The WooThemes Blog

Our latest theme release has been sitting on the backburner for a while now, ever since it was initially released as a Tumblr theme (which we’ve since discontinued). Not letting it go to waste the designer, and co-founder of WooThemes, Magnus Jepson hoped to find some time to give it some WordPress love and subsequently a more impressive feature-set. As can be seen on this blog we’ve been pretty busy this year so he only found the time a month ago, but we are very happy to finally get this out.

The Beveled homepage.

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We are only days away from the release of our 100th theme. Can you believe it? 100 themes.

To get everyone excited for our big milestone we thought we’d tease the theme in a different way. Ryan ‘The Cannon’ Ray has been experimenting with Final Cut Pro X and Motion and this is the result. Not bad if we say so ourselves!

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A portfolio module has been one of the most popular requests for our Canvas framework theme. We’ve however always been cautious adding such heavy functionality into the theme and bloating the code. At least we have been until now…

With the recent launch of Canvas 4 a couple months back we are now hugely confident in Canvas’s codebase. Matty has spent countless hours refining the structure into a more modular design, flexible enough for child theming, and custom hooks, filters and functions to be added.

The Canvas portfolio page template.

As seen in our popular business themes, Canvas now boasts a full portfolio component for keeping track of all the awesome work you do and showcasing it to prospective clients and collaborators.

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Mr Ryan O'Rourke

Then we have just the theme for you!

A few months ago we were introduced to Ryan O’Rourke, via our “Submit a Design” page. He sent us a beautifully polished theme design catering for real estate agents listing their properties in a pixel perfect featured slider with sub-featured listings, and what looked like lots of widgetized goodness. Needless to say we loved the design, but felt it could cater for more than just real estate agents by applying some more generic modules to the home page. We purchased “Empire” from Ryan and Tiago, Jeff and Magnus got to work on it.

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In February we worked with the design talent that is Cameron Moll on a portfolio/tumblog theme, similar to Elefolio given it’s popularity.

Cameron is a seasoned speaker, a graphic designer with proficiency in website interface, a letterpress & videography enthusiast, as well as the owner of Authentic Jobs – which only yesterday launched it’s new Authentic Jobs UK division. Quite a creative talent.

With the “Briefed“ theme that Cameron designed for us, it caters for creatives like himself – one’s that don’t fit into a box. The comment Cameron provided with the initial concept of Briefed sums up the design well:

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Sheesh, that title sounds like an infomercial, right? But we just can’t help it, because that probably best sums up our latest theme, Elefolio.

Chris Rowe – who also designed Spectrum this year – is back with another absolute beauty in Elefolio, which is designed to be both a blog and a portfolio. In the past though, our portfolio themes would’ve just included your traditional blog, but since we’ve been making such a splash on microblogging of late, Elefolio has been enhanced to function like that instead.

Elefolio thus adds a bit of uniqueness to our portfolio themes collection, which is perfectly suited to the designer that wants to showcase his / her content & portfolio in the most trendiest of ways.

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A digital designer is rarely caught without a coffee, coca cola, or red bull on their desk. Largely due to the late night rushes before a client deadline, but according to Dr. Downie it also fuels creativity.

After teasing it only yesterday, we’ve cruised through the tweaks and fixes (few of course!) reported by our beta testers and are happy to release the Caffeinated theme today, less than 24 hours later.

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We know you love business themes here at Woo, as you can see from our theme leaderboard. So closely following Apz is another business theme designed in-house by myself.

Inspire continues where Optimize left off, adding a dynamic custom homepage that uses custom built jQuery in the featured area.

jQuery driven Featured Area

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Digital Farm – which was designed in-house by Mark – is the second “recycled” design that we’re releasing here, after my previous blog design (now Rockstar) made it into our themes collection. But where Rockstar was nothing more than a pretty cool free theme; Digital Farm should impress the hell out of you with a bucket load of premium features.

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…

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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.

It feels weird to be writing a blog post about a new theme release on WooThemes, when it’s my own theme – since I was only blogging about other designers’ themes on Woo for the last couple of months. The last time I blogged about my own theme release on Woo, was way back in July 2008 when we launched WooThemes and I released VibrantCMS. And yes – I concur – that’s waaay too long to wait to release a new theme… But onto this theme now…

Geometric is a blog + portfolio hybrid that enables you to showcase both your written and visual content within one template and one WordPress installation. I spent a lot of time to make sure that there was a seamless integration between the two different types of content on the site, which wasn’t really the case with our previous portfolio themes. For example, on a date-based archive page or search results page, the template automatically picks up what type of content it should display (written vs visual) and then makes it look easy and stylish at the same time.

The design itself is slightly more minimalistic and is defintely heavily inspired by my recent fascination with shapes and how they interact with each other (thus the name: geometric). You can also see a similar line of thinking when you visit my own blog.

The feature that I am however most excited about is the completely customized homepage of Geometric. If you’re used to widgetized sidebars or widgetized spaces in sections of the theme (we’ve implemented both these in previous themes) – you can prepare to be amazed, because your whole homepage on Geometric is widgetized! So basically we’ve developed a bunch of custom widgets (12 in total!), which you can move around on the homepage (and in the sidebar) – so you have total control over how you utilize Geometric to best serve your needs & ideas.

I trust that you will find value in these release, since I really enjoyed developing it. Also – this is my first release in a very long time – so go easy on me… But right now, you should head on over to the demo and have a play around the theme. After that, I’d really appreciate some compliments or just general feedback ya’know…

Notice: Geometric has already been upgraded to version 1.1.0 to accomodate 5 more colour schemes and an option to switch between a left- & right-hand sidebar [12-01-2009].

In the last few weeks, we’ve seen the growing popularity of our only portfolio / showcase theme to date – ProudFolio. So we thought it’d be nice to release another portfolio+blog combo theme… The result is our 10th theme and a mashup of Fresh News & ProudFolio – with the new theme being called Fresh Folio.

DESIGN

As mentioned, the basic design style was based on the Fresh News theme, whilst we’ve added some of our more popular styles on our other themes to Fresh Folio as well to increase your options.

The homepage is designed to both showcase your featured portfolio work (albeit web design, graphic design or photography), along with posts from your blog. The dual nature of the theme – and especially the homepage – allows you to take an integrated approach of publishing both your portfolio & blog in one, clean environment. Beyond the combo homepage, the rest of the theme is perfect for publishing a thought-provoking blog, as the portfolio sections doesn’t interfere there.

You’ll also find our base (default) theme styles very easy to customize (to suit your style and branding), since this theme is geared to being a framework theme for digital professionals that needs a portfolio & blog, but don’t have the time to take care of all the WordPress coding. In addition, you’ll also find our more arty / complex styles of value if you wish to go with a more out-of-the-box approach.

FUNCTIONALITY

Fresh Folio doesn’t function much differently from a standard blog theme, except that we use a “Portfolio Category” to basically highlight your portfolio items. As with all of our themes, we’ve included our standard basket of premium goodies to make your usage of the theme even more pleasurable.

We also think it’s worthy to mention that the theme only uses one optional plugin – Slimbox – to display the larger preview images for portfolio items. So the idea is that you can add a portfolio to your current WP blog in a few minutes, without having to adapt your current installation. Quick. Easy. And it works out of the box!

SO GET IT ALREADY!

What is keeping you? View the demo and if you like the theme, either buy the theme or – even better – join our awesome WooThemes Club and get all of our shiny new themes to play with!