The WooThemes Blog

Tom Dent runs a small design studio in Cheshire, UK and recently shared with us his experience working with the Canvas theme for a client site wanting to sell vintage clothing.

Hi, I’m Tom Dent a designer, wed developer and co-founder of Double D Creative a small Cheshire based design studio I run alongside my business partner Tom Denton… hence the name ‘Double D’. We’re not brother’s as someone once thought (very odd), but we’re good friends with a passion and eye for great design and have been creating creative, engaging and functional design for traditional and digital media since we started the company in 2006. We pride ourselves in the quality of our work and attention to detail.

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We’ve been on a very prominent drive in the last couple of months to solidify Canvas‘ status as our flagship theme here at WooThemes. The release of Canvas V4 was followed shortly thereafter by the addition of a portfolio module, which has made Canvas a truly flexible set of incredible functionality.

The biggest challenge with any theme of this stature is the education that surrounds it. To this extent, we’ve been quietly working away at building & populating a brand-new Canvas How To section.

Canvas How To Tutorials

The Canvas How To section currently contains 24 tutorials and the guys have been hard at work trying to squeeze some more value in there (juggling support & development tasks with that of writing some extensive tutorials).

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Preface

Kris Millsap

I’m Kris Millsap, a web developer and video editor with New Media Samurai (NMS3 for short). We provide creative services (web development & video production) for companies looking to enhance and develop their brand/persona across the internet. We’re Affiliated Woo Workers and active users of WooJobs.

I am a super fan of WooThemes and the WooFramework. The flexibility and functionality combined with forward thinking of the WooFramework has enabled us to build client friendly sites at a much faster pace while keeping up with the latest and greatest trends on the ever evolving web. Canvas has become our boilerplate for almost all of our projects and the launch of Canvas v4 held as much anticipation and excitement for me as awaiting the latest iThing… well… close to that level of anticipation and excitement.

Adii recently asked me to translate a design from Chris Rowe utilizing Canvas v4 for use on his personal blog. It was a tremendous opportunity and the development of the Child Theme took me deeper down the Woo rabbit hole than I had been to date.

Canvas Layout: Before & After (design by Chris Rowe)

The following is a loose chronicle of my journey (I almost said Woo Journey, but thought that to be a bit Woo Much).

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A portfolio module has been one of the most popular requests for our Canvas framework theme. We’ve however always been cautious adding such heavy functionality into the theme and bloating the code. At least we have been until now…

With the recent launch of Canvas 4 a couple months back we are now hugely confident in Canvas’s codebase. Matty has spent countless hours refining the structure into a more modular design, flexible enough for child theming, and custom hooks, filters and functions to be added.

The Canvas portfolio page template.

As seen in our popular business themes, Canvas now boasts a full portfolio component for keeping track of all the awesome work you do and showcasing it to prospective clients and collaborators.

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In this post we cover our recent involvement with the launch of a training academy and how we put its website together using WordPress, BuddyPress and Canvas.

Over the past couple months WooThemes has been involved in a joint-venture with GivenGain, Silulo, RLabs, and Web Growth in creating an academy for school leavers to be educated in, and equipped with web & social media skills to hopefully follow with real-world internships at selected non-profit and commercial organisations that are willing to accommodate digital apprenticeships.

Last week, behind the scenes, WooTeam members Matty, Jeff and myself attended the bootcamp of the “GROW Academy” – a 5 day workshop for 20 recruits, equipping them with social media, crowdsourcing, SEO and web design and development skills. With WooThemes taking the “Design and Development” workshop day teaching the recruits about web design, open source software, content management systems, and the wonderful world of WordPress.

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As our flagship theme, Canvas has seen many enhancements and additions since it’s released early last year. The response to Canvas’ flexibility and ease of use from users at all levels has been incredible. With this in mind, it was time to give Canvas a bit of a tune up under the hood and overhaul the code for even more flexibility.

When approaching a task of this nature, which concerns users of all types and skill levels, it is important to take that into consideration as a primary pillar on the project- users of all skill levels need to be able to take advantage of the new features. Enter the Manager modules.

The Manager modules, “Layout”, “Hooks” and “Meta”, provide users with an easy-to-use interface for making use of advanced functionality in Canvas (such as it’s bundled hooks via the “Hook” Manager and filtering common areas via the “Meta” Manager). This means that, without understanding too much about what a hook or filter is, a user can make use of them. Therefore, at a basic level, these advanced functionalities no longer seem daunting and unapproachable. More advanced users can, of course, still make use of a standard coded filter in their child theme, once comfortable with the concepts of what hooks and filters are.

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In the last couple of months, Canvas has well-and-truly become the flagship product here at WooThemes. Canvas is absolutely feature-packed with some of the best awesomeness we’ve ever developed and if you consider that Canvas was first released in March 2009, it boasts a truly mature feature set that has definitely been tried & tested.

We’ve noted recently that the WooCommunity has become more & more adept at modifying the heck out of WooThemes (especially Canvas) and in the process are creating some mind-blowingly beautiful websites. The recent re-launch of Wishlist Member was just another amazing example of the power & flexibility of Canvas.

This prompted us to sit down (using this user-submitted idea as the basis of our discussion), take some time out of our regular release schedule and attempt to work some magic into Canvas. We wanted to release a new version of Canvas, which would make your life easier in enabling you to create more unique, beautiful websites easier. Simple as that.

To that extent we’d like to announce that Canvas V4 is now ready for purchase (or for download to existing users / club subscribers) and we simply can’t wait to get your feedback on this release. Below we’ve given you a proper overview of all the new functionality that has been included int he new version of Canvas…

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In all 3 years of WooThemes’ existence, there’s one “feature request” that has truly stood the test of time: BuddyPress integration. Ever since BuddyPress’ first release, we’ve been inundated with e-mails and comments about releasing BP-specific themes and we’ve been holding off on making a move in that space. Until now…

Before we get into the exciting news though, we’d just like to explain why it’s taken so long. Since the release of the platform we felt that it was still very much a WordPress experiment and theming it just wasn’t viable. Not necessarily because theming itself was going to be hard, but we had other considerations as well, especially those around support. To this day, BuddyPress is not close to being as mature as WordPress itself, and if you’ve tried your hand at using the platform, you’ll know that it’s got a bucket load of potential, but many frustrating elements to it too.

All of that said though, we’ve finally taken the plunge with the release of Canvas BuddyPress.

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Canvas can power fully multilingual sites “out of the box” with no configuration. This tutorial shows how to build multilingual sites with Canvas and WPML.

First, a few words about what multilingual sites are.

When we say multilingual, we mean that the same WordPress install holds content in several languages at the same time. Most themes today come with .po files that allow them to run in different languages. Multilingual means, the site includes content in several languages together.

WPML makes WordPress sites multilingual. Authors can write content in several languages. It also loads the correct .po (actually .mo) files, so that the WordPress, the theme and plugins display in the right language.

Installation and Configuration

First thing to do is download and install WPML.

Next, click on the WPML menu to add languages. The setup process includes 3 steps:

1. Choosing the default language (the language in which contents are currently in)
2. Adding more languages
3. Adding language switchers to the theme

Choosing languages for the site

Until here, it’s all standard. Now starts the fun part – the pre-configured setup for Canvas.

Translating Content

Once WPML setup is complete, you can start translating content.

WPML helps you separate between content authoring and translation. Of course, the same person who writes can also translate, but normally, other people would do the translation.

Create new WordPress accounts for your translators. They can have any sort of account type, including even subscribers.

Head over to WPML->Translation Management->Translators and make these users translators.

Adding a new translator

Now that you have translators in WordPress, you can send them jobs. Click on the Translation Dashboard tab, choose the documents you want to translate and send to translation.

Translation Dashboard

WPML will send notification emails to your translators, they will log in and translate in WordPress. Each translator sees a jobs queue and can only work on content that you send for him/her.

Hey, I Didn’t Notice Anything Special About Canvas!

Good catch. This is what happens when things are fully integrated – you don’t actually need to do any setup.

Canvas uses custom fields in posts and custom post types. The custom fields store the SEO data and the custom types hold slides. The theme includes a language configuration that tells WPML all it needs to know, so that when you start translating, WPML includes the right fields in the translation editor.

Editing body and Canvas SEO fields

When you send content to translation, WPML knows which custom fields Canvas uses and includes them automatically. Some fields get translated and others just copied.

Canvas also stores texts in its setup page and WPML lets you translate them.

After you save the options in Canvas->SEO, you can translate these values in WPML->String translation. Go to that page and select the texts from Canvas. Translate and save.

Beyond a Blank Canvas

Chances are you’re using Canvas as a starting point and not as the final theme.

When you add your own custom fields or use new custom types, make sure you tell WPML how to handle them.

You can do that in one of two ways:

Via the GUI – WPML->Translation Management->Multilingual Content Setup. Then, choose what to translate.

Choosing which custom fields to translate

In the XML configuration file – open the file called wpml-config.xml and add your new stuff there.

Canvas has been a crowd favorite ever since it was released, which is why it is our “flagship” theme that receives most of the latest functionality. Version 2.0 gave you additional page templates (Magazine and Business) to play with, and now we are adding our latest WooTumblog functionality (no plugin required) so you can use our new Express iPhone App to publish to your Canvas powered blog!

For those that don’t know what Tumblog means, it means making your blog function like Tumblr, which allows you to very easily publish snippets of content, whether they be images, videos, audio, articles, quotes or links.

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Earlier in the week we asked you how we could make Canvas more of a theme framework and you have responded with some great suggestions. But whilst we have been considering your suggestions & feature requests (and hence our lack of response), we couldn’t help but feeling that either our own message or your expectations were misguided / misaligned.

So we wanted to circle back to a “simple” question: What is a WordPress Theme Framework? The suggestion that initially came up in the Open Forum was for Canvas to be more of a Theme Framework and it seems that some suggestions relate to Canvas as a framework, but most are more straight-forward theme feature requests (i.e. those could apply to any of our themes; not specifically Canvas as a framework).

This is how WordPress.org describes a theme framework (with a bunch of examples too):

A Theme framework is a Theme designed to be a flexible foundation for quicker WordPress development, usually serving as a robust Parent Theme for Child Themes. Some Theme frameworks can also make theme development more accessible, removing the need for programming or design knowledge with options pages.

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One of the ideas that has been getting a lot attention of late (after our Open Forum two weeks ago), is turning Canvas into more of a theme development framework, which would empower our developers even further in terms of building 99% of their WordPress-powered websites with Canvas.

Our opinion is that Canvas is a semi-framework (for lack of a better description) already and it should thus not be that hard to include a few additional features & functions according to your needs. Judging by the amazing Canvas modifications you are putting out there, we also don’t believe that it’ll take a lot of work to turn Canvas into a truly amazing, fully-fledged framework.

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Canvas is currently our most popular theme (by far too) and we believe there’s one reason for that: it’s flexibility & customizability.

Serving as a semi-framework, Canvas can be modified & adapted in any way imaginable by seasoned WP developers. But the beauty of Canvas is the fact that you don’t even have to touch the code to modify it; you can just use the extensive list of design controls available to you.

We thought that it’d be a fun exercise to compile some of the best Canvas modifications that we’ve seen lately just to show how flexible the theme is. So below there’s a list of 11 superb modifications which clearly shows how diverse the different implementations of the theme are…

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We’re very happy to finally introduce you to our newest creation – Canvas.

In the last couple of weeks Magnus has been spearheading a project to develop a brand-new theme that would add a few touches of uniqueness to our collection. Along with the odd contribution from the rest of the WooTeam, we managed to create a new & improved starting point for your blog.

Canvas started out as a re-write of the starter theme that we were using with WooFramework2, to develop all of our existing themes on-top off. But we seemingly got carried away a little bit and Canvas truly came into its own right, serving its own purpose and satisfying some of your more specific needs.

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Here’s a preview of a little something-something that we’ve been cooking up behind the scenes. When we release this beauty next week, you can be assured that it’ll be unlike anything else that we’ve released before. Promise.