The WooThemes Blog

It’s been almost three years since we designed Fresh News, and since then it has been our most sold theme up until recently when Canvas finally passed it on our theme leaderboard. We have continually updated it to fix bugs and make it work with thelatest WordPress versions, as we do with all our themes, but time had come for a complete overhaul to bring it up to today standards.

We received some suggestions from one of our users on what was missing from the theme, which was a pity because the theme still had killer looks, but was let down by the seemingly outdated features. We listened to the suggestions and after almost a week of coding we can now present version 3.0 of Fresh News.

Fresh News 3.0

The theme has been re-coded so it isn’t bound by the strict 960 grid system it used before. It also has a more flexible header now which was restricted in height in the old version, which made it harder to customize. Here is a rundown of the major features, some that you will also see in our other new themes in the future.

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We know that we’ve been criticized on a handful of occasions for releasing the same old, similar themes every now and again (over and above the unique, awesome stuff that we do), yet we’ve always maintained that there’s method in this supposed madness.

A quick look however at sales in the last 3 months (this gives you an indication) shows that there are 7 themes that feature in our Top 20 sales, of which 2 of those are almost 2 years old (Busy Bee & Fresh News). If you consider this, then you might understand why we keep maintaining these themes (and update our older stuff with new features quite often) and also releasing similar, but newer themes.

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I was tempted to use “Beauty & The Beast” in the title to announce our two new Drupal themes, but whilst (for a moment anyway) it sounded like fun, I decided against it…

For this month’s Drupal releases, we’ve chosen a timeless classic, along with a more modern, trendier companion. Considering that we only started doing Drupal themes when we already had 50+ WordPress themes available, it’s quite a challenge every month to pick the cream of the crop from that collection to be ported to Drupal. But we believe that regardless of that challenge, we’ve chosen a pretty cool mix for you this month…

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This definitely took us a while longer than we expected, but one of the biggest and most ambitious days in our history is finally here – we’re proud to announce the addition of ExpressionEngine themes to our collection. With that we hopefully welcome a whole lot of first time visitors to our site, and ExpressionEngine evangelists.

If you have been following us, you’d see that this is the first of the “bigger” things that we’re announcing this year and hence why we’re so excited & slightly nervous at the same time. ExpressionEngine is obviously a relative unknown to us, but for months now we’ve earmarked our expansion to this platform as a top priority. Today, months of hard work and extreme patience (whilst we waited for EE to roll out version 2.0) comes to fruition at last.

So to kickstart things, we’re releasing two paid EE themes – Coffee Break (our fastest selling theme in 2009) & Fresh News (our best-selling theme ever) – and one free theme in Bueno, which is fast becoming one of our most popular free releases.

To produce these themes, we teamed up with one of our friends & EE developer extraordinaire – Bjørn Børresen – who will be responsible for all the development & technical support work associated with our EE themes. And for those concerned: this means that our WordPress work and the capacity to release themes & new stuff for WP, won’t diminish, as we have added Bjørn to the WooTeam for added capacity.

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So after massive blowouts in the first two weeks of the Showdown, we really hope that we can get a very close battle this week around… I mean – how much fun would a nail-biting 51% vs 49% Showdown actually be!? Especially if the winner finally takes the last 10 votes before we close the poll, to snatch a very-late victory… So here’s to hoping that this week will be just that kind of Showdown…

For Week 3, we have thus called on our best-selling theme ever – Fresh News – to hopefully provide a close battle. In the one corner, we have a very recent awesome modification in WhatFest, which will go up against probably the first-ever, great modification of Fresh News – GoMediaZine.

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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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