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.

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.

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.