The Beveled homepage.

The beauty of Beveled is it’s simplicity. It’s not overly designed, but well coded and perfect for people wanting to customise a theme through typography, custom background images, custom logos and widgets.

Beveled is a clean yet sophisticated portfolio theme, which can be used to show off your work, or even display your photos. It is compatible with the WooTumblog plugin, which when enabled gives you access to post formats and iPhone publishing, thanks to our Express App!

It’s minimal design allows the content lots of space to breath and showcase. With a responsive design the theme adapts to the media type it is being viewed on.

The Beveled blog page with the tumblog being used.

Thanks to the custom typography editor in the theme options you can really transform it’s look by simply changing some header, paragraph, post meta and navigation font families.

The blue alternate style with the custom typgrography theme options used to transform the look of this theme.

Have a look at Beveled’s complete feature set here or experience Beveled in full on the demo before letting us know what you think.

Counting down until the big reveal

Before the weekend started, the team prompted Magnus to consider designing a new theme, as he had not released a theme since Inspire (in May last year). Considering how well Maggie’s theme have sold, the WooTeam’s rationale & motivation was obvious. Heck, Busy Bee was a weekend’s work, so why couldn’t Maggie do it again?

Maggie consequently had the idea for Placeholder yesterday afternoon and 24 hours later it is released.

The theme is designed to be a holding page for those times where you’re working on something new, yet you want to already refer people to your site without losing the opportunity to capture their interest & details. Placeholder includes both a way of linking your visitors to your external social profiles, as well as capturing their e-mail addresses via the simple sign-up form. The countdown timer is just the cherry of the cake in terms of keeping your visitors informed of when they should be back.

Integration with the WooFramework

We’re already researching a way for us to include a generic version of Placeholder in the WooFramework and thus all of our themes. If we execute it in our ideal way, you’ll be able to use Placeholder on the front page of your new blog, whilst working hard to finish whatever other WooTheme you are customizing & implementing.

We think that this will be a pretty cool addition to the already-superb WooFramework.

For now though, download Placeholder here and enjoy this latest freebie to hit your dashboard.

Inspire continues where Optimize left off, adding a dynamic custom homepage that uses custom built jQuery in the featured area.

jQuery driven Featured Area

The custom homepage is similar to our other business themes, as it has a mini-features area and a custom widgetized area on right and in the footer. You can easily add more content above or below the mini-features area from the options panel.

Mini-features area

I’d also like to mention that we included the new Google Font replacement javascript in this theme for the first time, using the Droid Sans and Droid Serif fonts. It really makes the theme look unique compared to those standard web-safe fonts. If you don’t like it you can simply turn it off in the theme options.

Other features include a jQuery driven portfolio page template, easily change background image and color and lots of custom Woo widgets to put in your sidebars or footer.

In the last couple of weeks Magnus has been spearheading a project to develop a brand-new theme that would add a few touches of uniqueness to our collection. Along with the odd contribution from the rest of the WooTeam, we managed to create a new & improved starting point for your blog.

Canvas started out as a re-write of the starter theme that we were using with WooFramework2, to develop all of our existing themes on-top off. But we seemingly got carried away a little bit and Canvas truly came into its own right, serving its own purpose and satisfying some of your more specific needs.

What is Canvas?

In a nutshell, we could say that Canvas is a clean & minimalistic theme with a whole bunch of easy-to-use, backend design controls, which literally gives you click ‘n play carte blanche to tweak most of the CSS properties of the default design.

What we’ve tried to create is a theme that is perfectly suited for the “enthusiast” developers (i.e. those of us that know just enough code to be a danger to our own blogs) in that they would be able to tweak & experiment with Canvas without having to touch one line of code. So changing colours, font-styles, borders etc. really is a breeze with Canvas. Here’s a few of the design controls available to you:

• 90+ options to tweak colours, borders, font-sizes, font-families etc.;
• Upload background & header imagery via our backend;
• Easily modify the width of your site (choose between 5 presets) or pick between 6 different layout options.

Sound good? Watch this video in which Magnus brings his paint bucket to Canvas…

Painting on Canvas

It’s for *Real* Developers too…

We’re hesitant to use the word “framework” in the same sentence as Canvas, as that is not what it is and that’s not what we’re trying to sell here. BUT – Canvas is the closest that WooThemes has come to releasing a real developer-type framework theme.

At the moment, Canvas includes 25 hooks, which means that if WordPress child theming is your thing, you would now be able to use those to customize the theme without having to tweak the code of the parent theme.

To give you an idea of what is possible if you use Canvas along with a unique child theme, have a look at this Fresh News-inspired design that Magnus built on top of Canvas (as a child theme i.e. the core Canvas files stays unmodified):

Fresh Canvas child theme for Canvas

Download Fresh Canvas.

So on this front, Canvas also presents some new possibilities for newbie & advanced WordPress developers alike. If front-end tweaking is your choice, we’ve got your covered via all the design controls in the backend and if you’d rather get your hands code-dirty, we have all those hooks to sink your teeth into.

The Final Goodies

If you have a look at Canvas’ full theme features, you’ll see that it includes all of the custom Woo widgets as always and has been built on the immaculate WooFramework2. Canvas users will also be gushing about the fact that the theme already has built-in support for the recently developed WooNav; so beyond your design tweaks, you also have complete control over your navigation.

You can also consider this release to be a proper V1 release and whilst we plan to add some awesome new things to Canvas in the coming months, it’s a rock-solid release already. So if you start to get acquainted with Canvas now; your relationship will only get better in the months to come.

If you’re still not convinced, have a look at Canvas’ beautiful design on the demo and then consider purchasing Canvas for your next project.

After the rip-roaring success of Magnus’ Coffee Break design (which is probably our fastest selling theme of 2009), he opened up his Photoshop for one last hurrah (for this year anyway) and got designing on another cracker of a business theme. Since we launched WOO2 back in June of this year, we’ve been getting so many requests for us to release our (custom btw) design as a theme, so with Magnus’ new design, we needed to take that into account as well (since we love giving you exactly what you want).

The result is a slick new design entitled Optimize, which builds on Coffee Break’s success, as well as the popularity of our own design. Take a look…

Optimize in it's default style

Optimize with some Christmas spirit

We’ll be covering the features & functionality of Optimize in the release post (Optimize should be ready at the end next week), but in the meantime you can have a squizz at our beta demo that is online now. So if you want more, you’ll just have to wait for next week.

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!

So with his new magazine-type design – titled Headlines – he completely took the team by surprise, as we didn’t know he was working on a new design. Whilst Headlines hasn’t reinvented any wheel, the team has been very impressed by the design and the feedback we received from the teaser we posted on Facebook seems to confirm our early positive feelings about the design. So let’s take a closer look at the new theme…

Headlines - Homepage

Headlines - Inner Page

As with all of Magnus’ designs, you’ll notice that his signature style comes to the fore in a very prominent manner. But you’ll also see that he’s tried to break that mould a bit and the most apparent deviation from his signature style, is the “around-the-corner” ribbons & navigation items. Generally though, Headlines has been designed on the same basis that has made Busy Bee & Fresh News our two most popular themes ever.

Layout-wise, we’re hoping to develop Headlines in a very customizable way. One of the most important features we’d like to include is the ability to effortlessly switch from a left sidebar (as on the mockup) to a right-aligned sidebar. The main reason we’re keen on this, is the fact that most of our themes seem to adhere to a content+left sidebar layout and we’re just hoping to mix that up a little (in the process further diversifying our magazine themes collection).

So what do you think? Features wish list? Specific functionality we should include? Shoot away with suggestions, feature requests, functionality demands etc. and we’ll try our best to evolve this theme into a real beauty when the time comes to release it.

Note: Keep track of the themes we’re working on, on our Themes in Progress page.

Object Theme

Since we showed you the beta preview of Object exactly a week (and 83 comments) ago, Magnus has been busy implementing some of your suggestions in the final, release version of the theme. So whilst slightly unexpected and unplanned, we’ve decided to push Daily Edition‘s release back by one week in favour of making Object available immediately. So onto the theme…

Object is a flexible photo- & videoblogging theme, which has been crafted using Magnus’ signature and slightly minimalist style (the same style that spawned bestsellers such as Fresh News & Busy Bee). So I’d doubt that anyone will question the potential, flexibility and awesomeness of this theme.

If you wanted some more proof of the flexibility of the theme, consider that you can use it as a 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 column design with 15 different styles and an extremely elegant interface to publish BOTH photos and videos. Magnus also spent quite some time perfecting the image gallery functionality on single pages, which uses a very pretty jQuery slider.

All-in-all we wanted to release a theme that does a great job at publishing videos & photos, because we felt that there was a slight gap in our (multimedia) themes collection. And on top of that, we figured that Magnus’ design style was perfectly suited to create an easy-to-customize, superbly coded, flexible theme.

What do you think? Not convinced by our words yet? Then have a look at the demo and the short screencast and leave your feedback in the comments.

If you’ve had a look at our best-selling themes, you’d also be stupid to bet against Magnus pulling off another extremely popular design… In fact… I personally made the mistake of not backing Busy Bee entirely when I first saw it and it’s now our second most popular theme EVER… That’s called learning the hard way…

So onto Magnus’ new design (yes, that one which he designed and basically finished coding over the weekend)… The new design has been titled Object and is a photoblogging theme a little bit similar to Aperture. Magnus has however decided to focus more on photos (making this more of a niche theme), whereas Aperture is probably a little bit more multi-purposed. Here’s what Object looks like…

Object - Homepage

Object - Single Post Page

Surprised a little that we’ve designed another photoblogging theme, when Exposure (which we previewed here) is still in the works? I was, but then again I didn’t expect Magnus to design a new theme…

Our reasoning however is that there’s always room for another awesome theme by Magnus, people love photoblogging themes and we’ve postponed Exposure a little to promote The Daily Edition up the release schedule (only because people are raving about it). Ultimately let’s be honest here… Nothing *everything* we do makes complete sense, is planned or expected… But that’s what makes WooThemes so awesome!

Back to Object then… What do you guys think? Has Magnus gotten it spot-on (again)? Check out the demo of Object, and watch this screencast Magnus made to show how easy it is to upload and show images in this theme: