The WooThemes Blog

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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Here at WooThemes we use a script for dynamic image resizing in all our themes which is called timthumb.php (thumb.php in our themes). One of the main reasons why we haven’t replaced our dynamic image resizing script yet, is because we feel it is superior to the WP post thumbnails that were introduced in WordPress 2.9.

The reason it is superior to WP Post Thumbnails is because it can dynamically change the size of your images. It is widely used amongst WP theme developers, but it also has it’s problems (mostly setup and server performance issues).

We noticed a WP trac ticket (hopefully it makes it into a future WP version) which had a nice function to use the built in re-size functionality which already exists in WP core, and have now added this function to our framework (v 3.1.10) to see how it works.

We have also updated Canvas with a new option to enable the re-size function if you use WP Post Thumbnails, so you can test the new functionality today!

Native image resizing for WP Post Thumbnails

PS! We also have some new framework functionality coming soon which will update the way you upload images in your options panel/custom settings… Stay tuned!

Update!

We have deployed version 3.2.0 of the WooFramework which now uses native WP upload functionality for uploading in the options panel and in custom settings field. Grab it now by going to YourTheme > Update Framwork.

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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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 are some basic guidelines on how to update a theme and framework to it’s latest version.

1. Find your version number
2. Have you made modifications?
3. Updating modified template files
4. The WooFramework
5. How to update the WooFramework
6. How to manually update the WooFramework

Video Tutorial

Find your version number

1. Check which version you are running by looking under Apperance -> Themes:

Find your theme version

2. Login to our website and find the changelog for your theme in your dashboard or under the theme documentation:

See the changelog for newest version

3. The next step is to download your theme from your dashboard (where you originally downloaded the theme), by logging in to our website and clicking Account in the top right corner and My Downloads.

Download new theme from your Dashboard

Once you have downloaded and unpacked your theme on your computer, you need to determine which way you want to update your theme based on the following:

Have you made modifications?

If the answer to this is NO, then you can simply update your theme by overwriting the existing theme files, although we highly recommend making a backup of your current theme directory (e.g. rename /wp-content/themes/freshnews to wp-content/themes/freshnews-old/), or to install it into a new directory (e.g. /freshnews2).

If the answer is YES, then you will have to make a decision on how to proceed based on how many updates that have been made on the theme. You can check this by looking in the changelog.txt in your theme folder and see all the changes since your theme version which we found above. If there are many changes in files you have modified, then you might be better of just installing the theme to a new directory, and reapplying your customizations.

After you have uploaded your theme, you should make sure it’s activated and then go over the Options Panel and see if there are any new additions that need to be edited.

Updating modified template files

If you have modified your files, and you can see that these files have been updated in the changelog.txt, then you need to inspect exactly what changes have been made so that you can update your existing file to the new version. This is most often described in the comment behind the actual file like this:

*** Fresh News Changelog ***

2009.08.19 - version 2.0.6
  * footer.php - removed tabs.js
  * includes/theme.js - added superfish, tabs
  * includes/js/superfish.js - superfish new file

In this example from Fresh News changelog.txt, we can see that there are 3 files that have been updated. So for updating footer.php you would need to edit yours and remove the line where tabs.js was included before.

You can also use a program to list the differences between your existing file and new file, to see what the changes are, and merge the two, on both PC and Mac.

The WooFramework

All our themes run on a code framework called the WooFramework, which includes general functionality across all our themes. The WooFramework is located inside your theme folder in the “functions” folder.

To check which version of the framework you have, simply look in your theme options panel

Framework version

You can see what the latest version of the framework is by checking the Changelog on the documentation pages

Update Framework

How to update the WooFramework

Updating the framework is simple thanks to our update functionality built into the theme. In the theme menu you have an option called Update Framework. This function will upgrade the /functions/ folder in your theme automatically to the latest version.

How to manually update the WooFramework

If the automatic framework update doesn’t work on your server, then you’ll need to manually update the framework using FTP.

1. Download the latest framework from our server.
2. Unzip this file on your computer.
3. Upload the framework files and folder via FTP to your themes’ functions folder
4. Make sure you overwrite all files and subfolders

Fresh News is the all time most popular theme here at WooThemes, so we thought it should deserve to be one of the first themes to receive the new Woo Framework update treatment (see video of new framework). What this basically means is that the theme is now easier to setup and use because of the improved functions in the framework (options panel, new widgets, easier image upload, easier to update in future etc.).

We also reworked some of the coding on the front page of the theme, so it now acts more like Busy Bee in functionality. To be more specific:

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