The WooThemes Blog

So WordPress 3.1 is just about to go out (it should’ve been out already, but who are we to judge) and we’d just like to let you know that you’re good to upgrade.

We’ve had a play with the beta versions and Release Candidates and so far none of our themes have been broken. As soon as WP 3.1 drops, you can thus upgrade with peace-of-mind, knowing that your WooThemes will work just fine.

As promised a couple of weeks ago, we’ve been working hard on upgrading Estate – which is one of our most powerful themes to date and has also become one of the fastest selling themes since release – to V1.1.

Our rationale & strategy with Estate was purely to get a V1 of the theme into your hands, before we would start integrating & adding further features. We wanted to prevent ourselves from having to guess which features you’d like (because admittedly real estate isn’t our specialty) and didn’t want to bloat the theme with unnecessary code.

We therefore took a whole bunch of your suggestions, split it up into viable groups and then plotted these on a roadmap for V1.1, V1.2 (hopefully before year-end) and V1.3 (early 2011). Here’s details of the V1.1 upgrade…

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Custom Goodness 2.0

After reaching a lot of praise for the inclusion of custom post types in our last business theme – Sealight – we had a bit of a chat within the WooTeam and it was decided that it may be a worthwhile strategy to update some of our most popular, but older business themes which doesn’t sport this functionality yet.

So we set out to trial this new strategy with the extremely popular Inspire & Optimize themes…

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City Guide has probably been one of our most successful themes this year (evidence here). Considering that this is a very niche theme, we feel this is quite an accomplishment.

So this means that after an initial round of major upgrades, we’ve gone ahead and added even more functionality to the theme. Here’s just a few of the updates in the theme…

Coloured & custom PNG markers per category

A Few Pretty Colours

You can now set these per category- either just change the colour of the default Google Maps markers, or you can upload your own PNG version.

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As you all should now by know: WordPress 3.0 was finally released at the end of last week.

So this is a quick note to tell you all, that all our themes are already WP 3.0 compatible and there’s no need for you to upgrade your theme. This also means that you can happily upgrade to the new version of WordPress, without any hassles from a WooThemes-side (even though we’d suggest checking plugin compatibility).

Further more – as noted here – you are now able to use the native WordPress Menus functionality instead of the WooNav, if you so wish. To start using WordPress Menu’s simply activate them from the Appearance > Menus tab, and it will replace the WooNav functionality (note: you will need to re-create your menu if you switch).**

Lastly, you can expect some new themes from us in the near future which will be using some of the other new features in WP 3.0; more specifically custom post types which we plan on using in a very unique way…

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WooFramework SEO

In the past we definitely haven’t been the biggest fans of SEO and whilst we’ve never disrespected the benefits of paying attention to the SEO of a website, we’ve never really made it super-easy for our users to really invest in SEO if you so wish. This however changes big-time, with the addition of a few advanced SEO controls to the WooFramework…

So in the past couple of weeks, we’ve had a good look at what seems to be best practice with regards to SEO integration on WordPress themes; also considering that there are already a few popular SEO plugins that are widely used by many WP users. What we have thus done, is to include the most important controls to maximize the SEO benefits for your content.

These are some of the features included:

• 3rd Party plugin support (All-in-One-SEO & Headspace 2)
• Advanced & Dynamic Page Title control
• Indexing & Follow control
• Custom & Dynamic Meta Description / Keyword control

Don’t worry if those terms don’t make much sense; we’ve made it easy for you…

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Fresh News is the all time most popular theme here at WooThemes, so we thought it should deserve to be one of the first themes to receive the new Woo Framework update treatment (see video of new framework). What this basically means is that the theme is now easier to setup and use because of the improved functions in the framework (options panel, new widgets, easier image upload, easier to update in future etc.).

We also reworked some of the coding on the front page of the theme, so it now acts more like Busy Bee in functionality. To be more specific:

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The Station has been one of our most popular themes since we released it about 7 weeks ago and as you should be now expect from WooThemes; we like to add value for existing users. So a few weeks ago, I contacted all of the current users of The Station, to suggest some improvements and new features and got a whole lot of great ideas…

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:

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We have now updated all our demo themes to the latest version of WordPress! There were no problems at all in the upgrade, so you can go ahead and upgrade! There is no need to update your theme to the latest version if it is working fine on your current installation.

The new version of WordPress sports a brand new admin interface which is incredible in our opinion. Much quicker and better layout than the last one. There are also some new features available in version 2.7 like threaded comments, which we will now start adding to new themes and also our old themes. We are aiming on doing a mass update of all themes with the new features that we believe are worth adding, so stay tuned for an update in the coming week.

Which features would you to see in the future update of our themes? Let us know in the comments below…

Update! We are currently updating our themes to support threaded comments. Here is the list of themes that have been updated:

• Busy Bee v1.1 – (demo)
• Gotham News v1.1 – (demo)
• Abstract v1.0 – (demo)
• Fresh News v1.4 – (demo)
• VibrantCMS v1.2 – (demo)
• Papercut v1.2 – (demo)
• Gazette v1.3 (demo)
• Live Wire v1.3 (demo)
• NewsPress v1.3 (demo)
• Flash News v1.3 (demo)
• Over Easy v1.1 (demo)
• Open Air v1.2 (demo)
• Thick v1.1 (demo)
• Typebased v1.1 (demo)

Please review the changelog.txt in the theme directory for info on which files to update. We are working on updating our other themes and will update this post when they are done.

We’re proud to announce that all of our themes are now officially on Version 1.1. You might be asking why only now and you’d have a very valid question…

Fact is, we only recently started using Joost de Valk – to help develop a WooThemes-exclusive custom write panel script, which adds the additional fields – required by our themes – to the the Write > Post & Write > Page panels. No more plugins, no more Flutter; everything works out of the box!

Subversion

We’re still doing some beta testing of our subversion server, but we will most probably give our users access to the subversion files very soon. This would mean that you could use appropriate SVN software to merge your modified theme with our latest version on WooThemes.

Upgrading

All the updated themes are available from “My Theme Downloads”. If you’d like to upgrade and have made changes to your existing theme, we strongly advise you to have a look at the changelog for the theme that you are using. The changelog will specify which files has been modified. If you haven’t made any modifications to the theme, then you can just overwrite your old version.

To get the custom write panel working, you will need to upload the /functions/custom.php and functions.php files to your theme directory. Please check out the updated theme documentation which has new screenshots of the custom write panel.

As was noted on our blog last week,