The Snippet Home Page

The Snippet home page serves as a showcase of all your latest Tumblr posts, neatly arranged and categorized thanks to clean iconography and a very flexible JS Masonry powered grid layout (that we’ve previously used on a WordPress theme – Mortar). You’ll notice some Generate theme influences we’ve included, based on its recent track record.

You might notice that the icons we have used throughout this theme are from the Pictos icon set that we released with Drew Wilson earlier this week.

The Snippet Permalink page, with support for Disqus commenting. Easily add a logo, or a text-based title in your header.

Sometimes when designing a theme I find it’s best to take the approach of designing exactly what it is that I want from a Tumblr theme, rather than trying to think what our large user base want. That’s the approach I took when designing this theme: I personally wanted something clean and spacious, all the while presenting as many snippets of content I’ve found on the interwebs that I find interesting. I hope other Tumblr users feel the same way and enjoy this theme…

If you are a Tumblr user head on over to the theme page to purchase this theme. I’ve already got it running on my personal site, and I might add the Tumblr checkout process is fine piece of user interface work. Purchase the theme if for that reason only…

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.

Unique Features

• 

  Custom home page slider

  A custom home page featured scroller to highlight specifically tagged posts and present them uniquely – looking like the front and back of a postcard.

• 

  Google Maps integration

  Google Maps integration for geo-tagging of posts, with a custom map panel for your blog post editor and journey planning widgets for usage on the home page.

• 

  Custom Widgets

  Other Custom Woo Widgets for use in the 3 widgetized home page zones, and 1 generic site sidebar – e.g. Twitter feeds and Flickr photo streams

• 

  Image Gallery

  A category-based image gallery template that groups photos published in posts according to categories, and displays each category’s photos, minus the post content using neat AJAX trickery and ThickBox for image pop-ups.

• 

  Alternative styles

  9 alternate styles ranging from a ‘minimal’ blank canvas through to an ‘airmail envelope’ style, allowing for its usage to truly be limitless and it’s appeal to reach further than just travel bloggers.

To give you a little history… Mark first launched this version of (his) Digital Farm on his own website about 3 years ago and if you’ve been following him since then, you’d know that this was the design that got him massive acclaim in international CSS design galleries (and pretty much kick started his career as an extremely talented designer). The great thing about this design is that it was still awesome & trendy enough to be featured on Mark’s site as late as a couple of months ago, when he redesigned and relaunched the next version.

So since we’re not the kind of company that enjoys wasting great design, we figured that Digital Farm could be repackaged and released on here. This is how we’ve transformed it…

Personal Blog + Design Portfolio

Yes, yes – we have a lot of portfolio themes in our collection already, but when they’re as awesome as Digital Farm; we just have to make a little place for it.

The coolest thing about Digital Farm is however the fact that it can completely double as a simple business / CMS theme. In addition to the default, colourful style that Mark used on his own site, he also included some cleaner, corporate styles that are much more flexible & extendable than the default design. All of this of course to create themes that are easily adapted and scalable. It gets better though…

The corporate white style with a custom header & logo

Flexibility

This is a first for us at WooThemes, but Digital Farm is coded to accept both a custom header and / or a custom logo. This gives you immense power in terms of mixing & matching some awesomeness together to give your brand / company / website some extra spunk.

Along with that, we’ve included an extremely sexy (yet, optional) slider widget for your portfolio items, as well as a slew of other custom options, widgets & page templates to give you even more choices when setting up the theme. But then again – that’s what you expect from us by now, right?

Anyway… I probably need to stop gushing about Digital Farm, as Mark will probably start to think that I’ve got a crush on him or something (weird)… So read more about the detailed features of Digital Farm and check out the demo for some design awesomeness.

Corporate Black style with custom header & logo

These are some of the more unique features that you will find within the theme:

• A completely customizable header region with theme options to upload your own background header graphic and logo image.
• A tag based, optional sidebar slider to showcase your portfolio or any collection of posts/imagery
• A page template dedicated to showcasing all your older, archived posts for the sidebar slider above
• Complete control over excerpt vs content being displayed in the home pages blog posts, and archived posts
• 4 custom woo widgets and two widgetized sidebar regions for full control over your sidebar display
• 7 delicious alternate colour schemes to choose from, with two minimal, corporate designs for a completely different look and feel.
]]> http://www.woothemes.com/2009/11/digitalfarm/feed/ 0 http://www.woothemes.com/2009/08/mortar-binding-your-website-together/ http://www.woothemes.com/2009/08/mortar-binding-your-website-together/#comments Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:12:51 +0000 Mark Forrester http://www.woothemes.com/?p=2682 Some theme launches here at WooThemes are hyped for weeks and weeks on Twitter and in our blog, others we silently and secretly work on and launch for our community as a nice little surprise. Mortar is one of those that I’ve been working on for a few weeks.

Built on an awesomely flexible grid structure that enables you to select how many columns you want on your home page and archives page and then arranges your posts according to their height and width using the JS Masonry layout plugin built by David DeSandro (Source code available here). The rest of the design is governed by the fabulous Grid 960 framework for easy modifications.



Default Style - 3 column layout selected

As is noticeable in the screenshots no space is left unused between post boxes and the posts don’t need to be equal heights like other WooThemes, making for a much more fluid, fun, collage-like layout. With an optional Twitter, Ad Banner and About module the home page can take any form you so desire.



City Life Style - With 'About' module enabled and 4 column layout

The ‘City Life’ theme style is one of my favourite styles with a background image of a London city skyline I snapped a few months ago, with a layered semi-transparent grid over it highlighting its sharp edges and urban feel.



Pink Texture Style - 2 column layout selected

Enjoy building onto this theme’s flexible layout and we look forward to seeing some creative showcase submissions. As can be seen in the screenshots its usage could be limitless, a photographer’s portfolio/diary, a web designer’s showcase gallery or an online magazine for a publishing company.

As with all our themes we welcome your constructive feedback, but make sure you’ve had a good look around the demo and seen the sub-page layout of the blog posts, single pages and full-width content before judging this theme

The Challenge

A special prize for those who have read to the bottom of this post. I’ve made a Mortar wallpaper for the release of this theme, it is a polished version of a photo I took here in London – which is a place filled with bricks and mortar!

The first 5 people that leave a comment with a link to a picture of them sitting in front of their computer, with the Mortar wallpaper apparent on their desktop, will each win a free standard package of this theme. Easy hey? Competition closed- winners announced below.

The wallpaper is available in 5 different sizes:

• Mortar Wallpaper – 1920 x 1200 pixels
• Mortar Wallpaper – 1680 x 1050 pixels
• Mortar Wallpaper – 1440 x 900 pixels
• Mortar Wallpaper – 1280 x 1024 pixels
• Mortar Wallpaper – 1024 x 768 pixels






Thanks for all the great entries. We had 6 quick submissions so we have rewarded one extra. The winners are - Adam Kayce, Javier Zuloaga, WP Themes, Joe Botha, Prashant and Iain Broome. Well done! Please email us with your account details, or desired username and password if you are not already a member, so that we can link you up with the Mortar theme.

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