Instead, today we are announcing the release of a brand spanking new video-based theme – Premiere. Almost 2 years to the day since our last video theme – Groovy Video.

A sexy home page with featured slider and video tabber

This is one of those themes where I really don’t need a video theme on any of my personal sites, but almost feel compelled to create a new site just to use it. It really is a beautiful and very functional theme that we all love here at WooHQ.

Designed by the well traveled Frenchman Sacha Grief and submitted to us via our design submission page this theme has a very well thought out home page design, drawing inspiration from Hulu and Seesaw amongst others, capable of showcasing lots of videos, or just a few without your site looking too busy or too bare.

The video player on the single video page.

The featured slider was refined over numerous development revisions and the one you see in the final release allows you to display a video or an image advertising the video, as well as a caption overlay that can be positioned left, right, top or bottom of the slide. You can set the slider transition, speed and number of slides. Flexible indeed.

With Premiere videos are a custom post type in the WordPress backend, so they can be archived and searched for separately from your blog post archives. With their own custom settings panel below the WYSIWYG editor one can add videos sourced from YouTube or Vimeo, or even self-hosted WordPress videos, as long as they have an embed code to use. Then on the video category pages one can arrange videos by name or date added.

The video archive pages, that can be arranged by date added or name.

Thanks to the engine behind Diner and Listings, Premiere has a page template that allows for registered, or regular site visitors to recommend videos by supplying their details and the video embed code, then categorise and tag the video based on what exists in your WordPress system.

Before you ask version 1 does not allow for video subscription membership or visitors/users to upload videos to your site from the front end. With WooCommerce taking nice shape, and depending on the uptake of the theme that is all possible in a future rendition though.

Browse the theme listing, watch some videos we enjoy in the demo, play around with the slider, category pages, and blog archives, then get thinking about how you can use this theme on your site!

Backstage was first conceptualized by the talented British web designer extraordinaire – Elliot Jay Stocks way back in June. We thought Elliot was well suited for this kind of design as he himself is quite a musical genius.

Fox has spent the past few months, off and on, hard at work creating powerful widget goodness and theme options for Backstage. With custom category templates for the discography, latest news, video and image archives this theme really helps empower artists and bands with the tools they need to promote themselves. An upcoming shows widget helps manage your events, whilst a home page featured slider can easily be enabled/disabled via the theme options panel.

It’s probably best letting the images below, and the demo, do the talking don’t you think?

The glossy cubes alternate style with the feature slider enabled

We hope this theme helps continue to grow our long tail of theme offerings and we look forward to seeing it in action on the interwebs soon. As with any theme please provide us with your constructive feedback so we can continue to improve this beast of a theme.

Have a read over the theme listing and view the alternate styles on the demo switcher before reaching into your pocket for your wallet. Trust us, this theme holds huge potential.

A more muted grey alternate style. Remember it's easy to create your own unique look based on one of our alternate styles as a building block

This is Exposure

It’s not every day that we can sit around the (virtual) Woo boardroom table and get this excited about an unique new theme that we’re releasing. But I think – and I believe the whole WooTeam would agree with me here – the release of Exposure is one of those kind of themes to make you sit up and notice.

So here’s my grandiose claim for the day: Exposure is one of the most unique WordPress themes – albeit inherently simple (will get to that now) – that will be released this year. Think I’m being silly? Gimme a few minutes to explain it to you (and then you can decide whether it’s all just smoke & mirrors)…

Core WordPress Media Management

We all know that WordPress has built-in media management (images, audio etc.), but it admittedly isn’t as solid as the rest of WordPress is (apparently this is getting a massive upgrade in the upcoming version 2.9). But that said, it’s still solid enough to allow you to do some pretty cool things with it.

With Exposure (which we’ll officially dub as a photoblogging theme), we wanted to create a theme that uses these often-overlooked functions that are already bundled within WordPress; thus no need to run 3rd party gallery plugins, because admittedly they’re usually pretty tedious and buggy. We also wanted to create something that is superbly flexible and hence our extensive use of theme options & widgets (more on these later) to control the output / layout of the theme.

So you’ll note on Exposure’s online demo, that a category is a parent gallery, with the posts in that category being the sub-galleries and the photos within those posts being the actual gallery images. I know that sounds a little verbose, but that’s technically what the result is with Exposure. This also means that comments can appear on both gallery- & individual image level, which in our minds just further fuels that flexibility we are after.

Widgets, options and oh, more widgets…

If you click on the thumbnail to your right, you’ll be able to view one of the most elaborate widgets that has been used with WordPress (another grandiose claim). This is the widget that powers the homepage of Exposure and from the amount of options available, I’m sure you’d agree that at least in theory it should be rather flexible.

Options for image size, titles, optional jQuery sliders / scrollers (and settings for that) etc. definitely looks as if it may be quite useful, right? Well, why not watch the next little video of this Exposure widget in action?

Exposure – 1. Customize Your Homepage from WooThemes on Vimeo.

In terms of inner pages (category / tag / date-based archives and single.php pages), we have also included quite a few options to allow you to tweak to your heart’s desire. Have a look at this screenshot of the theme options panel to get an idea of what we’re on about. And how about seeing those options in action here:

Exposure – 2. Customizing a post Gallery from WooThemes on Vimeo.

So after all of that… What do you think? Is this as grandiose as I claimed it to be at the beginning? Play with the demo for a bit and then pour out your heart in the comments field…

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.

In mid-March when I posted an early teaser on my blog I received a lot of feedback about what our wonderful Woo users would like to see in a photoblogging theme. I got some great ideas from this and although I couldn’t include all of the requests I’ve tried to build it as best I can, thinking like a woo photographer.

Aperture’s custom built home page makes for an impressive visual display of your portfolio of photos/work/products. Note the slashes there. Aperture has evolved into quite a multi-functional theme. What was originally and predominantly built for photographers can easily be customized for just about any type of website by tweaking the theme options panel and renaming some of the widgets.

Aperture is built on our awesome new Woo-Framework that has an enhanced “Custom Settings” panel to easily upload your featured image for each post. The theme option’s interface has also received a make-over thanks to the wonderful Foxinni.

There’s tons to play with in Aperture – 12 alternate styles, 7 custom Woo widgets and 6 widgetized sidebar and footer spaces should keep you busy!

One of our two grunge styles for Aperture

I’m not going to post our awesome default style here, have a play with that on our WooThemes Aperture Demo.

The dark blue style for Aperture. One of the 12 styles the theme package comes with!

So view the demo, read up on the specs of the theme and then give us a little feedback love…