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’re all still basking in the euphoria of WP 3.1 finally being released and as we noted yesterday, all of our themes are indeed compatible with WP 3.1. We are however pushing a minor update to all of you that are using any of our tumblog themes.

One of the major new features that WP 3.1 has included is the new, standardized Post Formats (we actually worked with the core team on this, as we were the first theme developers to have used different post types / formats before this was included in the WP core). The latest versions – now available in your dashboards – of our tumblog themes now includes the use of Post Formats, which is obviously also perfect timing considering the launch of Tumblr2WP.

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Say “Hi!” to our latest project coming to you from the WooHQ: Tumblr2WP, the perfect tool for you to migrate your Tumblr blog back to WordPress.

This has been something that we’ve been working on for quite some time now, but had to wait for WordPress 3.1 to finally be released (as Tumblr2WP supports post formats, which was not available pre-WP 3.1). In the last 6 months, we’ve been putting many of our assets in place to allow us to replicate the popularity of Tumblr’s functionality on WordPress and our new migration tool is one of the final pieces of this jigsaw puzzle.

If you haven’t been following our progress in this space for long, here’s a recap:

• We now have 8 tumblog themes available for WordPress, which gives you a Tumblr-like blog hosted on WordPress.
• For those that don’t want to use our own tumblog themes and prefer to create their own, we have the free WooTumblog plugin (downloaded almost 5000 times already) to replicate Tumblr-like publishing functionality on *any* WP installation.
• We have our very own iPhone app – Express.app – which enables you to publish to your WooTumblog-powered blog from your iPhone. Hot. Over 1000 downloads already.
• And now we have a migration tool for those of you who have been wanting to move to WordPress and copy all your existing Tumblr posts across.

That’s the complete package right there.

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Our micro-blogging / tumblog themes are selling really well, our free WooTumblog plugin has had more than 4000 downloads and Express.app is being used by more than a 1000 users already. Not bad, right?

V1.1 of Express.app is now available with Landscape Mode support

We’re loving the progression of Express.app as an awesome value-add for using our tumblog themes and by the looks of it, there’s many of you who are loving this as well. On that note, we’d thus like to mention that V1.1 of Express is now available and includes the much-anticipated Landscape Mode support. So start up those iPhones and grab the new version!

Don’t have Express yet? Win yourself a copy!

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Our WooTumblog plugin has been downloaded over 2700 times already, and our Express app for iPhone has already been purchased by over 500 people, which proves that “tumblogging” is a very popular niche nowadays.

We contacted James McDonald and asked if he wanted to design a Tumblr theme for us a while back, and he produced the stunning and detailed Auld for us. With the popularity of WooTumblog, we decided to release it on WordPress instead of Tumblr. The theme was a perfect fit to use with the jQuery Masonry plugin, which allows the post blocks to align perfectly on the homepage in a two column fashion. Check out his Dribbble page for some more great visual design by this up and coming designer.

Auld Tumblog theme by James McDonald

Most of the WooCrew will now take a long sought after Christmas break, and we’ll be back in the new year with more awesome goodies for you! From all of us at WooThemes, have a merry Christmas and a happy Woo Year!

We won’t blame you for thinking that this week’s “theme” here on WooThemes is all about microblogging / tumblogging (after this post), but heck, let’s just say that we’re pretty excited and proud of the work we’re currently doing in this space.

Shortly after releasing Express.app about two months ago, we invited all designers & developers to develop themes that took advantage of the free WooTumblog plugin (2500+ downloads already) and thus also supported Express.app. And now we’re starting to see a flurry of amazing themes by other developers being released.

Here’s a couple of our favourites thus far, which compliments our own tumblog themes rather nicely! Check them out:

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Some might have noticed we haven’t released any new themes for Tumblr in a long while. Instead, we’ve been focusing our attention on expanding our tumblog themes for WP, in addition to our (free) WooTumblog plugin and Express.app.

Our strategy has been pretty simple: we’re making a *big* push to enable Tumblr -> WordPress migrations, and make WP a viable option for micro-blogging. We’re doing this for two reasons:

1. On WordPress you get to own and manage your data completely, which is always beneficial; and
2. WordPress is open-source and as a result it will always be more flexible than Tumblr.

Before we could however set off on this journey, we kinda needed a beacon to know from where we needed to start. So I was the one tasked to be the lab rat / crash test dummy for migrating my own blog from Tumblr to WordPress.

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One of the things that our development team has experienced this year, is that themes with more advanced, specific (and non-standard WordPress) functionality simply take more time to develop, test and maintain. We are constantly trying to push the boundaries of WordPress whilst it strives to push it’s own boundaries in becoming more of a content management system, but there’s a trade-off to achieve this: more time.

In the past year, we’ve developed a few themes that would fall into this classification:

• Estate, which was miles ahead of any other WP real estate alternative at the time and still the only theme to support IDX / MLS integration;
• Diner, with it’s advanced booking functionality, and also the only of it’s kind in the WP community;
• The WooTumblog plugin, along with all of our tumblog themes and of course the Express.app, which have been a major commitment on our side to bring a Tumblr-like experience to WP (we take pride in pioneering this);
• Listings, which is coming up and already looking likely to be another game changer;
• The existing WordPress Custom Menu’s which we developed as part of the WooFramework initially and then committed to the WP core; and
• More recently the Sidebar Manager which adds a truckload of customization value to every single WooTheme.

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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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Canvas has been a crowd favorite ever since it was released, which is why it is our “flagship” theme that receives most of the latest functionality. Version 2.0 gave you additional page templates (Magazine and Business) to play with, and now we are adding our latest WooTumblog functionality (no plugin required) so you can use our new Express iPhone App to publish to your Canvas powered blog!

For those that don’t know what Tumblog means, it means making your blog function like Tumblr, which allows you to very easily publish snippets of content, whether they be images, videos, audio, articles, quotes or links.

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Perfect for lazy bloggers

It sounds like Europe and North America are coming to terms with the fact that the days are becoming shorter and the air crisper, whilst us fortunate ones down south are enjoying quite the opposite – sun and blue sky….

Where was I going with that. Agh yes. Crispy. This one is dedicated to our northern hemisphere friends.

Crisp is the latest theme to join our growing portfolio of popular tumblog themes that we teased a few weeks back. Ideal for bloggers who love the ease of use of Tumblr, but want the flexibility and ownership of their content on their own WordPress website.

Jeff has been providing continual tweaks to the underlying code of our Tumblog themes after recent feedback from Mr. WordPress himself – Mr Matt Mullenweg. With a new tumblog section added to your WordPress backend once the theme is installed powered by it’s own custom taxonomy, we’ve brought a simple and fast publishing form to your dashboard.

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After seeing this Dribbble (and seeing how well it was received by the Dribbble community) by the talented, young designer, Tyler Galpin, we knew we wanted to release this on WooThemes. So we contacted Tyler, purchased the design and it has been in development recently…

What to expect? Well, Crisp will be a hybrid between a personal blog and a tumblog (available on WordPress only; not Tumblr) and you can expect minimalism, perfect typography and an amazing canvas for your new content. Here’s a teaser…

Microblogging is still catching flame like a house on fire. After our foray into this type of themes – and the popularity of  Retreat amongst others – we’re now venturing into that field again with our latest theme, Unite.

Unite was collaboratively designed by the pixel perfectionist Rogie King and it offers you a sweet, minimalist canvas on which you can create and showcase your content. The minimalist design is unobtrusive, which also means that your content can do all of the shining (here’s a reminder to implement a great “content is king” strategy). So we’re saying that this makes Unite great, but from your viewpoint this may all seem a tad dull… Maybe this would’ve been true had we not spent a lot of time adding some new bling to other aspects of the theme…

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Here’s another teaser of an upcoming theme that we are extremely excited to release very soon… Unite was designed by the uber-talented Rogie King and it’s been unfortunate that this one has been sitting in our backlog for so long, BUT it’s only because we’ve had to develop something superbly unique to make the theme truly special.

When Rogie initially designed the theme, he had a vision for a commenting system that would change the way that readers commented on a blog post. To say that this was a challenge integrating would be an understatement, but Jeff has done amazing work to make this a reality.

For now though, you need to be content with a graphical teaser instead…

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