The Sidebar Manager comes from years of my own personal experience with WordPress themes, having been frustrated with the rigid sidebars and widgetized regions. Blog sidebars quickly become static, boring and life-less when every page renders the same widgets time after time on every page – not giving your users a very dynamic or targeted experience.

The Sidebar Manager gives you the power to create a unique sidebar for specific pages of your site. You can now tailor make each page with specific content and functionality across almost every aspect of the template.

I’ve created a quick video below to show off the Sidebar Manager’s work flow. (Please excuse the lack of sound in the screencast.). WordPress101 have produced this very informative screencast on the Sidebar Manager for us.

Best viewed full screen.

How do you get started?

• We have launched the Sidebar Manager in our most powerful theme to date, Canvas, as we are preparing for it’s release in every theme in the WooThemes repository.
• For those of you who are eager to try it out on your current Canvas theme, all you need to do is update your framework to Version 3.0.0+ and follow the installation instructions on the Sidebar Manager page. Follow the “Update Framework” tutorial here.

It requires very little adjustment to your theme, yet opens up a world of possibility! We hope that this feature becomes an instant hit amongst the community. Constructive feedback is obviously most welcome and will help improve the sidebar manager even further.

(BTW… If you’re reading this in a RSS reader, get yourself over to the site, because everything is new & shiny!)

We won’t want to keep you too long (because you should explore the website yourself and discover all of the awesomeness that way), but we figured it’s a good idea to give you a bit of a summary of the new things that WOO2 brings. Here we go…

WOO2 Feature List

The Facelift

This one you would’ve already noticed; without a doubt… WOO2 includes a brand-new and polished identity for us. We’ve tried to create something that is absolutely stunning to look at and even better to use. This new polished version of WooThemes is a perfect starting point for what we have planned for you in the next couple of months…

A new user dashboard

Even before we decided to launch a new design on WooThemes, we realized that our user dashboard (backend) needed a facelift as well, because it just wasn’t as great as the rest of our website & our themes (or that’s how we felt). So we’ve tried to re-code the whole dashboard to give existing users a much better experience all around our website.

Watch this video for a more in-depth look at the new dashboard:

Sneak Peek: New User Dashboard in WOO2 from WooThemes on Vimeo.

The new subscriptions

One of the biggest criticisms we’ve received since launching WooThemes last year, was the fact that there wasn’t much incentive for existing club subscribers to renew their subscriptions after the initial 3 / 6 months. So we’ve changed things around completely and you can now stay connected at only $15 or $20 per month. View the details here.

We hope that this will persuade more of you to get in on some WooThemes action soon!

Revised theme packages

Along with the tweaks to the subscriptions, we’ve also renamed our theme packages to Standard & Developer packages (instead of Single & Developer before). Beyond the difference in the naming, there’s only two changes to the packages i.e. both Standard & Developer packages can be used on unlimited domains and the Standard package comes with one bonus theme (2-for-1) and the Developer with two bonus themes (3-for-1). View the details here.

Focusing on improved support

A big part of this redesign has been geared towards improving everything for existing WooThemes users. So you’ll see that the forum sports not only sports a new look, but also a new structure, which we hope will improve your experience in-and-around the forum.

We’ve also given the theme documentation a much needed upgrade and we believe that it’s now more easy to use than ever. We’re also in the process of improving the content in the documentation and it will soon include new screenshots and video screencasts.

Optimized Support Policy

We have also tweaked our support policy slightly, to optimize the time of our forum ninja’s. The tweaked policy allows us to focus more on fixing bugs and helping users with technical problems, whilst customisations will be more regulated going forward. Read the full new support policy here.

Our design, development & better blogging outlet

More Content

The WooThemes blog has been completely repositioned and restructured; so from now on it will be used exclusively to publish WooThemes-related news. So you may ask where our other content is going if the blog on here is only gonna focus on WooThemes-stuff!?

We’ve created a brand-new blog in WooCamp, which we’ve dubbed as our official design, development and better blogging outlet. Whilst the blog is still young, it’ll soon become a very valuable, complimentary resource for WooThemes users (and non-users). We plan to also feature CMS-specific news & tutorials, along with a few tips & tricks in running your own startup. Definitely check out WooCamp…

What happened to the new themes on new platforms?

Unfortunately nothing in life really happens to way you plan and this kinda caught up with us during the development of WOO2. You can find more information & status updates here.

So what happens now?

Well, the only thing left for you to do is explore around. We’re not saying WOO2 is perfect and if you stumble on some bugs, then that’s due to us pulling a few long days of work to get this out there. Please don’t comment on any bugs on this post; instead please e-mail it through to us so that we can fix those up ASAP.

And then last thing… We’d love to hear what you think of the new WooThemes. As we’ve mentioned million times before: we’re really, REALLY proud of what we’ve done here and really hope that you are just as impressed with our work. So do tell us what you think of all this hype.

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.

So what’s this “themes framework” thing?

Basically we’ve just developed a new core theme, which will now be used throughout all of our themes. This core includes the most important features / functions that are currently used throughout most of our themes.

So in terms of our users, nothing much changes, but we have now enabled ourselves to update our themes more regularly (and easily), along with the fact that every theme will be much more standardized in terms of the way it is coded.

The new framework / backend is currently only available in Aperture, Metamorphosis and myweblog, but as soon as we’ve squashed the last bugs, it’ll be integrated into all of our older themes.

Uploading Post Images & The “auto image” option

If you haven’t seen the preview of the new backend in action, I suggest you view this video first.

There are basically two new features we’re using for post images (thumbnails or featured images):

1. Upload an image directly to a custom field i.e. you don’t need to upload, then copy / paste the image URL anymore.
2. The “auto image” option automatically pulls the first image within a post (to display it as the post thumbnail or featured image) if there’s no custom image specified.

But why believe me? Here’s a little video to show you what we’re doing:

* The little intro snippet was created by our good friend, Richard Bolland.

But now there is! A few hours of coding, and voila, an optional homepage layout, which you can turn on from within your options panel. This will add post boxes on the front page, and you have the option of showing the latest video, or disabling it and getting that gallery feel on the theme.

This theme can therefore easily be used as a normal blog/gallery/portfolio or whatever you can imagine it to be. There is no need to add videos to your posts, so you could use it to show of your design work, or run a CSS gallery.

If you already own WooTube and want to know how to upgrade, you should study the changelog.txt and first backup your current theme if you have made any changes to the files.

Let us know your thoughts on the upgrade by checkint out the demo, and if there are any more tweaks that we should add.

Liam and his crew over at Function have had a go at making some grunge styles for Fresh News. The result is stunning and we are releasing this add-on for all you previous owners of Fresh News. First of all go check out the five new grunge styles on our theme preview, by using the lovely style switcher at the top right of the page.

Fresh news is now version 1.2 with this latest update. If you have already purchased the theme and just want to add the new grunge styles, here is what you must do:

1. Log in to your WooThemes account and download the v1.2 from “My Theme Downlods”
2. Unpack the new version and upload functions.php, style/*.* and functions/*.* with your FTP client.

You must also add a new div to your header.php and footer.php files. If you haven’t made any modifications to these files from the original, you can just overwrite your current files. If you have made modifications to your files you must manually add one line to header.php after the body tag:

You must also add the end tag for this new div in the footer.php before the end body tag:

That’s about it. If you have any trouble updating please don’t post in the comments. Our forum staff is ready to help you out with those questions.