The WooThemes Blog

We’ve received many questions on our development and how we manage to maintain and update 40+ themes. In addition to reading about our development cycle, the below screencast should give you a good idea of how we roll around here…

Behind The Scenes: SVN & Development from WooThemes on Vimeo.

A lot of new things happening over here at WooThemes HQ… Along with the pending redesign of our back- and front end, we’ve also been working on a new themes framework, which will most definitely enhance your experience when using our themes.

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.