This is Exposure

It’s not every day that we can sit around the (virtual) Woo boardroom table and get this excited about an unique new theme that we’re releasing. But I think – and I believe the whole WooTeam would agree with me here – the release of Exposure is one of those kind of themes to make you sit up and notice.

So here’s my grandiose claim for the day: Exposure is one of the most unique WordPress themes – albeit inherently simple (will get to that now) – that will be released this year. Think I’m being silly? Gimme a few minutes to explain it to you (and then you can decide whether it’s all just smoke & mirrors)…

Core WordPress Media Management

We all know that WordPress has built-in media management (images, audio etc.), but it admittedly isn’t as solid as the rest of WordPress is (apparently this is getting a massive upgrade in the upcoming version 2.9). But that said, it’s still solid enough to allow you to do some pretty cool things with it.

With Exposure (which we’ll officially dub as a photoblogging theme), we wanted to create a theme that uses these often-overlooked functions that are already bundled within WordPress; thus no need to run 3rd party gallery plugins, because admittedly they’re usually pretty tedious and buggy. We also wanted to create something that is superbly flexible and hence our extensive use of theme options & widgets (more on these later) to control the output / layout of the theme.

So you’ll note on Exposure’s online demo, that a category is a parent gallery, with the posts in that category being the sub-galleries and the photos within those posts being the actual gallery images. I know that sounds a little verbose, but that’s technically what the result is with Exposure. This also means that comments can appear on both gallery- & individual image level, which in our minds just further fuels that flexibility we are after.

Widgets, options and oh, more widgets…

If you click on the thumbnail to your right, you’ll be able to view one of the most elaborate widgets that has been used with WordPress (another grandiose claim). This is the widget that powers the homepage of Exposure and from the amount of options available, I’m sure you’d agree that at least in theory it should be rather flexible.

Options for image size, titles, optional jQuery sliders / scrollers (and settings for that) etc. definitely looks as if it may be quite useful, right? Well, why not watch the next little video of this Exposure widget in action?

Exposure – 1. Customize Your Homepage from WooThemes on Vimeo.

In terms of inner pages (category / tag / date-based archives and single.php pages), we have also included quite a few options to allow you to tweak to your heart’s desire. Have a look at this screenshot of the theme options panel to get an idea of what we’re on about. And how about seeing those options in action here:

Exposure – 2. Customizing a post Gallery from WooThemes on Vimeo.

So after all of that… What do you think? Is this as grandiose as I claimed it to be at the beginning? Play with the demo for a bit and then pour out your heart in the comments field…

Our Business Themes collection is still one of our most popular ranges on WooThemes and to an extent this popularity was sparked by the release of the grand-daddy – VibrantCMS – back in July last year.

So in a recent little internal study to decide which type of themes we should be working on, we decided that since VibrantCMS was still selling really well, we needed to release an updated, more modern and younger brother for it. The result is an awesome new design – entitled Delegate – which we produced internally, with FRESH01 at the helm of the design duties.

Taken from Dictionary.com, this is what Delegate means:

a person designated to act for or represent another or others; deputy; representative, as in a political convention.

So what does this supposed awesome design look like?

Delegate - Homepage

Delegate - Inner Page

As you’ll see, we haven’t tried to reinvent any wheels and Delegate features a similar dynamic, sliding featured area (on the homepage), which made themes like VibrantCMS, Over Easy and more recently – Coffee Break – extremely popular. The design borrows some of it’s glossy, modern styling elements from Apple- / Mac OSX-inspired website designs.

The theme has been purposefully crafted to serve as a professional representation of your business online and along with the sleek, stylish design we think you’ll make a good impression on your existing & prospective customers.

What do you think? Have we nailed it with this design? Any features or specific functionality we have missed?

Note… Whilst these themes’ designs have been finalized and some of them has been coded, there’s no clear ETA on any of their release dates. So it’s not gonna help if you ask us in the comments. All of these themes will however be pushed out in the next 3 months; so even though we’re being vague, you won’t have to wait too long…

Antisocial by Tim van Damme

Antisocial is a hybrid of Tim’s personal “business card website” and a bit of a blog. We’re extremely happy with how this design panned out and we believe this is quite a unique concept in terms of WP themes and what’s available at the moment.

We almost get a kind of “desktop” feel when looking at the design, as there is a kind of “dock” on the left-hand side of the page. That dock will be used to link out to all of your social network profiles, whilst the rest of the design (on the right) mainly takes on the functionality of a traditional blog. The homepage also thus serves as some kind of aggregation space for your activities online and the only element missing from these mockups is a link to a Lifestream page, where you’ll be able to stream all of your activities on those social networks. Anything we’ve missed with Antisocial?

Antisocial - Home

Antisocial - Inner Post

Backstage by Elliot Jay Stocks

Another first for us is Backstage, which is being aimed at bands / musicians / artists. We’ve got some amazing functionality planned for this one and this along with Antisocial will be two of the most unique themes we release in 2009.

There’s however still quite a few question marks (for us) in terms of some of the functionality that we have planned with Elliot. We haven’t decided how we’re gonna handle the music files yet for example or where the “Download Free Tracks” section will pull it’s content from. We are however incredibly excited to get our hands dirty in making Backstage one of the most unique themes of our collection and also the WordPress theming community as a whole.

Backstage - Home

Backstage - Music

Backstage - Home (Glossy Style)

Exposure by FRESH01

Exposure has been based on the success of Aperture and the e-mails we get requesting more photoblogging themes. Again, we’re planning some awesome functionality in terms of widgetizing the whole theme and making it SUPER-customizable!

The idea with the widgets is, to include so many options that it’s gonna come out your ears… Options like displaying posts from a specific tag / category, including a slider for an image section and of course, you’ll be able to use the widget more than once. So in actual fact, there’s just going to be one Master Widget, which will allow you to build your own Exposure. This is most surely ambitious, but we’re sure that we can pull it off (read: Foxinni has got his work cut out for him)!

On another note… We’ve decided to not include a separate written blog in the theme, as we felt that the audience that this theme is aimed at, will be talking via their photos. Obviously every photo can include some text / multimedia content, but the theme won’t have two sections in terms of photos & blog. Thoughts?

Exposure - Home

Exposure - Home (Alternative Widgets)

Exposure - Home (Grunge Version)

SophisticatedFolio by Tony Geer

We love our portfolio + blog combo themes (maybe because we’re all designers at heart), and SophisticatedFolio will be the latest design to join our portfolio themes collection. It’s definitely different to the designs we did before and we’re sure that homepage will wow anyone!

We like the fact that the theme is totally different to our other portfolio themes and the homepage design (especially the featured area) is also a new look in terms of what our existing theme collection offers… Another change-around, is the sidebar that’s actually on the left. So whilst SophisticatedFolio may not be groundbreaking, we believe this is an awesome alternative for our existing portfolio themes.

SophisticatedFolio - Home

SophisticatedFolio - Portfolio

All that’s left is for you to tell us how awesome these concepts are and how excited you are to see them released in the near future… Go on… We know you love them…

More seriously… We’d love to get your constructive feedback on the concepts and if you have any suggestions on the kind of functionality that we should (try) include, we’d love to hear them. Fact of the matter is, the designs are awesome, but if the themes that fit your needs, we’re not doing our job. So tell us what kind of functionality you need from these theme concepts and we’ll do our best to include it!

So the last time we posted some teasers, was way back in March this year (here & here) and from those lists we still have Feature Pitch & “Big Easy” (from Dan Rubin) in the backlog. Feature Pitch will be released next week and then Big Easy, along with Groovy Photo & Blog (from last year’s WooContest) have been scheduled for release next month. (Don’t hold us to that, because we’re a fickle bunch hehe…)

For this post then, we’ve got 4 amazing new theme concepts that we’re working on. You’ll see that we’re only showing you very small teasers in Part 1, but as soon as all 4 concepts are completed, we’ll be publishing more in-depth teasers of the upcoming themes. So here we go (in alphabetical order)…

Some Max Voltar awesomeness

Antisocial by Tim van Damme

We’ve been in love with Tim’s network design ever since we first saw it and apparently we’re not the only one’s that have wanted to create a design inspired by his original work. So we’ve been working with Tim to create a design which includes all of his network design’s elements, along with a little blogging & lifestreaming. The result is a very early concept called “Antisocial”, which is totally unique to anything we’ve released before. [Tim has also given his blog followers a little preview here.]

VIP Access

Backstage by Elliot Jay Stocks

Elliot finally makes a comeback and Backstage will be his second contribution to WooThemes (only because we love Elliot & Proudfolio has been a very popular theme among you lot). Since Elliot has had multiple affairs into the music scene, we thought it would be great to ask him to fill another gap in our theme collection; a design that would primarily work for musicians, artists & bands. The result? An amazing new concept – Backstage – which comes in 3 different style flavours (grunge, glossy & minimalist). You really want this theme (too)…

Great photography exposed

Exposure by FRESH01

And yes… We are still designing in-house as well… Cobus (FRESH01) only joined our little team earlier this year and whilst he’s been responsible for polishing both of my recent themes (The Station & Feature Pitch), he hasn’t contributed his own, unique design yet. But that is officially changing when we’ll be releasing Exposure in the coming months. Exposure is a photoblog design (guess, you could use it as a digital portfolio as well) and has been heavily influenced by the popularity of Aperture. The idea was for Exposure to have a really minimalist feel (even though Cobus has already designed a grunge style alternative as well) and totally focus the attention on the photos.

Showcase your work

SophisticatedFolio by Tony Geer

Personally I’ve always been a fan of Tony’s work and I was pleasantly surprised a while back when we got an e-mail from him, suggesting a little collaborative design effort. We have thus been working with Tony on a new portfolio (and blog) design, which should draw a lot of inspiration both from his current design, as well as the previous iteration, which got a lot of linklove from design galleries. SophisticatedFolio is thus just an upgraded offering on our already-great range of portfolio themes, since we haven’t released a portfolio theme in quite some time.

What you waiting for?

If you haven’t joined WooThemes yet, you really need to think long & hard about why you’re not sharing in this fun. We think the above teasers are enough evidence that things here at WooThemes are only gonna get better and the themes collection is sure to hot up towards the end of year.

In addition to these themes, we’re also negotiating more collaborations with some top-notch designers. Magnus (who hasn’t designed a theme for a while) also has a new theme concept in the works (a design that was initially used as an early iteration for WOO2) and rumours suggest that Mark is designing the follow-up to Aperture. So you’re missing out on the fun if you’re not involved…

OH: and how awesome are those teasers? Bet you can’t wait for Part 2…