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.

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…

IDX / MLS Integration

We’re so proud & excited to announce our partnership with the guys over at Diverse Solutions & dsIDXpress to be the first real estate WordPress theme to support IDX & MLS integration out-of-box.

So this means that you sign up with dsIDXpress & install the plugin on your Estate-powered, WordPress website, you will then be able to see the full potential of IDX & MLS integration. No need to modify anything – all you need is the dsIDXpress plugin & the latest version of Estate; we’ve taken care of the rest…

Here’s an overview of the features included with this IDX / MLS integration:

Example of IDX / MLS Listings

Example of a single property listing via IDX / MLS

Alternative search for properties listed via IDX / MLS

Variety of IDX / MLS-specific widgets to use in the widgetized areas

No WooTheme would be complete without theme options to make your life easier...

More New Stuff…

In addition to IDX & MLS integration – which is the major new feature in V1.1 – we’ve also included a few extra upgrades to make your life & usage so much easier. Here’s a run-down of those:

• Improved RSS feeds to show all property-specific data, and not just the generic WP RSS feed items;
• Property image gallery captions in thickbox / lightbox view;
• Further improvements to the search logic, as well as a property-specific search widget styled to fit Estate;
• Customization all labels in the Search and Single Property pages;
• Contact Agent about a specific property using the contact form template;
• Option to make Additional Features click through to their taxonomy archive page; and
• Back-end options to change Agent-related titles & copy in addition to the iconography for property features.

So all-in-all, this is a pretty significant update to Estate and we trust that all of these additions will just further increase the popularity of the theme, as well as increasing the ROI of the real estate agents that decide to use it. If you haven’t checked out the new V1.1 demo yet, shoot over here & let us know what  you think!

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…

2.0 Features

These are the new goodies that you can expect in version 2.0 of Inspire & Optimize:

• Custom Post Types integration for Homepage Slides (Inspire only), Mini Features / Info Boxes on the homepage, Portfolio Items & Testimonials (Optimize only).
• Upgrading of the Portfolio items, which enables you to upload multiple images for every portfolio item (see screenshot below).
• A clean-up of the theme options (as we now need less options, since the custom post types optimizes handling of these areas) for the above features.

Upgrading to 2.0 is as easy as re-downloading the theme and installing it on your server. Do however note that you will need to manually migrate your existing content to the new custom post types.

The Upgraded Portfolio

Multiple images for every portfolio item.

Our 2.0 Strategy

Before you ask us when we will be upgrading themes X, Y & Z to 2.0, we wanted to answer your questions in this regard… At this stage we are trialing this strategy with the 2.0′ing of Optimize & Inspire to see how well this works for you guys & girls, as that will allow us to adjust the strategy (if needed) with regards to the other themes. Our main (albeit minor) concern at this stage is with regards to the updating process which isn’t seamless and requires some manual input.

If the trial however works out well, then we do plan to update all of our business themes, as custom post type integration is a definite advantage to users who uses our themes in this regard. So we’re looking forward to your feedback on this!

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.

Street View

You need to go this way.

Jumping on the bandwagon of the massively popular Street View option in Google Maps, you can now guide your readers to your point of interest with Street View as well.

Full Map Template

Points of interest: Scattered.

The new version also includes a new page template to display a full map with all of the points of interest that you have added. We believe this is a great way of giving your users a good overview of all the interests available to them in your location.

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…

** You will need to grab the latest version of the theme from your dashboard to enable this.

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…

An Example of the SEO controls

3rd Party Plugins

First thing we wanted to do, was to make sure that we didn’t step on the toes of existing plugins, as they should be able to take preference & priority if an user has been using them for a while. We are thus supporting both Headspace 2 & All-in-One SEO, where you have the option of either giving those plugins control over SEO functionality OR to use the controls that we have built in.

More Controls

We have also included settings to help you specify global controls (as the one showed in the screenshot above), or tweak the output on individual posts & pages:

SEO controls on a post

What about the HTML?

Another basic principle of SEO is to make proper use of heading tags (i.e. h1, h2…), which you will find we have done in all of our latest themes. Some of our older themes may however not be entirely optimized in this regard, which won’t hamper you from using the WooFramework SEO controls, but as part of full disclosure we didn’t want to claim that we were SEO experts all of a sudden (there seems to be too many like *those* recently) and that our themes are perfectly SEO’d…

Get it!

These functions & controls are already available in the latest version of the WooFramework and also thus all of our themes. So you can start using this immediately after upgrading your version of the WooFramework to the latest one (use this tutorial as a help guideline).

Enjoy the new features and hoping to get some feedback on these!

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:

• You now don’t have to setup a “featured” category and add posts to it for them to look like featured posts.  Simply set X number of posts that you want to look like a featured post (basically just a bigger image). If you want them to stay featured, just use the sticky post function in WP.
• The front page now uses the standard navigation (prev/next) instead of a link to the archives, and if you install WP-PageNavi plugin, then it will also work like in our demo.
• You also have the option of showing the normal posts in 2-column default fasion, or showing them as 1-column posts, so it looks more like a blog.
• You can specify if you want the featured/normal posts to show the full content or only the excerpt of the post (default).

The next big improvement is that the sidebar is now widgetized except for the sidebar tabs. This makes it way more flexible than the older theme, and you have 4 widgetzed areas (Sidebar Top, Sidebar, Sidebar 2-col left, Sidebar 2-col right).

The video player widget is also a lot easier to use, since all you need to do is drop the embed code for your video into the posts “Custom Settings” field under “Embed”, and the widget will resize the video to fit in your sidebar and also resize it to show in your archive/single post. Check demo for examples.

See our documentation for instructions on the new features and also the changelog for current users who wish to upgrade their theme (also found in the theme zip file). There are a lot of changed/new files so if you haven’t done any major modifications to your theme, we suggest thatyou simply install a fresh copy instead of trying to upgrade.

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.

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.

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.