Today we reveal one of our biggest secrets yet.

The good news is however that tumblog themes have not dropped off the radar and the future (which includes a very early, very sneaky preview of an upcoming tumblog design) is looking very good indeed (there are even rumours of an iPhone app to support our themes).

I’ve personally goofed around with some potential functionality for our first tumblog theme, whilst working away on my own site. So I intend on getting a little technical now, but here are some of my thoughts on functionality…

Media Types

The essence of a tumblog is its ability to support different media types (we will support: text, images, video, audio, links, quotes & dialogues / chats)  and format the content according to those media types. For this to be effective, the WordPress theme needs to determine in some way what “type” of post you are adding. In my mind, we have the following options:

• Using categories or tags, which you can specify in the backend. This would mean that if a post has been published with a specific category or tag i.e. “Images”, the display format will be for an image as specified by the theme’s design;
• Adding an optional drop-down on post-level to (manually) select which type of post it is you’re publishing; or
• Developing the theme in an intelligent way i.e. if you’re embedding a video via our custom field, it will automatically be rendered as a video post by the theme.

Now it’s probably possible to use a combination of the above, but I’d think that the use of categories & tags makes the most sense. Using categories & tags would mean that you could access the archives for all “quotes” posts or all “video” posts, as they are linked to a specific category or tag (which you have specified in the theme options). This makes even more sense when you have a look at most tumblog designs, which are normally quite visually labelled with their media type to make navigation easier.

If we go that route, I’d also think that we should include a fallback in the case that the appropriate category or tag isn’t present. In this case, I think the drop-down select on post-level probably makes the most sense!?

QuickPress

This is something which we’re totally borrowing from Tumblr, but it is a must-have if we’re gonna be serious about our tumblog themes.

WordPress already includes QuickPress functionality, but we’d like to take those ideas a little further and develop a WooThemes Tumblog widget for your WP dashboard, to allow you to quickly post any type of content to your tumblog theme. With a little jQuery & AJAX magic, I’m sure we’ll be able to integrate something superbly usable & user-friendly; plus it maintains the spirit & principles of tumblogs in general.

Feedback

This is still early days yet for WooThemes tumblog themes, but we have quite a few ideas (as you’ve seen above) on how we’re going to pull this off. We would love however to hear what you think at this stage…

Are we missing some crucial functionality? In your ideal world, what would you like to see in our tumblog themes? Or is there any aspect of Tumblr themes that we can improve when we release our WP-equivalents? Fire away!

So… Recently I’ve been very impressed with Tumblr and have been surprised by their popularity and adoption rates. Looking at myself however (and the difficulty in posting on my own (full-on) blog, I can understand why micro-blogging is becoming the publishing medium of choice (Twitter probably being the ultimate proof in the pudding). With that in mind then, I’m definitely keen to develop a framework (and subsequently a set of tumblelog themes) for WordPress, but I’m also intrigued by the prospect of possibly porting these designs over to Tumblr.

What do you think? Would you prefer to use Tumblr or WordPress? And would you actually pay for such themes? The whole idea is still very new and undiscussed (even amongst the WooTeam) – so just give us your 2 cents…