WooThemes

Headlining Act

05. Nov, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes

You only need to have a quick look at the Themes Leaderboard to realize that Magnus has designed a whole lot of our most popular themes since we started out. It should also be evident that it would be total ignorance from us should we deny the fact that Magnus’ signature design style has greatly influenced the overall look & feel of what we offer with WooThemes (even more remarkable considering we’ve worked with some of the best designers in the world)…

And with his new design – Headlines – that’s exactly the situation once again.

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Daily Edition – Read all about it!

15. Sep, 2009 by Mark Forrester in New Themes

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!

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Read all about it

01. Jun, 2009 by Mark Forrester in New Themes

Headline news today – “WooThemes launches The Journal“.

Joining a growing portfolio of hugely popular newspaper based Wordpress designs “The Journal” has been in development for the past month and boasts some impressive new functionality.

The Journal was brilliantly conceptualized by our friend Firman Firdaus and given to us in Photoshop format. After some serious brain storming we simplified some of the functionality and typography and began the Wordpress wizardry.

Foxinni came up with a nifty backend option feature to assign certain tags to different parts of the home page. Making it really easy to move things around and not have duplicated content clogging up key areas of the home page.

There is also a neat javascript carousel to display content and 6 widgetized areas to play with, not forgetting 10 different styles to apply to the theme.

The Journal is very light on template imagery making creating your own styles an absolute breeze by tweaking some css colour values.

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The New Station is here!

26. May, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in Development

The Station has been one of our most popular themes since we released it about 7 weeks ago and as you should be now expect from WooThemes; we like to add value for existing users. So a few weeks ago, I contacted all of the current users of The Station, to suggest some improvements and new features and got a whole lot of great ideas…

New Features in V1.1.0 of The Station

Here’s a brief run-down of the new features in The Station, which you can also see live on our demo:

Integrated Woo Framework Backend & New Theme Options

So The Station is the first “older” theme to restrospectively get the brand-spanking new theme options backend we’ve been rolling out in our last few themes. Here’s a little video to show you how this looks and explain the new options we have implemented:

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Good news

27. Feb, 2009 by Mark Forrester in New Themes

Today we’ve launched Newsport, a very stylish and sophisticated magazine based theme which can house a wealth of blog posts on a clean newspaper-styled homepage.

Newsport was one of the design concepts that was originially submitted in the theme contest we ran last year October. It was designed by Armono Wibowo – an Indonesian web designer – who finished in the top 10 of the competition. Armono also designed Typebased which is available for free on Woothemes.

It was then coded by PSDtoWordPress and woo-erized (adding the icing on the cake) by Magnus, who built some nifty functionality into it, spread across 4 widgetized modules. You can do all sorts of cool things using the theme option’s panel, like swop the category based top navigation bar for a page based navigation top bar. You can move the logo to the left and have a 468 X 60 ad banner next to it. You also have complete control over what categories appear where and you can paint your theme 11 different colours.

Find out more about the theme or demo it here.

The foreword thinking theme

20. Jan, 2009 by Mark Forrester in New Themes

Foreword Thinking is a theme that as the name suggests has a home page that serves as an introduction to the rest of the website. My initial idea was to create a home page that resembled a magazine’s table of contents page with well presented blog post excerpts drawing you deeper into the content on other pages.

With alternating vibrant colour blocks (with colours that can be set in the neat theme options) for the featured posts and the date blocks the home page design never gets tired, together with minimal image styling your website should load super quick. If you flick through our 10 different theme styles you should find one that tickles you fancy. If not, customizing a style is a doddle – by changing the background image for example on the wood style to any other image can give your website a completely fresh and unique feel with the bear minimum of effort.

Framed neatly with a colour co-ordinated border around the browser window the theme design has almost a print design feel to it.

A clean, corporate white style

A completely widgetized sidebar, that can be housed on the left or the right of your content, means you have complete control of what functionality and navigation you want on you website. The theme comes packed with 7 custom Woo widgets, and has two home page modules available below the “table of contents” section where you can pull through content from any two wordpress pages you have created.

Wooden style with right sidebar and 4 featured posts

What more can we say, the theme should speak for itself so head on over to the demo to have a play or follow us to the purchase links below.

Busy Bees

08. Dec, 2008 by Mark Forrester in New Themes

What a year 2008 has been, WooThemes is only 5 months old, yet we’ve launched 17 themes, answered about 2 400 support queries (14 000 forum threads!), and replied to a heap of sales/administration emails. To put it lightly we’ve been busy bees .

Today is a very special day as we are launching the much anticipated 19th theme of 2008 appropriately named – Busy Bee . BusyBee was masterminded by Magnus “Flash Gordon” Jepson , after much research into the reasons for our most popular theme – Fresh News .

Busy Bee caters for a huge variety of users, it can be used as a news based or magazine based theme. Alternatively you can use it for your personal blog, or your business website. It is packed full of useful features, with Magnus revising a good chunk of the theme options.

9 dedicated advertising blocks, with an easy to integrate Adsense option, 13 pixel perfect colour styles and completely widgetized sidebars and footer space, with some lovely custom-built widgets.

Go taste the honey here , constructive feedback most welcome as per usual.

Update: We’ve added a video player widget because of popular request. Grap version 1.0.1 if you already downloaded the theme. Check out the docs for how to setup video posts.

The News from Gotham City

19. Nov, 2008 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes

Well, maybe this isn’t as cool as Batman himself, but we think you’d love it nonetheles… Gotham News is the 2nd theme (after Typebased) we’re releasing from the recent Top 10 submissions in our WooContest.

So before we get into the details for the theme, we’d like to say thanks to Chris Rowe – who designed the theme – for a great theme concept. Chris’ 2nd Top 10 submission – Personal Blog Theme – is also almost ready for release and you can expect that one early next week.

The Theme

I think we were attracted to Gotham News mainly due to its simplistic beauty – and by that I don’t mean that it is not well-designed – in fact, it means that the design & style is great without being overbearing. This is one of the main things we’ve found recently – and it’s been confirmed in the responses we’ve gotten via our survey already: our users want our themes to be as customizable as possible.

For this very reason, Fresh News is our most popular theme ever – it’s got a great design and it’s built on a superior code base, which has allowed our users to customize it extensively (see the Fresh News mods on our showcase as an example).

So to cut to the chase – we saw all of these characteristics in Gotham News and that is why we’re so excited about this release. Essentially we’ve given you the blank canvas (that has been constructed on our top-notch theme framework) and it’s your job to make this design your own!

Magazine Style?

We’ve been focussing on a lot of themes that are not magazine-orientated of late, but again the preliminary responses on our survey has showed that most of our users are still very interested in buying these type of themes (it’s currently second after business themes). So Gotham News is basically us listening to your requests!

From a functionality point of view, we haven’t tried to reinvent the wheel, but instead we’ve taken some of the best elements from our other magazine themes and integrated them into a hybrid offering. The focus of Gotham News is on variety and catering to a vast amount of users’ needs & requirements.

Batman needs us

So we’ve got to run out, since Batman needs our help… But we’d love for you to check out Gotham News in a little more detail, view the demo of the theme or maybe it’s time for you to sign up to our themes club (which now sports 17 themes already!).

Oh, and leave your feedback. Please.

The Woo-skies open up to bring you…

01. Oct, 2008 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes

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!