The WooThemes Blog

Hanging around WooThemes.com the last couple of days, you might’ve noticed that there’s a few bits & pieces that simply disappeared over night. If you haven’t noticed it yet, it probably justifies our decision, but we still owe you an explanation, and assure you we’ll still be taking care of you if this announcement effects you…

We launched our ExpressionEngine themes in January last year, in an attempt to diversify and expand our business. The EE launch was also eventually followed by the introduction of Tumblr, Drupal & Magento themes, which re-inforced our strategy and allowed us to really gauge the demand and viability in these markets / communities.

After more than a year of working hard on this strategy, we came to the difficult decision to transition these platforms out of WooThemes as we re-focus our attention on the one CMS which our core team loves: WordPress.

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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 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!

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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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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It’s taken us a while, but we’ve finally given all 7 of our beautiful Tumblr themes a home here on WooThemes: Here’s WooTumblr.

After recently – and without any real announcement – adding two more Tumblr themes to our collection (Decadence & TumFolio), we felt that we needed to give our Tumblr themes a proper place within the WooThemes.com ecosystem. This also signals our intent with regards to creating more Tumblr themes going forward and we’re especially excited to explore with niche-focused themes (such TumFolio).

After our recent release of Snippet on Tumblr, our themes collection with them has grown to 5 themes (including one which is free). Judging by the initial responses & feedback (it’s been a little more than 2 months since we released our first Tumblr themes), we’re very keen to build on the momentum we have on the platform and keen to bring more Woo-specific innovation & awesomeness to Tumblr.

In the next few weeks, we’ll be working on a few more Tumblr themes (don’t worry, we’ve got some secret – yet incredibly awesome – WordPress stuff on the way as well), but instead of pushing the same old, same old at you, we want to explore new territory with those Tumblr themes.

So we don’t do this often (as it generally leads to an free-for-all), but please tell us what kind of features you want us to include in our future Tumblr themes. Also feel free to suggest any specific designs that you want us to consider or new niche ways of using Tumblr. Simply put: shoot with those ideas! (And we’ll try make them a reality!)

We are pleased to announce a new addition to our growing portfolio of WooThemes Tumblr based themes – it’s called Snippet.

The Snippet Home Page

The Snippet home page serves as a showcase of all your latest Tumblr posts, neatly arranged and categorized thanks to clean iconography and a very flexible JS Masonry powered grid layout (that we’ve previously used on a WordPress theme – Mortar). You’ll notice some Generate theme influences we’ve included, based on its recent track record.

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We recently discovered Drew Wilson‘s amazing work on Dribbble and after seeing him publish this teaser post, we decided to contact him about working with the WooTeam to bring some of that awesomeness over here.

The result is a free, vector icon set which contains 21 icons that are perfectly suited for your Tumblr & tumblog needs. Considering that we have released three tumblog themes on WP and another four on Tumblr, we thought that icons in this niche would be a nice little added bonus for all of our users. So this is what that awesomeness looks like:

Click to see a full preview of Pictos

You like? Download Pictos

NOTE: Please read the licensing information for the free Pictos icon set over here.

We’ve been talking about tumblog themes for a while now and you all know that our messages in this regard have been rather vague. Today we actually have something new & significant to add to the previous conversation…

Within the WooHQ, we’ve been discussing tumblogs extensively, and the conversation that we have had with you guys & girls here on the blog is minimal compared to the extended internal discussions on the matter. The only evidence that these discussions have resulted in anything more than talk is the release of Cinch & Slanted (both powered by WordPress) and teasers about an upcoming iPhone app to work with those tumblogs running on WordPress.

Nothing new there just yet… But we finally have an answer to the question so many of you have asked us in recent weeks: Are you making themes for Tumblr?

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We’ve been speaking about tumblogs for quite a while now, so it’s exciting to finally be able to release the two beautiful tumblog themes that are the fruits of our labour. Without keeping you waiting any longer, we’d like to introduce you to the awesomeness of Cinch & Slanted.

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Since we’re getting closer to releasing our two new tumblog themes towards the end of the month, we wanted to keep the momentum and hype going with another little teaser.

When we teased you with these previews a week ago, we mentioned that the themes would include some jQuery wizardry, as well as progressive usage of CSS3. To give you an idea of what we’re talking about, you can view Cobus’ new design which he launched over the weekend.

We’d like to think that considering that Cobus designed both Cinch & Slanted and that since he’s responsible for the front-end coding, you can expect some similar awesomeness from our tumblog themes. So click around his new site and start anticipating the awesome that we will be releasing soon.

We have been working on our tumblog themes for quite a while now and the only reason that we haven’t produced something more concrete until now, is because we wanted to make sure that the themes would be truly groundbreaking in every single aspect thereof.

So this is the first preview of our first two tumblog themes – Cinch & Slanted. Both were designed by Cobus and will feature amazing jQuery wizardry and some CSS3 advancements (for those cool kids that know all about using superior browsers). In the backend we’re also planning a few surprises that we hope to get as close to a proper Tumblr-style tumblog experience as possible.

Both themes should be ready later this month, but for now these teasers will have to keep you satisfied…

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Since posting our initial thoughts on tumblog (Tumblr-like) themes back in August, we’ve gotten a little busy with releasing all the new themes we had in the backlog. This is compounded by our #woobs charity & marketing campaign, which means that our lack of development capacity (this is why we’re hiring a new developer soon) results in us having to focus on the more important & time-sensitive things.

The good news is however that tumblog themes have not dropped off the radar and the future (which includes a very early, very sneaky preview of an upcoming tumblog design) is looking very good indeed (there are even rumours of an iPhone app to support our themes).

I’ve personally goofed around with some potential functionality for our first tumblog theme, whilst working away on my own site. So I intend on getting a little technical now, but here are some of my thoughts on functionality…

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Feeling rather inspired this morning, I decided to present myself with a new challenge: to develop a new tumblelog framework built onto our favourite platform – WordPress. A few hours later and I’ve got the basic ideas in place for where I want to go with this. But nothing around here at Woo would ever be complete if we didn’t throw this out there for your feedback first…

So… Recently I’ve been very impressed with Tumblr and have been surprised by their popularity and adoption rates. Looking at myself however (and the difficulty in posting on my own (full-on) blog, I can understand why micro-blogging is becoming the publishing medium of choice (Twitter probably being the ultimate proof in the pudding). With that in mind then, I’m definitely keen to develop a framework (and subsequently a set of tumblelog themes) for WordPress, but I’m also intrigued by the prospect of possibly porting these designs over to Tumblr.

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