We can already hear a couple of groans (“Not another magazine theme…”), but as long as the WooCommunity is demanding these types of themes – which is the case if you take a quick glance at our Theme Leaderboard – we’ll deliver accordingly.

Delicious Design

Delicious Magazine home page

You’ll find a few surprises on the very flexible homepage that we’ve designed for Delicious Magazine.

First and foremost you’ll see that we’ve included a spiffy new featured slider at the top of the page. Unlike most other themes that utilize the “standard” left-to-right, horizontal slider, Delicious Magazine has really spiced things up considerably. The uber-sexy design is perfect for content that features a well-picked photo and really does a good job of properly featuring your latest / best content.

In addition to that, the homepage also includes two different layout options for secondary content. You can either display the content via the “Spotlight” (which can act as a secondary featured panel) or just allowing the content to flow into the “Latest News” section, which is the chronological flow of your content. Options aplenty.

Subscribe & Connect

We’ve also included some new WooFramework features that we introduced with the revamp of Fresh News a couple of weeks ago. You’ll see that Delicious Magazine now includes the new Subscribe & Connect area below posts and in sidebar which we know you’re loving, as well as a little Footer Customization option to specify the amount of columns to use in the extended, widgetized footer. You can also specify site layout in your options and per post (full width only on single posts pages).

We also introduced a new optional top navigation in Canvas last week which we have also included in this theme, and this will be standard in all new themes that don’t already have a top navigation. The top navigation is hidden until you activate it through WP Menus. Neat!

What’s in a name?

Originally titled Food Magazine, we decided to rename this theme to Delicious Magazine, because we did not want to suggest that the theme could only be used for food-related purposes. Whilst we’ve kept the content very food-specific, we’ve done so purely because it looks awesome that way and also makes the theme stand out a bit from our other demo’s which mostly use the same generic, dummy content.

We can definitely see a wide variety of uses for Delicious Magazine and considering that it’s built on the same, flexible WooFramework as all our other themes, we’re looking forward to seeing how you guys & girls end up using it.

We have already released an awesome new business theme, Biznizz, this month which we followed up with the niche, freebie theme for landing pages, Placeholder. For our third release this month, we again go back to our roots with a brand new magazine / news design, BoldNews.

This is *bold*.

BoldNews. Jumping right out at you. Bam!

Our very first theme ever was a magazine theme (in the time when WP was all about these type of designs) and if you consider that recent additions to our magazine collection like Continuum & Spectrum that have sold really well, we figured we can’t go too wrong with a great, new magazine design.

Enter our friend, Ryan Downie (who also designed Caffeinated), with a few unique ideas and the result is BoldNews.

Without re-inventing the wheel, here’s a couple of unique design aspects to Bold News:

• The slider on the homepage is quite different to the “featured slider” that we normally include. We think you’ll love the variety.
• There’s a nice, big meta box on the single article pages, which contains a few tid-bits of information relating to that article. If it doesn’t currently include the info you’d like to display, then just modify away. The space is yours to do whatever.
• We think the socialites will absolutely love the little social bar in the two-tiered main navigation.

And on top of all that, BoldNews has the added awesomeness of being built on the WooFramework, which means you can switch to using it from any of our other themes and the process will be absolutely painless. We can’t find a more compelling reason to try out a new lick of paint. Can you?

The demo for BoldNews is here so feel free to have a look around (note: you’ll find the theme even more compelling after you’ve seen it in action, and may be tempted to spend some money). You can also find all of the theme’s details here.

The single post also has a nice new “Post Meta” widget, which has built-in modal post sharing functionality, so you don’t need any third party plugin. It also supports post voting with the I Like This plugin, which adds the voting functionality throughout the theme.

Homepage

The theme also has a custom homepage that holds a jQuery slider and two widgetized areas where you can use the custom widgets we have setup in the demo (or any widget you want) and also a widgetized sidebar. We also included a new Timeline page template, that shows your post history in a streamlined fashion.

Expect to love this one!

Spectrum is a visually rich magazine-based theme designed by Chris Rowe – who we have previously worked with on the popular BlogTheme and Gotham News.

With Spectrum the home page is a visually rich layout showcasing your website content via engaging imagery, and a featured scroller available to highlight noteworthy blog posts scattered across numerous categories (it’s a tag based scroller).

The blue style for Spectrum - one of 10 alternate styles available.

Whilst its usage would by default be for magazine-style publishers it could also efficiently be used by photographers and designers as a portfolio based theme thanks to its image heavy home page.

The Spectrum home page modules explained (click to enlarge)

View the demo here and the theme listing here. As always we welcome any constructive feedback.

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

Headlines (which changed slightly from the initial teaser we posted in September) is a superbly designed magazine layout, which we’re sure will quickly jump to the top of the (already great magazine themes) pile. Whilst not reinventing any wheels with the release of Headlines, we wanted to prompt the users of old-timers such as Busy Bee or Fresh News to give their blogs a little overhaul before the start of the new year.

Clean & sophisticated means that Headlines will be extremely easy to bend & break according to all of your creative requirements and you should see a spade of amazing user modified versions to be added to the Showcase in the near future. It is however the pretty new featured slider that we’re sure will woo all the fans the most…

The sexy new featured slider used in Headlines

We’ve also experimented with a little bit of new functionality on Headlines… First experiment allows you to set the alignment of the post images / thumbnails right from the backend; so no more editing pesky template code. The second “experiment” (we’ve done this in one or two themes before) is to allow you to switch between using a left- or right-aligned sidebar. These surely aren’t groundbreaking on their own, but both are representative of our new development mindset which is geared to release our themes in a much more modular way in future.

Image Alignment Options: From left to right in one click

If you’re not convinced of the awesomeness yet, have a play with the demo and read up on the nitty-gritty with regards to Headlines’ theme features. Irrespective of whether you like Magnus’ design style; you will love this theme!

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.

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.

The

Enough talk about its awesome features though, if you want more information view the theme listing. If you’d prefer to see the theme in action view the demo, and if you’d prefer to watch a little quick video introducing The Journal then click on the below.

An Introduction to “The Journal” Theme from WooThemes on Vimeo.

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:

Alternate Featured Slider

Everybody loves the featured tabber on the homepage of The Station (right?), but we thought it’d open a whole world of possibilities for you, if we gave you the opportunity to seamlessly switch between a featured slider and the default tabber. Here’s how that turned out…

The News Station Magazine

This one is slightly more mindblowing… Ever since we uploaded The News Station mockups to our Flickr profile, we’ve been contemplating how to implement them. In the end, we decided to integrated this with the existing The Station theme framework and just allow you to switch between the default business homepage & styles to that of the magazine look.

Just look how hot that turned out:

More…

Those 3 are the biggest additions to V1.1.0 of The Station, but there’s a few smaller additions & improvements that we’ve included as well:

• Integrated Content & Sidebar Video Player (view screenshot);
• 2 New Woo-specific widgets i.e. 125×125 Ads & Sidebar Video Player;
• Improved jQuery for the tabber & sliders;
• All content on the homepage now uses the default .entry styling for typographical elements;
• Updated blog pages to include the post image using our brand-new post image uploading functionality; and
• Improved the drop-down menu’s to support more levels.

That’s fun, but how do I upgrade?

Unfortunately there’s no quick & easy way to do this at this stage, but part of the integration of the new WooThemes framework will mean that upgrades to newer versions of themes will be much easier in future. We’ve tried to limit the changes to backend / core files as much as possible; so you should be able to keep most of your front-end changes in tact throughout the upgrade.

We suggest that existing users of the theme, consult the included changelog and update only the affected files.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!