The WooThemes Blog

Disclaimer: This is a long post, but we guarantee you it’s worth the read. This is a big theme release!

Today sees the release of a theme that us at WooHQ are hugely excited about – partly because we have a few musicians within the team who are passionate about creating something they’d personally want to use, and partly because of the innovative modules and thinking that has gone into it’s development. We present to you “Unsigned”.

Unsigned was initially designed by our friend Ryan Downie, given the brief to design a modern version of one of our older, popular themes Backstage, all the while keeping it hugely versatile in it’s usage, for individual artists/musicians, as well as bands – spanning all genres of music. A rather difficult brief, but one that we feel Ryan mastered.

Matt was tasked with it’s development, whilst Mike given the design to slice, dice and convert into a WooFramework powered theme. As a musician and former band manager and promoter, Matt approached Unsigned from that angle- what would a musician, band manager or promoter want out of the theme?

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So 2012 has finally arrived and we are getting back into the swing of things at the speed of Woo…

Shelflife is our first 2012 theme, designed and developed in-house by the talented Mr Cobus Bester, a.k.a. Fresh01. Shelflife is a clean, e-commerce focussed theme with a homepage dedicated to featured, popular and recent products with dedicated spaces for mini-features and promotions powered by their own custom post types, as well as a widgetized sidebar and footer regions. Think of it as a hybrid business and e-commerce theme where your products can be as much or as little a focus as you desire with a dedicated shop page available too.

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The mysterious Bek.

A rather confusing title I bet you’re thinking?

Back in June this year a freelance digital designer by the name of Bek, from Moscow, submitted a design to us called Olya. I had difficulty finding Bek’s full name (it would help if I understood Russian), or the meaning of Olya, but we loved the design submitted and were keen to develop it as a theme.

6 months later we’ve finally had the time to give it the TLC it deserves, and pack it full of useful features. Today we’ve launch this versatile AND responsive business/portfolio theme.

The homepage of Olya comes with a slider, powered by the FlexSlider script and it’s own custom post type. With some creative placements of imagery, videos and content (as you can see in the demo) the slider really can pull off quite a variety of tasks. All the while being viewed on most mobile devices. The homepage also allows you to display portfolio items, blog posts and featured content in “Mini-feature” modules.

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Our latest theme release has been sitting on the backburner for a while now, ever since it was initially released as a Tumblr theme (which we’ve since discontinued). Not letting it go to waste the designer, and co-founder of WooThemes, Magnus Jepson hoped to find some time to give it some WordPress love and subsequently a more impressive feature-set. As can be seen on this blog we’ve been pretty busy this year so he only found the time a month ago, but we are very happy to finally get this out.

The Beveled homepage.

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Wikeasi is, as the name suggests a wiki theme, made real easy. Designed by Chris Rowe Wikeasi’s simple, clean and intuitive design might make it seem it’s a rather  simple theme, but there is a lot of power under the bonnet – with it’s content heavy layout still feeling spacious.

It has been one of our calmest, most streamlined theme releases to date part thanks to some new processes we’ve put in place to speed up product development and make the communication between team members more efficient, part due to the dynamic duo behind this project Mikey and Matty.

The Wikeasi default homepage layout

So if you are looking to start an internal wiki for your company, or an external audited one WikEasi might be the theme just for you because of a number of reasons:

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Andy Rutledge

The internet has become our primary source for all of our news on any topic, on any given day. It’s safe to say that the internet-age has revolutionized the way we consume & interact with the news, yet news publishers have still not fully embraced these new trends, instead preferring to stick to their tried-and-tested, print-based best practices.

In August, Andy Rutledge, published an article (which is unfortunately not available anymore, but you can read a few of the reactions on this article here) on how he felt digital news was broken. Using The New York Times as a case study for his article, he included a proposed redesign of their website, which garnered a lot of attention from the design community; especially due to Andy’s bold, innovative – but well-thought-out – suggestions.

This design came to our attention at that time and we subsequently swooped and purchased the rights to release it here on WooThemes. Today then marks the release date of the fantastically-designed, Currents.

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Today sees the release of a new responsive WooCommerce theme called Emporium, equipped with all the homepage modules to showcase featured and recent shop products, recent blog posts, sticky notes, sales banners and a featured slider. Not to forget the widgetized footer region to add those personal touches.

Emporium’s uniqueness lies in it’s fixed top navigation that is always accessible even when at the bottom of a long page of content, with space for two menus – one top right and one bottom left, and also includes a cleanly designed shopping cart dropdown.

Emporium's fixed top menu.

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This week we have three more WooCommerce child themes available for our most popular business themes. What does that mean for you if you own one of the above themes? It means you can very easily get an online shop running with the WooCommerce plugin, a child theme and possibly one or two extensions.

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The second theme release for this month is a magazine theme that doubles as a business theme, and triples as a portfolio theme. It’s flexibilty lies in it’s modular design and it’s ability to highlight multiple authors blog posts and portfolio items efficiently.

With so many cowork spaces popping up all over the world, creating affordable, shared work environments for freelancers we thought it only fitting to provide them with a theme that helps sell the space, and the people who use it better.

The default Teamster homepage showcasing the various authors.

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We promised you continual and significant upgrades & new features for WooCommerce and we plan to keep to that promise, especially since it’s already been downloaded over 5,000 times in 7 days!

Today we are launching a premium WooCommerce theme, 3 payment gateway extensions and a product enquiry extension too.

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Buró - A business theme that responds

“Responsive” design has been the buzz word amongst web designers on social media channels & blogs for the past few months, some debating how it will change the web. This week marked quite a milestone with a major news publication “The Boston Globe” launching a subscription-only website featuring content from the daily newspaper as well as breaking news, customized for different digital devices, including smartphones and tablets (Source: The Washington Post).

The idea of having a layout that adjusts according to the browser width/resolution and device it is viewed on, without the use of any plugins, or seperate design stylesheets is one that has been commonly requested within the WordPress community.

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An incredible amount has happened since we launched in July 2008, as we mentioned in our 3rd birthday blog post. Today marks another monumental milestone we are hugely proud about – our 100th theme release.

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Pretty baby statistics with the Announcement theme.

Matthew Smith approached us a few months ago, before the talented SquaredEye design team shut office to join forces with a booming online start-up. He had a theme idea for us, after previously designing the slick charity theme “Saving Grace”. I received an email one morning reading:

I was driving this morning and thought about an Announcement theme. It would be a one page theme. I’m thinking about a wedding or birth announcement in particular with a commenting piece attached so that people can add their happiness

We like the idea and believed it was worth pursuing as there was/is nothing too similar in the WP theme space catering for this rather large personal niche of happy couples announcing a wedding, the birth of a baby, the graduation of a son or daughter, or any big event in one’s life. Nothing overly complicated, some photos, a blurb of text, a guestbook-type commenting system, some info graphics of statistics maybe, and some registry links.

Enter new theme, Announcement.

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The innovative Chapters menu system.

In the last couple of months, we’ve steadily been working with the Theme Team over at WordPress.com to roll out some of our most popular themes to WP.com users. Today’s release of Chapters, takes our tally of WordPress.com to 5 in total, with more themes being ported over in due course over the next couple of months.

The other themes we currently have available for WordPress.com are:

• Fresh News
• Headlines
• Delicious Magazine
• Crisp

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Mr Ryan O'Rourke

Then we have just the theme for you!

A few months ago we were introduced to Ryan O’Rourke, via our “Submit a Design” page. He sent us a beautifully polished theme design catering for real estate agents listing their properties in a pixel perfect featured slider with sub-featured listings, and what looked like lots of widgetized goodness. Needless to say we loved the design, but felt it could cater for more than just real estate agents by applying some more generic modules to the home page. We purchased “Empire” from Ryan and Tiago, Jeff and Magnus got to work on it.

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So much goodness.

It’s been only just over a month since Jay and Mike released FaultPress – an advanced bug tracking application theme, but they didn’t just stop there, they went straight back to the drawing board, read all our community’s recommendations and suggestions and started developing a new, more general usage support theme catering for a wider range of niches. We are proud to release that theme today – introducing SupportPress.

SupportPress, our second application style theme is designed to create a clean and simple, yet powerful help desk using WordPress core functionality. Customers can submit support requests, but are encouraged to check an intuitive knowledgebase to learn if their issues have already been resolved. Agents (your staff) administrate tickets by setting priorities and delegating tasks to fellow team members.

The solution is perfect for web designers, hosting companies, app developers, training academies, to name but a few examples. It takes WordPress as a content management system and turns it into a basic customer relationship management system.

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