First change we’ve made is giving ExpressionEngine it’s own home here on WooThemes. You can now get your EE fix there – we hope it now becomes clear why you can (in future) consider EE as an alternative for personal & client projects.

Then more great news is that two of our best-selling business themes – Delegate & The Station – are both now available for ExpressionEngine. This takes our total amount of ExpressionEngine themes to 5, with more coming soon.

What’s Next?

We’d love to know which of our themes you think we should port to EE next? What are your favourites? And which themes do you think will be a rip-roaring success on EE?

So for the very first Showdown ever we are featuring two incredible modifications of The Station, which has been our best-selling theme for the last 3 months. The two designs squaring off today is the elegant DBDA Studio versus the funky YourMentalWealth blog. Let’s get into some critique and reviewing then…

DBDA Studio – Link (David Bailey of DBD+A)

DBDA Studio

So I like these two modifications for two very different reasons. DBDA has gone for a much more minimalist approach with regards to modifying the default styling in The Station and the main modifications are the bright, diverse colour scheme and the featured animation on a modified homepage.

The colour scheme definitely gives one a very cheery feeling when browsing the site, whilst the featured message area – with its animation – makes a great first impression and also adds to the vibrancy of the site as a whole.

Why would we then feature this site if it hasn’t been overly modified? Because this shows that most of our templates are already well-designed and with just a little bit of unique tweakage, you can achieve a fantastic result. Need I say “less is more”?

YourMentalWealth – Link (Developer: Taylor Trask at Strategic Blend)

YourMentalWealth

In stark contradiction to the DBDA site, YourMentalWealth has received a massive overhaul of the default The Station styles. In fact, the new styles are so well executed throughout the whole site, that we needed to look at it very closely to know that it was indeed making use of The Station. Another thing that’s obvious from the modifications, is that a lot of thought has gone into designing something (and implementing that in such a way) that reinforces the overall look / feel of the site.

The (almost sea)-green colour they’ve used is not my favourite, but I feel surprisingly at home whilst browsing the site; so I think Taylor & his team deserve kudo’s for that. I’m also very impressed with the Shopp plugin, which they have integrated on the Shop page.

The Verdict

Overall, these are really impressive modifications and it’s going to be interesting to see which one you think is better. Remember that the winning contestant will get a $50 WooThemes voucher and a brand-spanking new WooThemes T-Shirt; so vote with your head not your heart. Here’s the voting poll then…

[polldaddy poll=1749744]

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.

After a day of frantic coding to get the last little bits of The Station done, I’m proud to present you with my latest theme offering – The Station. As you know, I don’t design much on WooThemes, but this time around I’m really excited to see what you will do with my creation!

At this stage, I must also give a lot of design credit to FRESH01 who polished the theme for me. He basically took my basic, unpolished version and turned it into something really eye-catching and hopefully special in all your opinions.

So what’s it about?

Without shame, I’d like to admit that The Station drew a lot of inspiration from the various Ellis Lab websites (such as Expression Engine). The main reason for this influence was their great (and trendy) manner in which they publish important information on the homepage, along with an extremely good information / navigation structure throughout their website.

So that is 100% where my focus was in designing this beauty. You can also be assured that this theme is intended to handle a helluva lot of information about your company, without a single bit of that falling off the way-side. A lot of thought and effort has gone into the different navigation spaces. We have also included quite a few options to allow you to actually customize all of these spaces.

The Goodies

Beyond the customizable navigation spaces, we’ve also included a spiffy new featured tabber, which allows you to emphasise the most important content (your most important messages). The rest of the homepage is also page-based, which gives you complete control over every character, paragraph, image & video that you want to include on the homepage.

I’ve also experiment with a new sidebar system, where you can choose between three different widgetized sidebars to be published along with the homepage, inner pages and blog-related pages. I hope that this will add value in terms of the choices that it presents to you: the user.

The Rest

Personally I’d love to evolve this theme and I can only do that with your feedback. So once you’ve played around with the theme, I’d be more than happy to listen to your suggestions. In the meantime, you can read up on the details of the theme, view the demo of The Station and consider signing up for our amazing club.

Feature Pitch

I have been enjoying putting on my design hat of late and ever since FRESH01 & Foxinni joined the WooThemes team, I now have some amazing skills to assist me. So for Feature Pitch (which will still get a more unique logo), I came up with the concept and then had FRESH’s help to polish the design and truly turn it into a top-notch WooTheme.

The theme’s purpose is simple: to sell your products / services. This is a promotional site, influenced largely by the way Mac Applications (see Things.app and Versions.app) are being promoted and sold. Also – to serve this purpose, we have actually gone for a much narrower design and the width is only about 800px.

I feel that this theme is something unique in terms of our current business theme offerings (only Productum comes close in purpose & focus), which means we’re only trying to offer you an even bigger variety when it comes to using the right theme, to promote your business in the best possible way. Here’s some teaser images:

Feature Pitch - Home

Feature Pitch - Inner Page

Feature Pitch - Blog

Metamorphosis

When we saw this latest design from Izuddin (who is responsible for the hugely popular Irresistible & Groovy Video), we immediately knew this this would be another hit if we were to release it for free.

We like the fact that this is a very unique theme in terms of not having any kind of sidebar (either on the homepage or on the inner pages), which means that the traditional sidebar elements will go into a widgetized footer, with a horizontal slider. Nothing beats a theme that’s unique and free… Or that’s what we believe! Have a look…

Metamorphosis - Home

Metamorphosis - Single

Suit & Tie

I think you’ve all grown accustomed to the fact that here at WooThemes we’re not overly concerned with our ego’s and that we thus love collaborating with industry-leading designers. This time around we’ve gotten Bryan Veloso to work with us on another business theme (2009 is the year of the business theme we believe!) and we’re amazed by the results thus far.

As we’ve done with all the big name designers (Veerle Pieters, Elliot Jay Stocks, Matt Brett & Dan Rubin), we gave Bryan an open brief in terms of what we wanted and the result is an extremely clean, jQuery-infused business theme titled Suit & Tie. Again, the idea of the design is to focus on its core-competencies and to not try be everything to everyone. Also, as I mentioned about Feature Pitch above, we believe in getting a wide variety of themes into our collection, as that is where the real value is for our users. So here you go…

Suit & Tie - Home - Blue

Suit & Tie - Home - Blue & Gray

Bloggingstream

And then we’re finally breaking the backlog of themes from the WooContest… The design is by Daus (who also designed another free theme of ours – Typebased) and with FRESH01′s help, we’ve turned this into a truly stunning theme (imho). The theme can be used as either a traditional blogging layout or a more content-heavy magazine look (as we’ll be developing a bunch of different layout options for this).

We also decided to strip the theme of all its colour (for the default colour scheme), as this should allow our users to really customize the theme extensively. We’ve also tried to keep the emphasis on the content of the site; and not so much any pretty graphics in and around it.

So what do you think?

Bloggingstream - Home - White

Bloggingstream - Home (Alt Layout) - White

Bloggingstream - Single - White

Bloggingstream - Home - Purple

Journal

This is another new design-in-progress from our friend, Daus, which we only got to see this past week. Journal is a magazine-style theme with a difference, as it is completely unique compared to all of our other magazine themes to date. For me, the theme resembles a printed newspaper, which really appeals to me.

Sorry for the lower-res preview, but then again, this post is all about teasing you anyway…

Journal Magazine Theme

Aperture

And then last but not least, I’d just like to mention Mark’s amazing new theme concept called Aperture. Since he has already blogged about it over here, I won’t say too much and I’ll let you visit his blog for some better quality mock ups.

I do however want to add that in terms of the types of themes currently available in the WP community, I believe that Aperture will be one of our most unique and niche themes to date. So we’re extremely excited about this one (along with the others we’ve posted above) and trust that you’ll continue to be excited with us…

Aperture by Mark Forrester

Have your say!

After an extremely long post (I promise that it took me a whole lot longer to write, than it took for you to read it), we’d love to hear your comments on all of our recent theme concepts. Tell us which theme you like best, why you don’t like others and maybe how we can improve on some of them.

Then, we’d also like for you to have a quick vote on which theme concepts you like most… If you all vote for the same theme, it might twist our arm in terms of which to develop first…

I just wanted to give you all an update on the development progress of my new theme – The Station – since we’ve been quiet on the matter since I posted the previews a few months ago. We’ve been doing quite a bit of upgrading work to our existing themes, whilst we’ve been trying to push through the backlog of themes concepts; which has meant that we haven’t had time until now to attend to The Station.

But with time, comes wisdom (or something like that); so FRESH01 and I have given the theme mockups a once-over to give it a much more polished and vibrant look. The theme has also officially gone into development this week and even though we won’t put an exact date on its release, we can now safely say that it won’t be too long before its release.

So here’s the updated mockups for preview… Let us know what you think!

The Station - Homepage

The Station - Inner Page

The Station - Blog Pages