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.

Beyond the featured space, we’ve also included a very nifty widgetized space, which acts as a secondary, featured space of sorts. This is what it looks like:

Widgetized & Scrolling Enabled

You’ll note that each of those boxes includes a little down-arrow, which scrolls the content in the box. The idea we had here was to include as much information as possible without taking up too much space, as the homepage is still your most prime web real estate.

The flexibility is topped off by a 5-column widgetized footer; so it is really possible to construct your homepage exactly as you wish.

Boast!

This new design will definitely give your business something to boast about. The design is ultra-modern in terms of style, whilst the structure is superbly flexible (as I’ve described above), which will allow you to bend the theme to serve your exact & specific needs.

The theme includes all of our standard goodies (custom widgets, page templates, the WooNav etc.) and by now you should know that this means that we have your business’ back covered. This is thus definitely a theme you need to consider… Check out Boast’s theme’s features or have a look & play with the demo.

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…

The next release though, will be another tumblog-type theme that is a slightly adapted version of Woo on the Slopes. You can expect this new theme – called Retreat – by Wednesday.

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:

WooFunction: 178 Amazing Web Design Icons

You like? Download the WooFunction Icon Set here!

NOTE: You can grab some more freebies in our new Freebies Downloads Section.

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

Working on a design for WooThemes isn’t like any other project. You’ve got to keep your mind on making something that not only looks fantastic to start, but something that can easily be customized in a variety of ways. The way I chose to get around this, on this project, was to offer something that quite minimalistic in design, but packed full of the features and special touches that users love to see in a WooThemes product.

By keeping the elements really clean and open I’ve left it wide open for Woo users to grab this and adapt it in their own unique ways. As the brief was for a more modern re-make of the Gazette theme I felt it was important to make the most of the special interactive features, and keep some of the charm that people love from that theme, but also make it distinctive enough to be different from the Gazette theme.

With so many different elements on the page it was important to establish an overall feel, but I spent quite a bit of time ensuring I had made the most of each section and element in turn. I’m happy with how everything turned out and I’m relieved that some of my experiments and ideas were welcomed by the community when the preview images were released.

Liam drew some inspiration from Fever

I wouldn’t say this was a minimalistic design though, not by any stretch, but I certainly was inspired by a lot of minimalistic designs and tried to bring as much of that as possible across in the design element. Sites such as http://feedafever.com, http://pixelbot.ro, http://headerfooter.com, http://www.rikcatindustries.com and http://www.designateonline.com/discussions/index.php really got my mind in the right place for making something with a lot of space and clarity. It was important to keep a lot of space without wasting space needlessly, I think it was all about finding that balance and still allowing for all of the special functions that the theme needed to have. It took a while finding something that looked spot on, but once it reaches that point you know right away!

Another big part of this project for me was the Wallpaper that WooThemes asked me to create. They put a lot of trust in me to come up with something that got the idea of theme theme across and create something that looked good enough for people to want to use as their desktop background. My idea was to make a wallpaper that included some big news stories from recent and past years, but I wanted to show them off in a way that made them look attractive and keep a positive feel on a mix of fantastic and horrific news stories. With that in mind I went for a very textured, soft and watercolor-like collage. Keeping the colors soft, and including a lot of space around the elements was done in an effort to reflect the characteristics of the theme. The idea to include news elements comes from the fact that you would class the theme as a premium News or Magazine theme and I’m sure that a lot of the users will be using the theme at some point in the future to document some very important and influential news, so it’s the users who’ll be making the news and it’s WooThemes who’s giving them the tools they need to do so.

All in all it was another project that I very much enjoyed thanks to the WooThemes team, one that gave me a lot to think about and a lot to do, but in the end one that I’m very proud of.

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!

The JQuery-based featured scroller was coded from scratch by Fox, can you believe his skills! With the “Talking Points” module also uniquely coded to showcase articles perhaps gathering dust, that can be showcased on your home page by pulling through a specific tag’s results organised from most commented to least.

With 19 alternate styles designed by both myself and Cobus there should be a style that closely fits your brand. By clicking a few buttons in the theme option’s panel you can have a completely different home page in seconds, see the two example screenshots below:

Please leave a comment below with your thoughts and constructive feedback. If you like the theme you can view more information and purchase it here, or test drive it on our demo server.

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…

The header showcasing a minimalist & sophisticated style, which just means that it's a blank canvas and ready for your modifications to be added. Just add creativity.

Simple featured scrolling module (for the homepage), which utilizes left / right navigation, as well as an indicator (the 5 red dots) of where you're at in the "slideshow".

We'll also (probably) use extensive jQuery (by the master - Foxinni) to make the video player module something special indeed.

Here's something we haven't implemented (at least in this form before)... Talking points is a mash-up of most-commented & manually highlighted articles. We obviously just love the Basecamp-esque styling of this module! This styling is also carried through & supported in the design of the sidebar elements.

Lastly, the footer "ends" the design with the same minimalism & sophistication that the header started. The footer will be extended and extremely customizable; with the main aim being to improve navigation to the most important sections on your website.

Feedback / Suggestions

So what do you think about the images we pasted above? Think this is a worthy addition to our collection of Magazine-type themes? From the teaser images we’ve posted above, is there anything (in terms of functionality) that we should consider including at this stage? Any other suggestions?

Anyway… Whatever you decide to say, just fill up & enjoy on the comments below!

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!

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:

Editorial by Mark Forrester

Well, we can’t let our collaborative partners have all the fun ya’know. Mark has been working on this concept on / off for a while now and we believe that this is definitely a ground-breaking theme in terms of the functionality involved. The theme is aptly called Editorial, since we’re creating a true magazine-vibe, whereby the posts are split into monthly issues, whilst the homepage acts as a Table of Contents of sorts. Here’s the visual low-down:

Cushy by

We don’t have teaser images for this one yet, but we’ve also recently started to work with CSS-guru, Dan Rubin. Dan – who has written quite a few books on web design & CSS – has promised to use some groundbreaking CSS techniques to push the abilities and design aesthetics of our themes to the next level. So we’re also really excited to be working with someone of Dan’s calibre and I’m sure you’ll join us in our anticipation to see what Dan produces..

So what do you think of the new teasers? Do you think that it is worth your time to sign up for The WooThemes Club, considering that we’ll be releasing these beauties (along with the 9 winners from the WooContest) into the wild in the next 2 / 3 months? Maybe you need to evaluate the value of our club in more detail?

(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!

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!

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.

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!