The WooThemes Blog

Streamin'

Our new year is now well and truly under way with the release of our first theme for 2010 – MyStream.

This theme spent quite a bit of time in development (we first previewed it in September last year), but not because it was difficult to develop; instead we decided to hold it back a little due to it’s similarities with Therapy (which was also designed by Izuddin Helmi).

So as with both Therapy & Antisocial, we’ve focused our intentions on social media & lifestreaming in MyStream, as that is what you guys & girls seem to be wanting from us these days! We’ve also included the new WooFramework with MyStream and regard this as another step closer to actually integrating it with all of our older themes.

MyStream may not be our most unique release this year (we’ve got some smashing plans for the next couple of months), but judging by the many requests & enquiries about its release, we’re sure you’re gonna have a ball playing with it!

View the demo now and check out all of the theme’s features here.

Unique Features

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.

We can’t let a week go by without us showing you some new awesomeness, that we’ll be adding to our themes collection in the near future. And that awesomeness is probably compounded by the fact that it’ll most probably end up being a free release as well…

And Therapy should go down ever better, after you voted for another new, free theme – Rockstar (preview the beta here) – which will be available on WooThemes in the next 2 weeks. So that’s probably 2 new free themes, that will be bulking up our collection of free themes. Excited yet?

Continue Reading »

For you. Personally.

We’re happy to release our 33rd theme (yes – we already 33 themes…) and the theme in question, is the personal blog theme – myweblog. The theme has a similar style to our most popular, personal blog themes, like Fresh News & Busy Bee and in that regard myweblog is sure to be a winner!

And myweblog also has the privilege of debuting our new stable Woo Framework backend, which we’ve been going on about recently. Both Aperture & Meta-Morphosis was released with beta versions of the backend, but myweblog includes the backend that we’ll be intregating into all of our old themes very soon.

So instead of me harping on about how cool this new backend is, have a look at it for yourself:

And then just before I let you leave… Go ahead and view demo, read up on myweblog’s features and then consider buying the theme and joining the WooThemes camp in the process.

Blogging & Streaming

I finally feel that we’re making some headway into the backlog of themes that was created by all of the amazing designs we purchased via the WooContest last year. It seems as if there’s light at the end of the tunnel and I’m extremely excited to push out more of the themes that we’ve previewed recently.

So the next theme on the release list is Bloggingstream, which was designed by Firman Daus. The theme – which sports a sexy integration for a lifestream – is just as well suited to a personal blogger, as it would be for a “diligent” publisher. The design also contains 7 different advertising to enable you to make money from your website.

Style-wise, we’ve kept the default style as clean as possible, to allow you to truly make this theme your own, whilst we believe that the additional (light-on-dark) styles can also be used out-of-the-box to suit your own branding needs. You’ll see that we’ve put some effort into the typography, spacing & layout to keep the focus on the content.

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

Today not only see’s the launch of our Christmas 4 for 1 special, but also the launch of one of our exciting themes that we collaborated with the wonderful Veerle Pieters on – Abstract.

A good few months ago we commissioned Veerle to design us a theme with a typical Veerle flair to it. We requested the theme have a business feel to it, keeping it simple and fun though. That was our only guidelines giving Veerle almost complete creative freedom on this project.

The end product that Veerle supplied us with was a pixel perfect Illustrator mashup of shapes and curvy lines in a harmonious colour palette, laid out neatly in a spacious grid structure. It was professional enough to be used as a business theme, and also fun enough to be used as a personal theme making it quite multi-functional.

Over the last month, we’ve sliced and diced her beautiful photoshop/illustrator design into neat html/css and Adii and Magnus have applied some wordpress wizardry.

I was the lucky one to be selected to create some alternate styles for the theme, not a particularly easy task when working with an industry leading designer’s designs. No pressure. I do hope you enjoy the 4 alternate styles though and will find one that suites your personality.

Without further ado here is the demo for Abstract for you to marvel at, and below you will find links to purchase it. Remember if you buy this theme in the next week you will be entitled to download 3 other WooThemes. Bargain!

It’s the 28th of the month and we’ve got just enough time to squeeze another theme release in before the end of the month, that mean’s we’ve launched 3 themes this month!

BlogTheme is another design concept that we received through our WooContest . Designed by Chris Rowe, who also designed Gotham News , this theme, that’s name is pretty self explanatory, has been specifically designed to cater for personal bloggers who like a simple, clean-cut blog design, with no bloating functionality, just the optional lifestreaming plugin that helps bring together all your social media profiles onto your site.

This theme is bundled with 5 colour styles, one of which we are sure we’ll suite you and your colourful personality.

You’ll want to read what we’re about to say!

We’ve decided that we will be launching some even more affordable themes, specifically for personal bloggers, with less functionality, but of course the same quality framework working under the bonnet. BlogTheme will be the first of these themes and available for an amazing 40 dollars ! Yup 40 dollars !

What are you waiting for, take this theme for a test drive , find out more about what this theme offers, and then give your blog a facelift.

As always please provide us with your constructive feedback.

We’re very happy to announce the release of THiCK at last, after posting the teasers to the theme about a month ago already. But I’m sure you’ll forgive us, since we’ve been hard at work on quite a few other thinks during the last month (which included 4 new theme releases anyway). Plus, you’ll have to forgive us, once you see this beauty in action…

THiCK was designed by the self-confessed, punk rock designer – Matt Brett. This was the first time that we have worked with Matt and he is also probably the most-popular and most-established designer with which we have collaborated. And we can honestly say that Matt lives up to this glowing reputation as rockstar designer – the design of THiCK is awesome and the CSS superior to most websites you will find out there. So kudo’s to Matt for helping us create an incredible theme!

DESIGN

We asked Matt to create an uber-personal blog theme, which resembles the thinking and principles behind the redesign of his own site, which he did a while back. The result is a design that is intended to allow you to take back your own blog and publish all of the various elements that builds your personality (photos, lifestream, your favourites etc.).

The style itself is reminiscent of the style that Matt has become known for… The theme includes both a grunge & clean version, along with the option to use a traditional dark on light approach or a light on dark style. And then you will also have 5 different colour schemes (default – grey, blue, orange, green & pink) to choose from for each of these 4 style options, which makes it 20 possible colour / style combo’s in total.

Continue Reading »

Something new in the room? Nah, we’re just adding a few things to improve the ambient glow around here… So can we hear a nice big “Hello!” for the latest addition to the WooThemes family – Ambience by the incredible Ambience is our first theme that is solely targeted at personal bloggers, whilst it also incorporates a strong lifestreaming element (which is another first for us). So instead of having a “super” theme with a wide variety of features, we’ve decided to go completely niche with this one and really just target personal bloggers (as we had neglected this niche until now).

(You will also see this trend evident in other new theme teaser – from Matt Brett – we posted a while back.)

DESIGN

As we mentioned above, Ambience is again built on top of the same, super-feature, super-functional themes backend as all our other themes).

We have basically integrated the Lifestream plugin by David Cramer into the theme (you still need to use the separate plugin) and created a custom widget specifically for Ambience. This means that you get the great functionality bundled with the plugin itself, whilst it integrates effortlessly into Ambience’s design style. If you have a look at Ambience’s live demo, you’ll note that the lifestream widget in the sidebar is pretty nifty… Right?

YOU’RE GLOWING ALREADY!

Come on, we can sense that you’re whole face is already glowing and you’re rubbing your hands together in glee… So why don’t you just run on over and read more about the features of Ambience, view the demo or even buy this little beauty. Hope you enjoy!