The WooThemes Blog

So… We’ve actually been working on some real innovation (not *this* kind of innovation) with regards to our ever-expanding list of tumblog themes (currently there’s Unite, Retreat, Cinch & Slanted with Crisp coming next week) here on WooThemes.

All of these tumblog themes were released prior to WP 3.x being available, which means that we didn’t have the benefit of using custom post types or taxonomies, even though it would’ve been perfectly suited for this. We recently had a discussion with Matt (Mullenweg) though about this and he suggested that we implement a standard custom taxonomy for the tumblog type posts, as he wanted the rest of the WP community & theme developers to adopt this as well. This lead to us implementing & trialing this when we released Unite two weeks ago.

The “beta” of this functionality has gone really well and the feedback on Unite has been great. So we have just gone ahead and upgraded the other tumblog themes with this functionality as well; so you’re able to rock some custom taxonomy love in your WooThemes tumblogs.

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We have just completed the roll-out of a nifty, new feature to the WooFramework, which now includes support for URL Shortening. The basic idea is to offer you a template tag which would output a shorter URL – currently only supports TinyURL (default) and bit.ly (with your API key) – which you can then publish as added meta on your posts.

This functionality was inspired by the implementation thereof on various Tumblr-powered sites (for example: Matthew Buchanan). The benefit of publishing a shortened URL is in minimizing the amount of time that your readers will need to link to your content (i.e. increasing their convenience). So it’s a pretty nifty feature to have we believe!

As mentioned, this functionality is available in the WooFramework now and we’ll soon be publishing a little tutorial with regards to the backwards integration thereof. Both Cinch & Slanted have been updated to include the backend functionality, as well as the publishing of “Short URL” links in the front-end.

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We’ve been speaking about tumblogs for quite a while now, so it’s exciting to finally be able to release the two beautiful tumblog themes that are the fruits of our labour. Without keeping you waiting any longer, we’d like to introduce you to the awesomeness of Cinch & Slanted.

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We have been working on our tumblog themes for quite a while now and the only reason that we haven’t produced something more concrete until now, is because we wanted to make sure that the themes would be truly groundbreaking in every single aspect thereof.

So this is the first preview of our first two tumblog themes – Cinch & Slanted. Both were designed by Cobus and will feature amazing jQuery wizardry and some CSS3 advancements (for those cool kids that know all about using superior browsers). In the backend we’re also planning a few surprises that we hope to get as close to a proper Tumblr-style tumblog experience as possible.

Both themes should be ready later this month, but for now these teasers will have to keep you satisfied…

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