The WooThemes Blog

Expect this feature rich dream theme for musicians and bands, designed by Ryan Downie later this month. You might even be able to sell your albums with it…

We are only days away from the release of our 100th theme. Can you believe it? 100 themes.

To get everyone excited for our big milestone we thought we’d tease the theme in a different way. Ryan ‘The Cannon’ Ray has been experimenting with Final Cut Pro X and Motion and this is the result. Not bad if we say so ourselves!

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We’re trying our hand at redesigning the news, courtesy of the incredible talents from design maestro, Andy Rutledge.

A couple of weeks ago, Andy wrote an elaborate article about how digital news is broken. His article included an analysis of The New York Times‘, as well as a proposed design of how he would’ve attempted to “fix” digital news. His proposed redesign of The New York Times sparked many conversations across the social web and the design soon become a firm favourite amongst users.

So we acted swiftly, got in touch with Andy about the design and managed to acquire the rights to it. This means that you can soon expect the design – to be called Currents – to become part of the WooThemes collection. Just another way in which we go that one step further for our users.

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We’re working on so many awesome things at the moment and we will be making some significant announcements (erm, cough, WooCommerce, cough, too) in the next couple of weeks. Before that though, we’ve got theme releases #99 & the big #100 to attend to. Here’s a sneak peak…

#99 will be a new niche theme that we’re calling Announcement. Designed by Matthew Smith, the theme is geared at – you guessed it – making specific announcements. But there’s a twist though… The theme includes something new in a widget which is called “Woo – Component” and the only thing we’ll say about this now is: drag & drop, baby!

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Jay & Mike (the guys behind the beautiful FaultPress) are at it again with the upcoming release of SupportPress. Since the release of FaultPress, we’ve had many enquiries about a more “generic” version of the theme which could be applied to multiple niches. SupportPress is our answer to those enquiries.

SupportPress is a help desk & knowledgebase all rolled into one theme (much like the beautifully designed hosted service, Tender). We think this will be a superb application (theme) for managing your customer support elegantly and most importantly: on a budget. Expect the release shortly. Teaser below…

So with our recent WooTeam trip to the UK, where we admittedly didn’t do much work, we’ve been a bit behind schedule on theme releases this month. Luckily for you though, we totally anticipated this, which means we had been working on the new themes for June even before we left for the UK. Yay us!

The first new theme you can expect this month, is a brand-new, minimalist photography theme. This has been a very popular suggestion in recent months and we anyway felt the need to release a more modern (in terms of the functionality) version of Exposure (which was popular in its own right in the past). The new photography theme, Statua, is packing some serious punch and was designed by Chris Rowe, who also recently did Simplicity & Delicious Magazine (both that has shot up the popularity chart).

Here’s a little teaser:

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It may not seem like it, but we’ve been working incredibly hard the last couple of weeks, revising & streamlining internal processes, code & projects; basically doing the behind-the-scenes stuff that we don’t necessarily blog about.

Don’t worry though, we’ll obviously never let a month pass without us releasing some new goodies (which we *will* blog about). Here’s a couple quick teasers for new themes which you can expect to drop in the next couple of days…

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Along with our announcement last week that we are re-focusing all of our resources on WordPress, we’d like to share some initial details on a new collaboration that we’re launching which will see more, niche, application-like themes coming to the WooThemes collection shortly.

A Colab?

Yep, we’re taking on this challenge with a collaboration, as our plates are already filled with a bunch of awesome things we’re working on, which means we simply don’t have enough time to take on every single idea that pops up within WooHQ. A collaboration with some awesome peeps therefore helps add capacity to the WooTeam, brings in some fresh voices and definitely gives the projects we’ll be collaborating more momentum, fire & passion.

The other reason for a collaboration is simply the niche nature of the themes that we’re aiming to release. If you have a look at our best-selling themes you’ll see that our users are predominately buying Business & Magazine-like themes. So whilst we’ve always made a push to release the odd niche theme, we’ve limited these in an attempt to satisfy the greater hunger of our users for Business, Magazine & Blog themes.

This approach however definitely leaves a couple of gaps, which would be great to fill (since we’d love to be *the* theme provider of choice for every single WP user by covering all of their niche bases imaginable). Again, a collaboration basically helps us do just that… Here’s the details…

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We haven’t released any video-specific themes for ages and when Sacha Greif submitted his design for a new video theme, we just knew that this was the design that would spice things up for us.

The new theme, Premiere, is almost ready for release and we’re building quite a few additional goodies into the initial release. We’ve also added an elaborate membership system to the roadmap for Premiere and whilst this won’t be ready for the first version, we’re planning on shaking things up considerably with this functionality.

This is what you can expect to be hitting your computer screens shortly…

Following up on the release of Delicious Magazine (and Chris Rowe’s honorary addition to our design team), we have a superbly flexible and elegant business theme, Simplicity, which we’ll be launching soon.

Prior to starting this design, we asked Chris to spend some time researching all of the most popular business themes out there and combine the best-of-the-best. Our opinion of the final product is that it’s absolutely fantastic and a guaranteed best-seller. Guaranteed we say.

Here’s a little preview:

Ever since the birth of WooThemes (more than 3 years ago now), we’ve never been afraid to ask for some outside help and this has seen us collaborating with some really well-known designers. We’d like to think that these guys & girls represent the best of the best.

In the next couple of weeks, we’ll be continuing this legacy by collaborating with the likes of Cameron Moll, Matthew Smith & Orman Clark, which obviously means that you can expect some extreme awesome on the design-front.

We’ve done this, because this obviously helps out with the capacity in terms of designing new stuff, but also supplements our own design work in keeping the styles & ideas fresh. One of our collaborative designers that has become more prominent in recent months, has been Chris Rowe, who we just recently worked with on themes such as Elefolio, Air & Spectrum. These designs (themes) have all proved to be very popular, which has resulted in us taking our collaboration with Chris to a new level.

Spectrum is now our 14th best-selling theme of all-time

Chris has signed up to become an honorary member of the WooTeam for the next couple of months, which will see him working on at least 6 new designs for us. Our decision in this regard was easy based on the quality of Chris’ design work and we’re hoping that we can leverage the relationship we’ve built to improve our future collaborative designs even further.

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We trust that all of our users and fans have had a very blessed festive period and hope that you guys & girls have an amazing 2011. We promise to pull out all the stops from our side to make your WordPress & WooThemes 2011′s better than ever!

With that said, we’d like to show you a lil’ preview for our first theme of the year – Biznizz. Biznizz is a sweet new business theme, which will add some variety & spice to our existing collection. Expect the release in the next couple of days.

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Last week’s sharing of some of the WPBundle teasers seems to have gotten you guys & girls even more excited about the upcoming launch of this great new collaboration between ourselves and the WPBundle crew. So here’s the second 5 (of 10) themes that will form part of the first bundle going on sale soon…

Essence: Sell Your Portfolio

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Since announcing our collaboration with WPBundle, this has been one of the most anticipated WordPress releases of this year. So whilst Liam & Spencer have done a great job in teasing some of their progress, we wanted to step things up a notch as we get ready for launch.

Launch date is imminent (no exact day has been decided yet) and we can confirm that the initial bundle of 10 amazing themes will be selling for $250 (lifetime updates & support, along with the PSD’s). So here’s a look at 5 of those 10 themes (the next 5 will be teased next week), ranging from magazine / news publishing to personal and microblogging to business & photography. It’s all there…

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Along with a little teaser (for some unplanned & unexpected new functionality) we posted earlier today, we’d like to show you what Jeff has been working on for the Listings theme that we previewed a while back.

In the screencast, you’ll basically see Jeff creating a new custom post type, taxonomy & custom field on the go via the WooFramework, without touching a single line of code. Without giving away too much, we’ll just say that the idea is that you can roll your own directory with Listings, albeit a book directory or a car dealership. Check it out:

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I’m not even sure that title makes sense, but it does somewhat describe the next two upcoming themes, and was the title of the email Cobus sent me with the teaser graphics.

Firstly, we have Ryan Downie’s personal portfolio theme design that he originally designed for his own personal use – fueled by his passion for Coffee, Red Bull and lunchtime pot of noodles according to his Twitter stream.

This theme’s release is literally around the corner and boasts more custom post type integration and a great summize of your online presence on the home page.

Caffeinated by Ryan Downie

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