The WooThemes Blog

It’s been almost 6 months in development since the WPBundle guys – Liam and Spencer presented their exciting project on Kickstarter in July of this year. Although the initial funding was unsuccessful, there was huge interest on Twitter and within the WP community so we approached Liam to see if they’d be open to a collaboration. We believed we could help market their WordPress bundle to a much more targeted market on our site rather than on Kickstarter, where potential backers are not so WordPress savvy.

Today we can finally announce that all their hard work, late nights and caffeine fuelled brain storms has become a reality. WP Bundle is now available and offering some game changing, hugely unique WordPress themes that we are quite certain you would have not seen anywhere else before!

Here are some tasters of what Liam and Spencer have cooked up for you. What is important to note is that all the WPBundle themes are built on the solid and ever improving codebase that is our WooFramework. That means if you are familiar with our themes and experimenting with our code in WooTheme customizations you’ll have no problem at all with the WPBundle themes. You should also be able to chop and change bits of functionality between the themes if you are feeling up to the task in creating dream sites for your clients.

As was mentioned in WPBundle’s newsletter WooThemes users will be eligible for very attractive discounts on the $250 WPBundle:

• WooThemes club subscription members can get the WPBundle for only $100
• Any other WooThemes customers that have purchased theme packages in the past can get WPBundle for $150

To take advantage of these special offers login to your WooThemes account and on the “Add Products” page look for the WPBundle offer, purchase the themes directly from there and you’ll be in business in no time. To find out more about WPBundle go to their beautiful site – www.wpbundle.com.

Getting Back to Business

As we’ve been promising, some “good ‘ol traditional” themes are on their way and today’s release is just the start of this sequence which should last for about 5 / 6 releases (before we go a bit niche again).

Our new business theme, is the beautifully designed Boast (done by Liam McKay) which sports a very nice, Apple-like gloss.

The Homepage

Boast’s awesome homepage really makes this theme shine (yes, you get it: the design is glossy) and we’d like to believe that the possibilities & opportunities that this offers you is very valuable indeed.

First up, we have a very different featured slider to the one we normally integrate. We’ve reserved a lot of space for the very first messages that you communicate via your website and as a result, the space is extremely prominent & flexible.

Continue Reading »

We realize that we’ve been “tinkering” with our theme releases as of late, and as a result it may have seemed like we have been in an overly experimental mood. Whilst that holds some truth (we are definitely exploring new niches), we can assure you all that our next few releases will be much closer to our tried & tested methods which have resulted in all your favourite themes being best-sellers.

This means that you can soon expect some more business, portfolio, blog etc. themes from us again. In fact, we have these two beauties; both going out to beta in the next day or two. Boast (the first teaser below) is a business + portfolio type design, whilst Diarise (more of a niche release) will surprise many of you with it’s amazingly, unique functionality… Check out the teasers…

Continue Reading »

In recent months we’ve worked quite hard to bring you some fantastic free stuff and we think that our growing collection of freebies is pretty awesome. So… Since icons are such a huge element in modern day web design, we decided to partner with one of the best icon designers we’ve come across to bring you a fantastic new web icon set.

We’ve worked with Liam McKay before on theme designs (5 to be exact) and we’ve always just admired his icon design work from afar. That however changes with the new WooFunction Web Icon Set which Liam recently completed for us.

The WooFunction Icon Set includes 178 amazing web-related icons in a sophisticated and glossy design style. All 178 icons are available as 32×32 pixel PNG files and we can assure you that they are indeed pixel-perfect. If you have an in-depth look at the individual icons, you’ll notice that Liam has spent a lot of time paying attention to the finer details, which means that this is a really classy icon set. Here; have a look for yourself:

Continue Reading »

Liam kindly spent some time with us chatting through what was involved in his recent collaboration with WooThemes on the Daily Edition theme.

Continue Reading »

I’m excited about this theme! Almost a month after teasing you with some original screenshots of Liam Mckay’s awesome design we have finally completed the conversion to a flexible, neatly coded WordPress theme. You commented, and we listened and built some awesome functionality into this theme.

Breathing some new life into the incredible success of Gazette Edition we wanted another news/magazine based theme that was minimalistic enough to let your content speak, whilst customizable enough to brand however you like. We approached our friend Liam McKay as we thought this was just up his alley, and did he impress!

Continue Reading »

We’re an excitable bunch over here at the WooThemes HQ and nothing excites us more than working with great individuals and getting to share upcoming theme concepts with you lot! This time around we’ve got a new design from now-WooThemes legend collaborator – Liam McKay – to show you…

We approached Liam in July and asked him to design a follow-up theme for the hugely popular Gazette Edition theme (which is also one of our all-time best-selling themes). The result is a superb, content-rich magazine- / news-style design titled The Daily Edition. Let’s have a look at the design…

Continue Reading »

Cushy by Liam McKay

I know, I know… The title isn’t overly original or indicative and probably doesn’t make any sense from a marketing perspective, but Magnus is away skiing in Austria and Mark is planning his wedding for this Saturday, which leaves me to do everything…

Cushy is the newest addition to our already popular range of business- / CMS-type themes, and we’re sure you’ll love the diversity that this latest design (by Liam McKay) brings to our ever-expanding collection of themes.

The design itself is very different to our other business themes (such as VibrantCMS & Over Easy), which sports a much cleaner look. Cushy takes a more vibrant and textured approach, without losing any of its sophistication. Also – with a variety of different page templates and layouts for different content sections, the theme seems to intrigue and surprise around every corner and click.

From a functionality perspective, Cushy has everything a business / corporate website would require, without being bloated. A custom homepage will allow you to stand out from the crowd, whilst a widgetized sidebar and footer adds to your options in terms of customizing the base theme. The product / services tabber on the homepage also displays some of your most important sales information effectively without taking up unnecessary screen real estate. Oh – and did you notice that sexy drop down menu’s for the main navigation!?

We hope that all of the Woo fanboys and -girls love our latest release; and maybe you’ll even consider signing up to our WooThemes Club, which now sports 24 themes! Before you leave, read the in-depth details of Cushy or check out the demo right away.

Oh… Wanted to let you know… I’m doing a little promo on Twitter a little later, where I’ll give away a few free copies of Cushy. So follow @adii on Twitter to get the scoop!

We know that this might come as a complete surprise to you, but we currently have about 10 themes that are in various states of development. Along with the 9 theme concepts that we have purchased from our WooContest winners, we have a few more collaborations that we’re working on. So, as we’re gearing up to release Matt Brett’s theme early next week, we thought it’d be cool to get your mouth watering over some of the other themes that are in the works…

Abstract by Veerle Pieters

Yup – you read it right! WooThemes is indeed collaborating with the super-designer, uber-illustrator and industry-leading designer, Veerle Pieters. We approached Veerle about a month ago to get cracking on a new design for us and she has created something truly unique and 100% within her signature style. This is a major coup for us in our attempts to get the best web designers involved with WooThemes in collaborative projects. Any here’s some enticing teasers:

Continue Reading »

Something new in the room? Nah, we’re just adding a few things to improve the ambient glow around here… So can we hear a nice big “Hello!” for the latest addition to the WooThemes family – Ambience by the incredible Ambience is our first theme that is solely targeted at personal bloggers, whilst it also incorporates a strong lifestreaming element (which is another first for us). So instead of having a “super” theme with a wide variety of features, we’ve decided to go completely niche with this one and really just target personal bloggers (as we had neglected this niche until now).

(You will also see this trend evident in other new theme teaser – from Matt Brett – we posted a while back.)

DESIGN

As we mentioned above, Ambience is again built on top of the same, super-feature, super-functional themes backend as all our other themes).

We have basically integrated the Lifestream plugin by David Cramer into the theme (you still need to use the separate plugin) and created a custom widget specifically for Ambience. This means that you get the great functionality bundled with the plugin itself, whilst it integrates effortlessly into Ambience’s design style. If you have a look at Ambience’s live demo, you’ll note that the lifestream widget in the sidebar is pretty nifty… Right?

YOU’RE GLOWING ALREADY!

Come on, we can sense that you’re whole face is already glowing and you’re rubbing your hands together in glee… So why don’t you just run on over and read more about the features of Ambience, view the demo or even buy this little beauty. Hope you enjoy!

Even though the title sounds almost Biblical, we won’t be that blasphemous… But our latest theme – Open Air – is sure to Woo you to a major extent.

This theme has been a while in the making, but that’s only because we like to produce quality themes around here; instead of having to push out mediocre designs every second week.

So if you want to get an idea of what Open Air has to offer you: read the rest of the post…

Design

a more personal front page. And you’ll note that the differences in the header is quite significant when interchanging between these two options; for the magazine option, you’ll be able to feature an important post, whilst the personal option displays an about the author section, as well as links to his / her Twitter account and e-mail.

Functionality

After releasing 10 themes before Open Air, it becomes really difficult to wax lyrical about all of the features, but when we’re already including all of the standard WooThemes greatness, there’s not much to say… Oh, except for the fact that we’ve added a Video Player…

We’ve decided to experiment a bit (both in terms of the coding challenges, but also in terms of what our users would like us to add to our themes) and the result is a new built-in Video Player. The nice thing about the video player is that it picks up the videos from the posts that you’ve published and you thus do not need to publish video-only posts to have them display there. Nifty, right?

Come on… We know you want to give this air a bit of a whiff…

You should really view the the demo of Open Air here, because the theme is much better than this blog post (which is just a clever marketing attempt on our part).

If you think we’re stark raving mad to think this theme is pretty cool, feel free to tell us that in the comments. But we can’t guarantee that we’re gonna take you seriously… Hope you guys and girls enjoy the new theme and look forward to your feedback!

Since we don’t like keeping you in the dark about the things we are cooking up here at WooThemes HQ, we just thought that we’d share some sneak previews of the newest theme we’re working on…

During the last few weeks we’ve been working with some collaborative designers on new theme concepts and one of these – entitled Open Air (another collaboration with Liam McKay) – is nearing completion and will be available during the latter stages of this month. The theme will have a dual-purpose, as it will include both a magazine-style & traditional blog layout, whilst also featuring a brand new (enhanced) video player, which we’ll be experimenting with.

Here’s a teaser collage of screenshots (there’s no larger preview available):

We’re quite excited about the theme and even though we won’t be reinventing the wheel, you can expect another typically, quality release from us. Kudo’s also to Liam for again coming up with a brilliant concept, after the very popular release of Papercut last month.

We look forward to sharing this one with our WooTheme users! And if it isn’t obvious to you yet: we’re pretty serious about regularly releasing new themes. The themes scheduled for the next few months will blow your mind! So sign up to The WooThemes Club already!

Liam and his crew over at Function have had a go at making some grunge styles for Fresh News. The result is stunning and we are releasing this add-on for all you previous owners of Fresh News. First of all go check out the five new grunge styles on our theme preview, by using the lovely style switcher at the top right of the page.

Fresh news is now version 1.2 with this latest update. If you have already purchased the theme and just want to add the new grunge styles, here is what you must do:

1. Log in to your WooThemes account and download the v1.2 from “My Theme Downlods”
2. Unpack the new version and upload functions.php, style/*.* and functions/*.* with your FTP client.

You must also add a new div to your header.php and footer.php files. If you haven’t made any modifications to these files from the original, you can just overwrite your current files. If you have made modifications to your files you must manually add one line to header.php after the body tag:

You must also add the end tag for this new div in the footer.php before the end body tag:

That’s about it. If you have any trouble updating please don’t post in the comments. Our forum staff is ready to help you out with those questions.

I’m sure that you’ll agree with our pretty bold statement in the title, when you see Papercut, which is the latest theme to be added to the WooThemes collection.

This grungy beauty was designed by one of our new best friends – We think that the homepage design of Papercut is absolutely incredible (in a modest way okay – hehe) if you’re looking to add a whole bunch of content to it. The grid-based layout really allows all of the content to “feature” in their own right, whilst not over-complicating the design.

You will also note that the design features a whole bunch of minor details to increase the overall user experience. We’ve paid a lot of attention to the typography and content text styles (for both posts & comments) in our attempt to truly create something magnificent.

Functionality

As you will now come to expect from us, Papercut is built on the same kind of functionality and backend that is featured in all of our other themes. This time however, we’ve decided to add some new things, which we hope you will like…

One of the new features in Papercut (that is essentially on trial and will be added to other themes if this “experiment” proves successful) is that the whole sidebar is widgetized. We’ve even custom-developed some additional Papercut-specific widgets which you can add to the sidebar; and will fit seamlessly into Paper Cut’s overall styling.

Check it!

Anyway, we can either continue to use a bunch of descriptive adjectives in our round-up of the theme’s release, or you can check it out here and decide for yourself.

And BTW… Our club subscribers already got access to this new beauty a hour ago… So download away WooMembers!