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?

The Unsigned homepage, as customized on our demo. And boy can you customize it, thanks to complete widget and theme option control!

One of the major advantages of Unsigned is that the artist has full control over the technical nature of their exposure. Whether aware of it or not. The functionality has been developed to anticipate the needs of the artist without them needing to add any extra code. This same approach is working hand in hand with our modular coding approach, making the code both smooth for the customer and swiftly maintained by us. The Unsigned homepage is almost completely controlled by widgets and a comfortable amount of theme options, making it hugely flexible (something a couple users expressed interest for yesterday).

A run down of the various Unsigned modules

Let’s jump straight into the various theme modules as there is a lot to cover.

Custom post types power Unsigned, and the Events module has a particularly clever one.

Events Module

Woo – Events caters for the management and listing of events (gigs, festivals, etc). Events can be grouped into categories (club, concert, gig, festival, etc) and tours. These are both custom taxonomies.

An event’s status (upcoming, right now, past) is determined by it’s start and end date/time. It’s also possible to select one of these types for display in the Woo – Events admin, making it easier to view snapshots of your events calendar.

The events module and the widget that controls it. Simple.

Woo – Events comprises 3 widgets as well as a custom “Tours” page template. The widgets are for listing events, tours and tour dates for a specific tour. The events widget has options to display all events, upcoming events, past events, events happening right now, events happening this weekend and events taking place in the current week. The “Tours” page template serves as an archive for listing tours listed on the website. These link to tour detail pages where the events for that tour are listed.

Venue listing, as well as links to online ticket sales and an optional price display are available per event.

Discography Module

Woo – Discography is where the artist manages their album releases. Albums can be sorted into categories and comprise a cover image, unique catalog ID and a release date.

Each album has an audio player facility, which uses tracks that are uploaded directly when adding or editing an album. The tracks can be re-ordered and managed using native WordPress lightbox windows.

The album widget placed on the homepage, and it's controls.

If WooCommerce is installed, each album displays an option to link the album to a product. If there is a link made, an “Add to cart” button for that product will be displayed alongside the album on it’s detail screen, as well as in the Woo – Albums widget. View the shop page here.

An album page with WooCommerce enabled allowing you to sell your albums.

Woo – Discography contains two widgets: the Woo – Albums widget, to list either all albums or albums in a specific category, and the Woo – Album Player widget, to list and play tracks from a specific album using an HTML5 audio player.

Photos Module

Woo – Photos is where the artist manages their photo galleries. Galleries can be sorted into categories and comprise a cover image and photo management section.

The photo management section is a clear and easy to use box in the admin that allows for the quick uploading, management (re-ordering, etc) and inclusion of images in the gallery. This is then applied on both the gallery detail screen and the Woo – Photos widget.

Woo – Photos comprises two widgets: Woo – Photos and Woo – Galleries. Woo – Photos displays either all photos with a limit count, or X number of photos from a specific gallery. Woo – Galleries displays a list of the photo galleries available, either in a specific category or across all categories.

Videos Module

Woo – Videos is where the artist manages their embedded videos from YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Videos can be sorted into categories and comprise an optional posterframe and an embed code field.

Woo – Videos consists of a single Woo – Embed widget which, similarly to our standard widget, displays videos from a specific video category or all videos, allowing for the quick switching between videos.

Band Module

Woo – Band Members is where the artist manages their band member profiles. This section consists of a “mugshot” image and a “role” field, for the band member’s role in the band (eg: guitarist).

Woo – Band Members also consists of a single “Band Members” page template, which lists the band members in the order they are set to display in. This can be re-arranged via the “order” field when adding/editing a band member.

Their band biography is added via the content area. View the biography page here.

Homepage slider

As has become a favourite within our themes, Unsigned includes Woo – Slides. This module displays a large background image on the homepage, as well as a slider content area above the content on the homepage. When navigating through the slider, the background image fades to the appropriate image.

These images are added using the slider image field.

Soundcloud integration

Woo – SoundCloud is a bridge between Unsigned and SoundCloud. When a username is specified, the system connects to SoundCloud and retrieves the user’s tracks and playlists.

These two content types are outputted via a Woo – SoundCloud – Playlist widget for specific playlists and a Woo – SoundCloud Tracks widget to display individual players for specific tracks.

This data is cached for a month to avoid speed issues and high load. It is possible to force-refresh this data via a “Refresh SoundCloud Data” button, made available under the “SoundCloud” tab in “Theme Options”.

Changing to a light style is as simple as flicking a switch. As is changing the logo. Transforming the look.

Adding a different background image, and using some different homepage widgets further demonstrates the theme's flexibility. All done in 5 minutes...

Spend another 5 minutes with the theme and can you imagine the possibilities? You have to view the theme listing for more information on all the functionality packed into this theme. Trust us!

Let us know what you think! Any feedback is welcome in the comments below.

P.S. Thanks to Captain Stu for letting us feature them and their awesome music in our demo.

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.

The shop page with it's dark, prominent sidebar.

It’s default styling is clean, with heavy contrast of blacks, greys and whites with a responsive layout adapting it’s display for your media type and browser width.

The homepage promotions module powered by it's own custom post type.

As you've come to expect with most our WooCommerce themes, the layout will adapt responsively according to different media types..

Let us know what you think! Any feedback is welcome in the comments below.

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.

The Olya homepage. Too much goodness to fit into a screenshot...

Viewable on all devices, at all sizes!

What also differentiates Olya from our other portfolio themes is it’s custom single portfolio post template. With a side menu to quickly navigate through individual portfolio items, and a tabber to get through imagery within a portfolio item.

A portfolio post. Navigate via the side menu and click through images in the portfolio tabber.

We’ve also ensured Bek’s vision of a slightly more custom contact page was developed in the theme. The contact page not only includes our standard contact form, but also the individual/company’s latest tweet, physical address and a Google Map showing the location.

The custom contact page of Olya.

Have a look at Olya’s complete feature set here or experience Olya in full on the demo before letting us know what you think.

The Beveled homepage.

The beauty of Beveled is it’s simplicity. It’s not overly designed, but well coded and perfect for people wanting to customise a theme through typography, custom background images, custom logos and widgets.

Beveled is a clean yet sophisticated portfolio theme, which can be used to show off your work, or even display your photos. It is compatible with the WooTumblog plugin, which when enabled gives you access to post formats and iPhone publishing, thanks to our Express App!

It’s minimal design allows the content lots of space to breath and showcase. With a responsive design the theme adapts to the media type it is being viewed on.

The Beveled blog page with the tumblog being used.

Thanks to the custom typography editor in the theme options you can really transform it’s look by simply changing some header, paragraph, post meta and navigation font families.

The blue alternate style with the custom typgrography theme options used to transform the look of this theme.

Have a look at Beveled’s complete feature set here or experience Beveled in full on the demo before letting us know what you think.

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:

Key theme features

• Reference management, for easily annotating posts and pages, with it’s own dedicated custom post type and a WYSIWYG form button to link the references to content.

The 'Insert Reference' button, as well as a reference already placed in the content represented by the star icon.

The popup presenting once the insert reference is chosen. All your references added as custom post types appear to choose from.

• Tooltips on each reference to show information about the reference in the content without taking the user away from their reading.

A reference tooltip in the post content.

• Revisions logic, including a list of revisions as well as the differences between the revision being viewed and the current published version.

Two revisions of a post compared, viewable by any site visitor thanks to the revisions functionality.

Revisions and references listed below the post content.

• Accordion-style sidebar navigation, using native WordPress widgets for the links.
• Customised search box, including search suggestions and an AJAX “live” search, which displays results without leaving the page. Automatic redirect on searches with a single result, to send the visitor directly to that single result (this enables quicker access to the content).

Auto-complete search result suggestions.

• A Dynamic table of contents for each page and post, based on headings within the content (as well as a shortcode for the table of contents).

An optional table of content in the post content.

• Detailed author archives, including an author biography and a list of contributions they’ve made (posts added, posts revised, media uploaded).

The custom author archive page

• Filter bar for re-ordering posts in the current view (homepage, archive, search) according to “most recent”, “most commented” and “recently modified”. This bar also includes a post limiter to specify how many entries are displayed per page.
• An optional three-column layout via a dynamic widgetized area that appears when widgets are added to it.

The 3 column homepage layout with the red alternate style activated.

• Several navigation systems (the primary navigation in the header, optional top navigation and sidebar widget menu systems) to distribute navigation of various types (categories, internal “about” pages, etc).

Making use of WP core

At it’s heart, the ethos behind Wikeasi is to keep everything lightweight… from the design through to the development. With this in mind, Wikeasi makes extensive use of WordPress core functionality and logic to produce some of the unique functionality of the theme. Revisions management and differences, references logic, the AJAX search and the filter bar all make use of core WordPress logic, with a few Woo tweaks and additions.

We did warn you there was a lot to this clean, simple looking theme. The beauty of it is if you scour over the template files you’ll see the code is meticulous and you really can build something quite powerful on top of it.

For those not needing a Wiki theme it’s still a very attractive theme that you could simplify as a magazine or personal theme. The search facility is optional, and you could quite easily remove the references and revisions logic. We have loads of plans for future revisions, but first we’ll access the update and your feedback.

Have a look at Wikeasi’ complete feature set here or experience Wikeasi in full on the demo before letting us know what you think.

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.

The News by Currents

Currents Redesigns The News

In his original article, Andy identified three reasons that prompted him to publish the article & proposed NYT redesign:

1. Existing online news was broken;
2. Online content is profit-driven, resulting in content / designs being compromised for the sake of placing advertisements & making money; and
3. Content should be delivered perfectly and only once; no need for different versions across multiple platforms or devices.

Current's Beautiful Single Article Page

With this in mind (along with all the other considerations that went into Andy’s design), we’ve tried to stick as closely as possible to Andy’s original vision. Currents as you see it released today, is that original vision tweaked slightly to accommodate WordPress and includes the default modules that we do from theme-to-theme.

Currents on the iPhone

Here’s a few of the stand-out features of the theme:

• Currents is a fully responsive design and looks beautiful on any screen size or mobile device. The FlexSlider allows for swiping on touch devices.
• The narrow, 800px content width is aimed at taking away the clutter and making the consumption of content easier.
• Headlines are scannable, allowing you to quickly peruse all of the content and selecting which specific articles to dive into.
• We’ve included a whole bunch of customizable news areas: be selective in which articles appears in the different areas on your homepage, archive pages or within the related articles list on single pages.
• If you’re like us, you prefer reading editorial content by your favourite authors. Currents includes extended author profiles, which allows you to dig into your favourite author archives.

They say “content is king” and that mantra hasn’t changed today. Currents’ fantastic design does however help make your content king like very little other themes / designs can. Have a look at Currents’ complete feature set here or experience Currents in full on the demo.

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.

Similar to Argentum the theme adapts to the media device it is being viewed on, even the homepage slider will scale, like our Buro theme. That’s if you want to use it at all, you might prefer to have the prominent homepage real estate display featured products, or even have the blog and recent products right under the header space. All is possible with Emporium.

Scale the window and look around the various product pages.

Clean monotones, brushed chrome and gun metal is the easy on the eye default color/texture palette, but dig around the alternate styles to see what else is achievable with the theme.

The veneer alternate style with the blog posts and recent products in focus.

Emporium doing it's thing on the iPad.

Let us know your constructive feedback, dive deeper into the theme in the demo, and read more about it on our Emporium theme listing page.

Grab Emporium with an 11% discount coupon, valid until 10 November. Just use EMPORIUM11 as your coupon code on checkout.

More extensions

Today we’ve got two new extensions available for your WooCommerce powered shop.

Visser Store Credit Extension

Michael Visser certainly knows a bit about WordPress e-commerce and develops extensions for various WP e-commerce plugins. We recently reached out to Michael to ask him to partner with in developing some kickass WooCommerce extensions.

Generate store credit coupons that enable customers to make multiple purchases until the total value specified is exhausted or the coupons life expires.

For example a $50 store credit voucher used at Checkout for a $30 purchase will allow for a future purchase of $20 or until the total value expires or is exhausted. You can even buy Products worth more than the remaining store credit and just pay the difference at Checkout.

PayU Payment Gateway Extension

Developed by our very own Polish support ninja Daniel Dudzic this extension enables WooCommerce shop owners to use the Polish payment Gateway PayU (old Płatności.pl) on their checkout page and charge in Złoty. Hopefully enabling a heap more Polish shops.

WooCommerce v1.2

Today also see’s the release of a new version of WooCommerce with a new “Best Sellers” widget, basic RSS feeds for products and product categories, further performance upgrades for ratings, the installer and WordPress multi-site and quick status change buttons (processing/complete) to the orders panel – to name but a few. See the full changelog here.

Quick status change buttons for order processing.

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.

Business themes with shopfronts

Inspire, Kaboodle and Biznizz were all designed based on the same winning formula – pretty sliders, an area reserved for mini-features to highlight important business/website services, a portfolio module to showcase work completed, and testimonials from happy clients. All powered by custom post types, all three themes looking quite different in terms of styling and typography.With each of them you can now do all of that AND sell products on a dedicated shop page that can be included in your site navigation menu, or set as the homepage feature. All three shopfronts carrying the exact same detail in styling and layout as the rest of the site look and feel.

Jay’s spent hours matching colors, border radiuses, box shadows, font sizes and font families so the storefront that WooCommerce enables carries the same attention to detail the rest of your site does.

Check out the demos, and theme listings below to get a better idea of how the child themes look and function.

• Inspire WooCommerce child theme – demo | theme listing
• Kaboodle WooCommerce child theme – demo | theme listing
• Biznizz WooCommerce child theme – demo | theme listing

Inspire Payment Gateway *FREE*

We have a growing list of payment gateways that we’ve integrated with WooCommerce via extensions. The latest being Inspire Commerce, the very gateway we use here at WooThemes when you checkout out with our products. With our relationship with the Inspire team we’ve managed to agree to release this extension for free – to all WooCommerce users, adding further flexibility out of the box.

The entire integration of this extension is built to maximize user experience – keeping customers throughout checkout on the actual website you design. Because of this, an SSL certificate is required for security and proper functionality.

View the extension listing page for more information and to purchase it.

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.

For me it was great to get back into Photoshop and to finally design something again, after spending the vast majority of my time over the last few months managing the workflow of our theme designs/developments with the recent increase in the size of our team.

Teamster Features

Getting the balance right between the amount of features, and making sure there is no feature bloat is an important factor when we build themes. We feel we’ve done this well with Teamster.

The homepage author module

The author module on the homepage is an AJAX powered tabber that displays all your WordPress contributors, editors and administrators, with the option to hide certain users. Once you select an author to display it will load their latest blog posts, portfolio items or a combination of the two. We’ve built additional fields into the author profile in the WordPress backend to capture a short biography about the user, their Twitter, Facebook and Dribbble links and their role within the company/CoWork setup.

The team custom page template

The dedicated team page template.

Further advancing the author module we have a custom page template you can dedicate in your WordPress site – the team page. The team page showcases all the WordPress authors blog posts and portfolio items, and you can navigate to each author’s profile page.

Author blog archive pages functions the same way.

The homepage featured post tabber

The featured post tabber with a green alternate style selected.

The homepage featured post tabber is a largely graphical showcase of particular blog posts, tagged with a specific tag. A hover effect on the tabs displays further information about the author.

And all the rest

Sorting the homepage modules is easy with the theme options.

There is an about/connect module reserved for the homepage, a homepage module sorter theme option, a dedicated portfolio overview page, and individual portfolio item pages, as well as specially styled custom widgets, and not to forget the alternate styles and easily customizable look and feel.

The portfolio page in a blue alternate style.

Let us know your constructive feedback, dive deeper into the theme in the demo, and read more about it on our Teamster theme listing page.

Grab Teamster with an 11% discount coupon, valid until 24 October. Just use TEAMSTER11 as your coupon code on checkout.

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

Argentum: A responsive online shop theme

You read that right, a responsive online shop, and trust us that’s harder to make then you think, yet minimally styled, with slick CSS3 goodness to allow for further customizations.

Argentum is a WooCommerce theme featuring a unique, responsive design optimised for mobile devices. It is the perfect theme for selling your catalog of products, small or large to users at their desktop computers, or on their smartphones.

The homepage showcases your featured and recent products while providing 2 widgetised areas, and a space for your latest blog post. Argentum also comes with custom shortcodes to add a sticky note with shop information, and a sale flash banner.

As you would expect, each and every WooCommerce widget / template / shortcode has been styled to match the Argentum aesthetic and elegantly scale depending on the viewing device.

There’s loads of nifty css3 enhancements such as subtle animation, drop shadows and border radiuses as well as laboriously refined typographical rules and hierarchy to match the beautiful custom typeface.

View this beauty on our demo site, make sure you scale the browser window, and view it on your iPhone, Android or iPad. Find out more about the theme’s key features on the theme listing page.

Grab Argentum with an 11% discount coupon, valid until 13 October. Just use ARGENTUM11 as your coupon code on checkout.

UK and South African payment gateway extensions

Given Mike and Jay are UK based, and WooHQ is down in South Africa we chose to launch some more payment gateways that we know are locally in demand. That’s not saying we are forgetting about all the gateways being requested on the ideas board – we are already working on more.

For South African web developers and designers you know have the option to integrate PayFast or VCS with your WooCommerce installation, for the English we’ve now got the hugely powerful SagePay covered.

Product enquiry extension

If you run the type of online shop that gets a lot of potential customers emailing you before committing to the checkout page, then this extension is for you. Perhaps you sell expensive products that usually require some customer research first? This extension adds another tab on your product page where a customer can email the store master some questions, feedback, notes. Each email received will be linked to the product in the subject line. Nifty hey?

The WooCommerce product enquiry extension

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.

We saw this as an opportunity.

Juanma Teixidó

A good few months ago we approached Juanma Teixidó of the award winning design studio Teixidó in Paraguay to design us a slick business theme in his signature design style. The outcome of that was a very detailed, well thought out, design named Buró.

Buró carries all the usual bells and whistles of our popular business themes – a featured slider, a feedback/testimonial module, and lots of footer/sidebar widgetized spaces. We knew this design would be a hit with our users, but we wanted to make it even more awesome.

The Buro home page design.

Cobus was handed the reigns of converting this beautiful photoshop file into a working WordPress theme, with the brief to make it responsive, and look beautiful on all devices. Jay and Mike had previously worked with responsive layouts on our application themes which helped a lot.

Over the past 3 months Cobus has done a huge amount of research into responsive design and the code it involves. Not only has he produced some consistent beautiful layouts, but managed to ensure that the slider scales using the JQuery FlexSlider , the dropdown menus adapt according to the layout being viewed, and videos in blog posts proportionally scale thanks to FitVid.JS.

The tan alternate style scaled in a smaller browser window.

We’d love to know what you think of Buró. We can’t guarantee all future themes releases will be responsive, as it was hugely time consuming, but we will be carefully monitoring Buró’s popularity as a metric to decide on it’s viability.

View the theme in all it’s glory on our demo site, make sure you scale the browser window, and view it on your iPhone, Android or iPad. Find out more about the theme’s key features on the theme listing page.

The Buro menu system as viewed on an iPhone, with collapsable sub-menus.

Grab Buró with an 11% discount coupon, valid until 21 September. Just use BURO11 as your coupon code on checkout.

The must watch video

Introducing Swatch

Swatch is a FREE, yes you read that correctly, business theme with a portfolio module that allows its usage to be completely diverse. This is a big move for us to release a fully-fledged Business theme for free, considering that we’ve generally preferred to tone down the functionality for our other free themes.

The pixel perfect Swatch homepage.

Swatch was designed and submitted to us in March by the talented UK web designer Oliver Long, with WooThemes having every intention to release this theme as a commercial product. It’s packed full of the usual features you’ve come to expect from our commercial themes, and built on the WooFramework that powers all our themes.

Swatch comes with custom post types for the featured homepage slider and mini-features to highlight noteworthy features about your business, service or website, as well as a custom post type reserved for the portfolio.

The homepage boasts up to 7 widgetized regions where you can place a heap of widgets, including 8 custom woo widgets, or just set up your theme options correctly and the homepage will use the modules presented on our demo.

A portfolio module in a free theme. It can't be?

We encourage you to browse the demo to discover all the free goodness available to you, as well as our theme listing page.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to our wonderful community of supportive WooTheme users. We hope this theme results in growing our community even further. We have LOADS in store over the next month so appreciate our existing club member’s patience in releasing our next impressive commercial theme.

Celebration Time: 10 Themes for $100

In addition to celebrating our 100th theme release in some free style, we’re also extending the awesomeness beyond Swatch… For the next 48 hours, you can purchase 10 Developer Package Themes for only $100.

This is how you do it…

1. Select the Developer Package for any theme you’d like to purchase and go to the checkout page.
2. Complete the form and use the coupon code “100themes”.
3. Once you’ve validated that coupon, you’ll see the price decrease from $150 to $100.
4. Complete the purchase and go to your user dashboard, where you’ll see that you have an additional 9 bonus credits which you can redeem for 9 other Developer Package themes. (Note: The bonus credits are only valid for the 100 themes that we have available today and not for future theme releases.)

Spiffy, right? You should totally grab this promotion for yourself, but you should also be a good friend and tell all your friends about this!

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.

The business announcement layout.

We thought the idea could be further explored and made more versatile in it’s usage by adding a couple more modules so that businesses could use it to announce a new service/product/conference. A video module for a quick video introduction, a subscribe and connect module to find the business elsewhere. Think of it as a more permanent version of Placeholder… on steroids.

Matthew and his team came up with a beautifully constructed layout of clean, light typography coated in a calm, happy, but mature color palette.

The wedding and birth announcement layouts.

Woo Ninja Mike Krapf worked tirelessly on the HTML / CSS / WooFramework goodness through the week of his special announcement – the birth of his second child “Jack Gunnar Krapf”. Congratulations Mike!

Matty has managed to further revolutionize our theme development by building each of the modules as components, very neatly coded components I might add. The benefit of this is that you are not restricted to our 4 beautiful, pre-defined homepage layouts for births, weddings, graduations and business announcements. Navigate to the “Appearance > Widgets” page and by placing multiple instances of the “Woo-Component” widget in the “Homepage” widgetized region you can place photograph slides, registry links, videos, comments, baby statistics, a countdown clock, or a heap of other components in any order you like to create a unique announcement homepage.

It’s truly hugely flexible, yet completely idiot-proofed in usability.

View our 4 pre-defined Announcement layouts on the demo, find out more about the theme on the theme listing page, and let us know your constructive feedback below in the comments.

Grab Announcement with an 11% discount coupon, valid until 24 August. Just use ANNOUNCE11 as your coupon code on checkout.

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

We know that most of you reading this post, will probably be hosting your own WordPress-powered websites, which means you’re unlikely to be WordPress.com users. Our WordPress.com themes are however beautifully crafted & coded and – in our opinion at least – are a great way to set up a good-looking, new WordPress blog in a matter of minutes, without the hassle or cost of getting hosting too.

Chapters on WordPress.com

So keep these themes in mind when you’re next recommending WordPress to a client / friend or you want to set up a new personal blog quickly.

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.

Empire is now a business theme with a flexible portfolio module making it perfect for just about any type of business. With custom post types for the slides on the home page and the portfolio items on the portfolio page you can feature whatever content you like, whilst keeping your pages and blog posts entirely seperate.

The Empire home page with it's featured slider and 3 homepage specific widgetized regions.

With Empire we’ve also introduced a new page template that we hope to make more use of in future themes. A team page lists all the WordPress users of your site (or you can exclude specific users), and with some slight modifications to the WP user page we’ve make it possible to now attribute Twitter, Facebook and Flickr links to a user. If you set up all employees of your company as WP users of the site you’d have a neat about page, and they can all blog under specific usernames.

The Empire team page listing the WP users of the site. Red alternate style selected.

The Empire portfolio page with the chrome alternate style selected.

With a whole 8 widgetized areas, with 3 specific homepage regions, you can really add what you want to your homepage. We’ve created a powerful testimonials widget, using it’s own custom post type to pull customer feedback quotes from, and “contact us” & “get in touch” widgets give you the control to display all the information you need to for potential customers to get hold of you.

A slide with a caption positioned at the bottom. You have complete control as to where, and if it appears in the custom settings panel.

Have a look at all the theme’s features on it’s listing page. Browse the demo for the full experience and to test the alternate styles. As always we value your constructive feedback.

Grab our innovative new theme with an 11% discount! Use the coupon code “EMPIRE11″. Valid until 19 July.

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.

Once again Jay has worked his magic with the intuitively laid out responsive CSS3 design, tested on iPhones, iPads, and MacBook Pros set at various resolutions, not to forget all the uglier web browsers (you know which ones we’re talking about), whilst Mike has done an astounding job in building a stable help desk on top of the WordPress core framework, keeping the code clean and bloat free.

Another responsive beauty coded by Jay Koster.

The knowledgebase can house commonly asked questions, and the feature I really like is that you can even convert a support ticket to a knowledgebase article at the click of a button if you are an administrator. You can also easily set your latest blog post as an alert if, for example you are a host company experiencing downtime – this will appear at the top of your homepage for all site visitors.

You can also make your whole site private, accessible only by registered members of the help desk, this is set in the SupportPress theme options.

Adding a ticket with SupportPress

In SupportPress you can even communicate with your agents and manage private information with messages. Think of messages like a blog, but one which is only accessible by your own team. Nifty.

A ticket, with the ability to 'watch' it to receive further communication on this support query.

Deciding what to screenshot and preview in this blog post has been difficult, as there is so much functionality packed into this theme that deserves highlighting. I haven’t even touched on the professionally styled email messages agents and customers receive.

The best way to get an understanding of what is achievable with this theme is to view the demo, read more about the functionality if offers on the theme listing page, and even test it out on the theme playground.

As an administrator converting a support ticket to a knowledgebase article is easy. Take note of the sexy, animated CSS3 buttons.

Competition Time (Again)!

As with Editorial’s release last week, we’d like to give you the opportunity to win a lifetime Developer Subscription to the WooThemes club by simply sharing the news about SupportPress’s release and telling us what you think of this new functionality in the comments below.

Use the coupon code “SUPPORTPRESS11″ to get 11% discount on your purchase of SupportPress (valid until 11 July). Come on, we know you want to…

ed·i·to·ri·al /ˌediˈtôrēəl/
Adjective: Of or relating to the acquiring or preparing of material for publication.

We designed & developed our new theme, Editorial, to allow you – as the editor & craftsman / -woman of your content – to have a stronger hand in how that content is displayed. We specifically target the way that WordPress themes generally handle the single post template, whereby all content is structured in exactly the same way across the site.

Content: Beautifully crafted. The centered header has been selected in the theme options.

Editorial Controls

Editorial includes functionality and options to allow you to tweak the layout and therefore the flow of single post pages. This obviously means that you can tweak this to better support, communicate and convey your content in specific posts.

Most of the visual inspiration was drawn from the way that printed newspapers are laid out. We’ve seen an increasing trend online too these days, whereby the bigger media outlets have custom-developed functionality to better handle the different types of rich media that they’re using.

Here’s an overview of the two most important features that we’ve included:

Columns!

Columns are a big thing in printed media and the only reason (that comes to mind) that it is not more widely used online, is that there’s no real “generic” / “one size fits all” way of handling this. Limitations will always be present; especially when using a WP template, instead of a custom-developed website suited to your exact needs.

With this in mind, we developed something that both adheres to the limitations that WP poses, but still increases the control you have significantly. We’ve done this by bundling a bunch of column layout “presets” (if we can call it that) into Editorial and then adding a button to the edit screen that allows you to easily split your content into multiple columns as you wish. This is how this looks on the Post Editing screen:

The Column Options under the Editorial Custom Settings panel, below the WYSIWYG editor in the post/page editor. Note the new tabbed custom settings panel we've introduced with Editorial.

Adding a column break to your post content is easy via the Editorial "column break" button. e.g. A 2 column layout would require 1 column break, whilst a 3 column layout would require 2 column breaks.

Images & Galleries

A big part of the layouting process is properly including your rich media formats (for eg. images) into your written content. With this in mind, we wanted to allow you to include one image or multiple images (a gallery via a customizable post slider) for your various posts.

Here’s a few of the spectacular examples of what is possible with Editorial:

A weighted two column post layout.

A 3 column post layout with the title, excerpt and gallery spanning 2 columns.

An equal width 2 column layout with gallery disabled, and image placed using the WYSIWYG editor.

We’ve probably just started to scratch the surface of what is possible in this regard, but we’re hugely excited about the new functionality that we’ve included with Editorial. We still have loads of question marks about this functionality and we’re excited to see this being used in the wild and see how you will be modifying it to suit your needs. Once we have that kind of feedback, we’ll probably move into phase 2 and further elaborate on this functionality (if there is the scope & viability to do so).

The left-aligned header with 4 tag-based posts to the right.

We’ve only covered the most significant, unique features of Editorial, so you can view the other features over here. Also be sure to browse around Editorial’s demo, where we’ve created loads of visually striking examples of what exactly is possible with this functionality.

A round of applause must go to the designer – our very own Cobus a.k.a. “Fresh01” who is responsible for this innovative layout, and who also coded it. The column manager and other advanced functionality by the super talented Matty and supervised, Q.A’ed, documented and populated by Mark.

Competition Time (Again)!

As with Statua’s release last week, we’d like to give you the opportunity to win a lifetime Developer Subscription to the WooThemes club by simply sharing the news about Editorial’s release and telling us what you think of this new functionality in the comments below.

Grab our innovative new theme with an 11% discount! Use the coupon code “EDITORIAL11″. Valid until 2 July.

Statua was designed by Chris Rowe, who has also recently been responsible for Simplicity & Delicious Magazine (with both sitting pretty on our Theme Leaderboard at #2 & #3 respectively for the last 60 days). Based on that we’ll go out on a limb and say that Statua will be another bestseller, as Chris has definitely proven himself to have a knack for designing really popular themes.

Apart from the design though, we’ve done some nifty stuff with the functionality that we’re sure you’ll appreciate…

Statua's visually striking (default) homepage

Flexibility. That’s all.

As has been the case with all of Chris’ designs so far, we really wanted to create something that could be customized easily. So we’ve kept things as minimalist as possible without compromising on the layer of style that has been applied on top of the minimalist Canvas.

For the photography itself, we wanted to give our users as many options as possible in terms of how they want to structure their photography portfolio or photoblogging posts, whether they wanted single images or extended image galleries. The first thing you’ll note in this regard is that we’ve included 3 alternative homepage layouts that offer you some different choices in how you’d like to structure your homepage. These layouts can also be used as inner pages if you’d rather use them there.

One of the grid-based alternative layouts which you can use as Statua's homepage

Additionally we’ve created beautiful image sliders for the galleries that you may like to include in your posts (here’s an example), which gives you a great alternative to just publishing one photo per post. Again, we wanted this to be as flexible as possible. The Gallery page template further offers a great overview of all of the photos you’ve published, which we think is a superb way to showcase your best work to prospective clients.

Another alternative homepage layout, showcasing the beautiful photo sliders

Lastly, at the core of Statua is the perfectly stable and unmatched WooFramework, so you’re guaranteed of all the other goodies (default page templates, widgets & shortcodes) that is now standard for our themes.

We’re sure photographers will absolutely love Statua and we’re excited to see your feedback on the theme (which we’ll use to shape V1.x iterations with some more spiffy features and tweaks where needed). You can view all of the theme’s features here & the visually striking live demo is available here. Enjoy!

Competition Time!

We’ve been having a look at PunchTab and have decided to give it a whirl. Use the widget below to enter into a raffle, where you could win a lifetime Developer Subscription to the WooThemes Club. We’re not promoting spammy behaviour in any way, so please be selective in terms of how you promote this giveaway.

We know you want Statua so badly! So celebrate 2011 with us and grab 11% discount when purchasing Statua with the coupon code “STATUA11″. Valid until 30 June.

Cameron is a seasoned speaker, a graphic designer with proficiency in website interface, a letterpress & videography enthusiast, as well as the owner of Authentic Jobs – which only yesterday launched it’s new Authentic Jobs UK division. Quite a creative talent.

With the “Briefed“ theme that Cameron designed for us, it caters for creatives like himself – one’s that don’t fit into a box. The comment Cameron provided with the initial concept of Briefed sums up the design well:

I’d like this design to appeal to more than just the web designer crowd. If a graphic designer selling letterpress prints were to use this template—in addition to the guy posting icons and UI screens on Dribbble—I would be elated.

With minimal styling creating a very clean theme Cameron didn’t want a theme boasting all sorts of bells and whistles, rather a theme that could cater for all, with the emphasis on the content within the theme.

Modular design allows for extreme flexibility

With home page modules that includes an about section, featured slider, blog/tumblog with widgetized sidebar, and a custom post powered portfolio with optional Dribbble feed the combinations are limitless to create your ideal home page display.

The Briefed home page with a featured slider and about module enabled.

A portfolio-based home page, with the 4 top posts being pulled from a Dribbble account.

You don't have to be a designer, or have a portfolio to use Briefed.

Theme option’s also allow for complete customization of the background colors/imagery, and typography with a vast selection of fonts available thanks to Google Web Fonts.

Browse the demo or view all of Briefed’s details here.

Tracking Bugs Beautifully

FaultPress is an advanced ticketing system with a focus on team collaboration & community interaction. This makes it similar to the hosted service, Lighthouse, which we currently use at WooThemes, but sticking to our strategy of using our own stuff, you can be sure that we’ll be switching to using FaultPress ourselves in the very near future after having already beta tested this beauty.

Here’s a quick overview of FaultPress’ features:

• Ticket & Bug Tracking. Create tickets, assign them to individual team members, discuss issues on those tickets and change the status according to the actions taken.
• Milestones. Attach various tickets to specific development milestones to help in your planning.
• Internal Messages. Easily discuss the issues with team members and have the option of making these threads viewable by the public.
• It’s a dashboard. Easily & quickly get an overview of what exactly is going on, where you’re at and what issues need attention.

FaultPress' backend & native WP functionality is just as beautiful as its front-end design

The Design

A lot needs to be said for the design, which is simply beautiful. Designed with a very clean UI, FaultPress borrows best practice thinking throughout the entire browsing experience: from the homepage to creating a ticket to discussing issues with your team. You should judge just how good this design is by how much it stays out of your way whilst using the UI itself (this is an app-like theme after all, which needs to be *used*).

FaultPress also uses the very latest HTML5 & CSS3 code, which means that it only utilizes a couple of images within the UI. This means that load times are absolutely amazing (another important consideration for app-like UI’s) and customization of the design would be incredibly easy.

Responsive Web Design

Another feature which we’re incredibly proud of, is the usage of the Less Framework. Internet users are using a variety of devices to access the web and all of these devices of different screen resolutions. Responsive web design is the design community’s answer to this.

Using the Less Framework and a few of our own tweaks, FaultPress adapts to whatever screen resolution, which optimizes your viewing experience & usage of the app regardless of which device you are using.

FaultPress on the iPad

And on the iPhone.

So what do you think?

We’re really happy with how FaultPress has turned out and we’re incredibly excited about our collaboration with Jay & Mike. If FaultPress is anything to judge by, the next collaborative theme (which they’re already working on) should be another game changer.

Use the coupon code “FAULTPRESS11″ to get 11% discount on your purchase of FaultPress (valid until 12 May). Come on, we know you want to…