WooThemes

As mentioned in my previous post, 13 wonderful websites using WooThemes , our plan has been to introduce a CSS gallery showcasing only WooTheme based websites. The idea behind the showcase is to get our readers inspired about the possibitilities of our Wordpress themes and drive traffic to our wonderful community of designers and bloggers already using WooThemes.

We’ve managed to put together our design showcase in record time and we are pleased to point you to it at showcase.woothemes.com .

Have a browse around some of our favourite website designs, leave some constructive comments for the webmasters and give the designs your personal star ratings.

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Just a quick note to point you in the direction of a post I’ve recently written featuring 13 wonderful websites using our WooThemes.

As our registered users are aware there is a showcase forum in our support forums where you can submit your customization of a WooTheme for others to view. A showcase gallery, viewable by all our site visitors, is in the pipeline for the WooThemes website, but we hope this will suffice for now.

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In the last few weeks, we’ve seen the growing popularity of our only portfolio / showcase theme to date - ProudFolio. So we thought it’d be nice to release another portfolio+blog combo theme… The result is our 10th theme and a mashup of Fresh News & ProudFolio - with the new theme being called Fresh Folio.

DESIGN

As mentioned, the basic design style was based on the Fresh News theme, whilst we’ve added some of our more popular styles on our other themes to Fresh Folio as well to increase your options.

The homepage is designed to both showcase your featured portfolio work (albeit web design, graphic design or photography), along with posts from your blog. The dual nature of the theme - and especially the homepage - allows you to take an integrated approach of publishing both your portfolio & blog in one, clean environment. Beyond the combo homepage, the rest of the theme is perfect for publishing a thought-provoking blog, as the portfolio sections doesn’t interfere there.

You’ll also find our base (default) theme styles very easy to customize (to suit your style and branding), since this theme is geared to being a framework theme for digital professionals that needs a portfolio & blog, but don’t have the time to take care of all the WordPress coding. In addition, you’ll also find our more arty / complex styles of value if you wish to go with a more out-of-the-box approach.

FUNCTIONALITY

Fresh Folio doesn’t function much differently from a standard blog theme, except that we use a “Portfolio Category” to basically highlight your portfolio items. As with all of our themes, we’ve included our standard basket of premium goodies to make your usage of the theme even more pleasurable.

We also think it’s worthy to mention that the theme only uses one optional plugin - Slimbox - to display the larger preview images for portfolio items. So the idea is that you can add a portfolio to your current WP blog in a few minutes, without having to adapt your current installation. Quick. Easy. And it works out of the box!

SO GET IT ALREADY!

What is keeping you? View the demo and if you like the theme, either buy the theme or - even better - join our awesome WooThemes Club and get all of our shiny new themes to play with!

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Liam and his crew over at Function have had a go at making some grunge styles for Fresh News. The result is stunning and we are releasing this add-on for all you previous owners of Fresh News. First of all go check out the five new grunge styles on our theme preview, by using the lovely style switcher at the top right of the page.

Fresh news is now version 1.2 with this latest update. If you have already purchased the theme and just want to add the new grunge styles, here is what you must do:

1. Log in to your WooThemes account and download the v1.2 from “My Theme Downlods”
2. Unpack the new version and upload functions.php, style/*.* and functions/*.* with your FTP client.

You must also add a new div to your header.php and footer.php files. If you haven’t made any modifications to these files from the original, you can just overwrite your current files. If you have made modifications to your files you must manually add one line to header.php after the body tag:

<body>
<div id="background">

You must also add the end tag for this new div in the footer.php before the end body tag:

</div>
</body>

That’s about it. If you have any trouble updating please don’t post in the comments. Our forum staff is ready to help you out with those questions.

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I guess it’s always nice to know the company you are dealing with (or considering to deal with whilst scoping out their products), as that kind of information can either make you feel more comfortable with your purchase or make you run for the hills.

I was lucky enough to do a presentation on premium WordPress themes - with the focus on what we’re doing at WooThemes - at yesterday’s WordCamp South Africa, where Matt Mullenweg (WordPress founder) was also present.

So if you’re keen to get a bit of an inside view of where & what WooThemes is at the moment and also where we’re planning on heading, you should read this summary of my presentation. I’ve uploaded the slides of my presso and also written up as much as I can remember of what I said. Hope it makes sense and makes your decision to possibly join us in future much easier!

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One of the key features with our themes is the multiple styles they come packaged with, that you can easily select with a click of a button in our options panel. We are now proud to introduce our custom made theme/style switcher for our demo themes.

Now you can preview all the different themes by selecting your theme from the drop-down select box and then selecting the style you want to see! A lot of people have been asking for this so go straight to our new demo and check it out!

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I’m sure that you’ll agree with our pretty bold statement in the title, when you see Papercut, which is the latest theme to be added to the WooThemes collection.

This grungy beauty was designed by one of our new best friends - Liam McKay (on whom we can’t lavish enough praise - whilst we obviously added our standard WooThemes & WordPress magic to the design.

Design

We think that the homepage design of Papercut is absolutely incredible (in a modest way okay - hehe) if you’re looking to add a whole bunch of content to it. The grid-based layout really allows all of the content to “feature” in their own right, whilst not over-complicating the design.

You will also note that the design features a whole bunch of minor details to increase the overall user experience. We’ve paid a lot of attention to the typography and content text styles (for both posts & comments) in our attempt to truly create something magnificent.

Functionality

As you will now come to expect from us, Papercut is built on the same kind of functionality and backend that is featured in all of our other themes. This time however, we’ve decided to add some new things, which we hope you will like…

One of the new features in Papercut (that is essentially on trial and will be added to other themes if this “experiment” proves successful) is that the whole sidebar is widgetized. We’ve even custom-developed some additional Papercut-specific widgets which you can add to the sidebar; and will fit seamlessly into Paper Cut’s overall styling.

Check it!

Anyway, we can either continue to use a bunch of descriptive adjectives in our round-up of the theme’s release, or you can check it out here and decide for yourself.

And BTW… Our club subscribers already got access to this new beauty a hour ago… So download away WooMembers!

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We’re proud to announce that all of our themes are now officially on Version 1.1. You might be asking why only now and you’d have a very valid question…

Fact is, we only recently started using subversion for all of our themes, which has allowed us to start documenting all of the changes to the themes in depth (even though our themes had already been upgraded / modified in the past). This means that if you now download one of our themes, you’ll find a changelog text file included in the package, which details all of the changes made.

Brief description of changes made…

Here’s a broad overview of the changes we’ve made:

• General Upgrades. If you have a look at our theme documentation, you’ll note that we’ve changed some of the theme options, whilst streamlining some of the functions within the themes.
• Decreased our dependence on 3rd party plugins. This means that you won’t have to use the Custom Fields manual workaround or the Flutter plugin ever again. We’ve also improved the standardized options within the theme, so that the theme works better out of the box (i.e. without following the installation steps in our theme docs).
• Custom Write Panels. We enlisted the help from WordPress genius - Joost de Valk - to help develop a WooThemes-exclusive custom write panel script, which adds the additional fields - required by our themes - to the the Write > Post & Write > Page panels. No more plugins, no more Flutter; everything works out of the box!
• XHTML / CSS Validation. This is another aspect we’ve been neglecting on our themes… But it’s now safe to say that all of our themes are fully validated and W3C standardized.
• Functions.php clean-up. We’ve given our functions.php & theme options a further upgrade by cleaning it out and streamlining it even more. It is not where we’d like it to be just yet, but it’s getting there.
• Live Wire Merge. We’ve merged the three Live Wire themes (2.0, Edition & Style) into one package, which means that if you now buy any of these on either Single or Developer’s License; you’ll get all three. We will also be giving current users of the previous individual themes, access to the new, merged package.

Subversion

We’re still doing some beta testing of our subversion server, but we will most probably give our users access to the subversion files very soon. This would mean that you could use appropriate SVN software to merge your modified theme with our latest version on WooThemes.

Upgrading

All the updated themes are available from “My Theme Downloads”. If you’d like to upgrade and have made changes to your existing theme, we strongly advise you to have a look at the changelog for the theme that you are using. The changelog will specify which files has been modified. If you haven’t made any modifications to the theme, then you can just overwrite your old version.

To get the custom write panel working, you will need to upload the /functions/custom.php and functions.php files to your theme directory. Please check out the updated theme documentation which has new screenshots of the custom write panel.

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We just got an e-mail from Yoast, the WP plugin guru, about a few manual tweaks that could improve the default WordPress search considerably. Even though these aren’t as straightforward as would be ideal and considering that it relies on a few 3rd party plugins; I still like the idea behind this and can see how the integration of these tweaks could massively improve the search functionality on your WordPress site.

In fact, the only thing that is holding us back from implementing this into our themes (and have it work out of the box), is the fact that it relies on 3rd party plugins… We are currently trying to reduce the amount of plugins that we use in our theme, as we’d like to create a theme that works completely, out of the box and without too much setup and installation of third party plugins. And suffice to say… We’ve learned our lesson with buggy 3rd party plugins over which we have no control: It seems like a great idea at the time, but ultimately we’re just opening a can of worms for ourselves…

So after we’ve finished the development on the 2 new themes that will become available on WooThemes this month, we’ll aim to look at increased functionality like this. For now though, this kind of WordPress Search Functionality (codename: WPSF) is only on our development wishlist.

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If you’re a member of WooThemes already, you’ll know that our support forum is of huge value when trying to modify our themes to suit your needs. Between Magnus, Mark & myself we try respond to all queries on the forum as quickly as possible, but due to time zone differences and busy schedules all-round, we can’t do support 24 / 7.

So that is where you come in… We are looking for some skilled peeps to join us on the forum and help out other WooThemes users, as it is important to us to further increase the value from our support resoures. We need someone that is proficient in HTML, CSS, PHP (intermediate) & also WordPress, as those are the skills needed to answer 99% of the requests…

Details of the job:

Here’s all of the information with regards to the job as a Forum Ninja…

• We will pay you a negotiable fee for every post that you make on the forum;
• You can work on flexible time (i.e. whenever suits you), as long as all forum requests are answered within 12 hours;
• We will still offer help to the threads that you can’t answer;
• You will get a free Developer Subscription to all of our themes, to allow you to familiarize yourself with the themes’ inner workings (and you will be allowed to use these themes yourself).

How to apply:

So if you think you have what it takes, we’d love to hear from you… Drop us an e-mail on info [at] woothemes.com, with the subject line being “Forum Ninja” and include as much details about yourself and your skills.

We will respond to all e-mails / applications that we get!

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