The WooThemes Blog

Bueno is Spanish word, roughly translated to “good” or “all right” in English. And that’s exactly why we decided to call our new free theme, Bueno; it is simply awesome (okay, we took some liberties with our word usage there).

We don’t always get around to release as many free themes as we want to (due to time constraints), but when Ajmal Eylia submitted his design to us, we knew that Bueno would make a great addition to WooThemes. So Bueno is our 9th free theme (and our 5th in 2009) and we’re sure that you will really enjoy this one!

Check out the demo over here or have a read through all of Bueno’s awesome features.

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So I need to call in some help on this one… We’ve been frantically busy building WOO2 in the past couple of weeks and one of the new things that you’ll see on the new site, is that we’ll be splitting our current blog into two niche purposes.

So this existing blog, will continue to function as our main blog, but will essentially turn into communication with existing & prospective users (which it basically is now). This means that we’ll feature company-related news here, as well as use it for marketing and some kind of development / updates type blog.

Then, the new blog (which is where I’ll need a bit of your help) will be running of a sub-domain of WooThemes.com and whilst it will contain WooThemes branding (very similar to the new WOO2 website), it will have a totally different purpose. This blog will be a content blog, where we’ll cover a variety of different topics of interest to people that would use our themes. So if I had to define the scope of this blog, I’d include the following topics:

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Meta-Morphosis

We know you like a freebie once in a while, and when we first saw the Meta-Morphosis design by Izzudin Helmi we immediately wanted to develop it into a WordPress theme, and give it away for free! The Photoshop design uses the Delicious font type, and we wanted to try and bring this over to the finished product, something we managed with the help of Cufon.

The layout of the theme is a bit unusual as it has a two column homepage with featured posts on the left, and normal posts on the right, so there is no sidebar like in your traditional theme. All of your widgets go down in the javascript slider in the footer, which is superslick!

We also incorporated the new and improved Woo-Framework in this theme, so you will see some changes in the backend options. The biggest improvement is the ability to upload your thumbnails directly without having to use the old upload, copy+paste link into custom setting field anymore. This also applies to uploading your custom logo in the options panel. We hope to update all our themes with this new functionality soon!

Check out the demo and get downloading already!

Blogging & Streaming

I finally feel that we’re making some headway into the backlog of themes that was created by all of the amazing designs we purchased via the WooContest last year. It seems as if there’s light at the end of the tunnel and I’m extremely excited to push out more of the themes that we’ve previewed recently.

So the next theme on the release list is Bloggingstream, which was designed by Firman Daus. The theme – which sports a sexy integration for a lifestream – is just as well suited to a personal blogger, as it would be for a “diligent” publisher. The design also contains 7 different advertising to enable you to make money from your website.

Style-wise, we’ve kept the default style as clean as possible, to allow you to truly make this theme your own, whilst we believe that the additional (light-on-dark) styles can also be used out-of-the-box to suit your own branding needs. You’ll see that we’ve put some effort into the typography, spacing & layout to keep the focus on the content.

So view the demo, read up on the specs of the theme and then give us a little feedback love…

It feels weird to be writing a blog post about a new theme release on WooThemes, when it’s my own theme – since I was only blogging about other designers’ themes on Woo for the last couple of months. The last time I blogged about my own theme release on Woo, was way back in July 2008 when we launched WooThemes and I released VibrantCMS. And yes – I concur – that’s waaay too long to wait to release a new theme… But onto this theme now…

Geometric is a blog + portfolio hybrid that enables you to showcase both your written and visual content within one template and one WordPress installation. I spent a lot of time to make sure that there was a seamless integration between the two different types of content on the site, which wasn’t really the case with our previous portfolio themes. For example, on a date-based archive page or search results page, the template automatically picks up what type of content it should display (written vs visual) and then makes it look easy and stylish at the same time.

The design itself is slightly more minimalistic and is defintely heavily inspired by my recent fascination with shapes and how they interact with each other (thus the name: geometric). You can also see a similar line of thinking when you visit my own blog.

The feature that I am however most excited about is the completely customized homepage of Geometric. If you’re used to widgetized sidebars or widgetized spaces in sections of the theme (we’ve implemented both these in previous themes) – you can prepare to be amazed, because your whole homepage on Geometric is widgetized! So basically we’ve developed a bunch of custom widgets (12 in total!), which you can move around on the homepage (and in the sidebar) – so you have total control over how you utilize Geometric to best serve your needs & ideas.

I trust that you will find value in these release, since I really enjoyed developing it. Also – this is my first release in a very long time – so go easy on me… But right now, you should head on over to the demo and have a play around the theme. After that, I’d really appreciate some compliments or just general feedback ya’know…

Notice: Geometric has already been upgraded to version 1.1.0 to accomodate 5 more colour schemes and an option to switch between a left- & right-hand sidebar [12-01-2009].

It’s the 28th of the month and we’ve got just enough time to squeeze another theme release in before the end of the month, that mean’s we’ve launched 3 themes this month!

BlogTheme is another design concept that we received through our WooContest . Designed by Chris Rowe, who also designed Gotham News , this theme, that’s name is pretty self explanatory, has been specifically designed to cater for personal bloggers who like a simple, clean-cut blog design, with no bloating functionality, just the optional lifestreaming plugin that helps bring together all your social media profiles onto your site.

This theme is bundled with 5 colour styles, one of which we are sure we’ll suite you and your colourful personality.

You’ll want to read what we’re about to say!

We’ve decided that we will be launching some even more affordable themes, specifically for personal bloggers, with less functionality, but of course the same quality framework working under the bonnet. BlogTheme will be the first of these themes and available for an amazing 40 dollars ! Yup 40 dollars !

What are you waiting for, take this theme for a test drive , find out more about what this theme offers, and then give your blog a facelift.

As always please provide us with your constructive feedback.

We really like to move fast here at WooThemes (even over weekends!)… So only two days after posting some teasers of the themes we’re working on, we have already started to deliver on our promises with our first theme release for November. And on top of that, it’s a free theme…

Typebased is the first theme we’ll be releasing as part of the winning entries in our WooContest. Typebased is an elegant, slick-looking personal blog design and with the 5 different colour schemes, we’ve tried to cater for a big possible user-base. The theme is built on our standard WooTheme-framework, that we use for all of our themes; so even though the “features” of the theme might not be that impressive – that was never the object of this release.

With our free themes, we are trying to keep things really simple, as the themes are targeted at the mainstream / mass market. This doesn’t mean that the quality of the theme is not on par with our other themes, since these free themes are there to give the general public the opportunity to experience WooThemes free of charge.

So we hope that everyone that downloads this theme, will enjoy it. We’re surely very happy with the theme and kudo’s to Armono Wibowo for the original design of the theme. Oh yeah – and obviously leave some feedback here as always…

Something new in the room? Nah, we’re just adding a few things to improve the ambient glow around here… So can we hear a nice big “Hello!” for the latest addition to the WooThemes family – Ambience by the incredible Ambience is our first theme that is solely targeted at personal bloggers, whilst it also incorporates a strong lifestreaming element (which is another first for us). So instead of having a “super” theme with a wide variety of features, we’ve decided to go completely niche with this one and really just target personal bloggers (as we had neglected this niche until now).

(You will also see this trend evident in other new theme teaser – from Matt Brett – we posted a while back.)

DESIGN

As we mentioned above, Ambience is again built on top of the same, super-feature, super-functional themes backend as all our other themes).

We have basically integrated the Lifestream plugin by David Cramer into the theme (you still need to use the separate plugin) and created a custom widget specifically for Ambience. This means that you get the great functionality bundled with the plugin itself, whilst it integrates effortlessly into Ambience’s design style. If you have a look at Ambience’s live demo, you’ll note that the lifestream widget in the sidebar is pretty nifty… Right?

YOU’RE GLOWING ALREADY!

Come on, we can sense that you’re whole face is already glowing and you’re rubbing your hands together in glee… So why don’t you just run on over and read more about the features of Ambience, view the demo or even buy this little beauty. Hope you enjoy!