch one line of code. So changing colours, font-styles, borders etc. really is a breeze with Canvas. Here’s a few of the design controls available to you:

• 90+ options to tweak colours, borders, font-sizes, font-families etc.;
• Upload background & header imagery via our backend;
• Easily modify the width of your site (choose between 5 presets) or pick between 6 different layout options.

Sound good? Watch this video in which Magnus brings his paint bucket to Canvas…

Painting on Canvas

It’s for *Real* Developers too…

We’re hesitant to use the word “framework” in the same sentence as Canvas, as that is not what it is and that’s not what we’re trying to sell here. BUT – Canvas is the closest that WooThemes has come to releasing a real developer-type framework theme.

At the moment, Canvas includes 25 hooks, which means that if WordPress child theming is your thing, you would now be able to use those to customize the theme without having to tweak the code of the parent theme.

To give you an idea of what is possible if you use Canvas along with a unique child theme, have a look at this Fresh News-inspired design that Magnus built on top of Canvas (as a child theme i.e. the core Canvas files stays unmodified):

Fresh Canvas child theme for Canvas

Download Fresh Canvas.

So on this front, Canvas also presents some new possibilities for newbie & advanced WordPress developers alike. If front-end tweaking is your choice, we’ve got your covered via all the design controls in the backend and if you’d rather get your hands code-dirty, we have all those hooks to sink your teeth into.

The Final Goodies

If you have a look at Canvas’ full theme features, you’ll see that it includes all of the custom Woo widgets as always and has been built on the immaculate WooFramework2. Canvas users will also be gushing about the fact that the theme already has built-in support for the recently developed WooNav; so beyond your design tweaks, you also have complete control over your navigation.

You can also consider this release to be a proper V1 release and whilst we plan to add some awesome new things to Canvas in the coming months, it’s a rock-solid release already. So if you start to get acquainted with Canvas now; your relationship will only get better in the months to come.

If you’re still not convinced, have a look at Canvas’ beautiful design on the demo and then consider purchasing Canvas for your next project.

So this is the first preview of our first two tumblog themes – Cinch & Slanted. Both were designed by Cobus and will feature amazing jQuery wizardry and some CSS3 advancements (for those cool kids that know all about using superior browsers). In the backend we’re also planning a few surprises that we hope to get as close to a proper Tumblr-style tumblog experience as possible.

Both themes should be ready later this month, but for now these teasers will have to keep you satisfied…

We know we should’ve done this a long, long time ago, but when things are moving so quickly (and you’re releasing 3 / 4 awesome new themes every month), the smaller things tend to fall from the radar. But better late than never, right?

The Playground is a WPMU setup, which allows you to test-drive our themes and experiment with the backend features (which has been impossible on our demo’s). So if you’ve been contemplating buying one of our themes, you should seriously consider playing with it first and making sure that it’s the right fit for you.

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.

When you’re busy, it is very easy to miss small shifts in thinking & practice like this, but when you stumble on something like this, it can be really profound and value-adding. I don’t think that we’re going to start developing plugins, building our own CMS or become the next Google / Microsoft / Yahoo, but it interesting to note that a business sometimes shifts itself based on user needs & wants.

So we’re extremely excited and passionate about this “new” door that has been opened to us. Hopefully we can continue building on the platform we’ve been given here now. Follow this space with curiosity & excitement.

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.

Postcard by WooThemes is our first dedicated travel blogging theme. It’s packed full of features and some pretty unique Google Maps integration that allows you to geo-tag your posts with a location. You’ll then be able to show your site visitors a map in the blog post showing exactly where you are, plotted on a map or snapped from outta space!

The custom map panel you'll find under your blog post editor once you've activated the theme.

Two custom widgets then allow you to show a Google map on your home page with your blog posts plotted on the map. “My Journey” widget can plot posts tagged with a specific tag, e.g. “america”, and then plot the posts written in America and the journey you took demonstrated by a polyline, starting from the oldest tagged post to the newest tagged post. The “Overview Map” widget shows all your posts that have been geo-tagged across the world, without the polyline.

Postcard also comes with a great AJAX based category image gallery developed by our code wizard Jeffikus. It is viewable here and documented in the video below.

A quick video overview

Here’s a little video introduction to Postcard that will help explain things better and give you an overview of more awesome functionality like the image gallery template and the Flickr and Twitter widgets.

A real life example

As mentioned in the video, the Postcard installation has already been implemented by some friends who are traveling from London to Cape Town in a Toyota Landcruiser. The theme works perfectly for their needs and serves as a great practical demonstration of what you can achieve with it very simply.

http://www.thevuvuzeladiaries.com/

Think out of the box

Postcard offers 9 alternate styles, ranging from a a minimally styled blank canvas, to an airmail envelope style. The potential with this theme can be seen when looking at the demo. Think out of the box, this theme can serve far more purposes than just as a travel blogging theme. It could be a corporate theme, showcasing a business’s various satellite offices dotted around the world.

The 'airmail' alternate style

Excited about the possibilities? Ready to make it your own? View the demo here. If you are a club member download it right away! Or if you are new to WooThemes make the purchase now. Of course it includes our great new custom navigation plugin that we launched yesterday.