The WooThemes Blog

You may know who WooThemes is and what it is we do, but you probably don’t know much about each individual ninja. We’re hoping to change that now with a video series we’re calling, “Getting To Know Woo.”

This was an idea I had to not only show off our genius ninjas, but as a consumer I also like to see the people behind the company. This is our attempt at opening ourselves up a little more, and having some fun while we’re at it. I know Adii talks and blogs a lot about how WooThemes as a business is run, now let’s meet the people behind the themes, plugins, designs, and all the WooThemes goodness.

Our first brave guinea pig is Jeff. Checkout our interview below. Apologies if you have a hard time hearing, our audio will be better for the next one.

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Remember the WooTrip we just had to London? Well just in case you’ve forgot or didn’t know, we’ve blogged quite a bit about it. First was our mini site to celebrate the trip, and for you to keep dibs on our antics. Next up, Adii talked a bit about the importance of the trip besides beer. Then he wrote about our passions working together. Finally, we blogged about the experience of all of us in one place.

Blegh, too much blogging if you ask me.

Speaking of these passions, I happened to study a little video production while in university and armed with my handy 7D in London I shot some clips of our trip. This is the resulting highlight video to the soundtrack of one of London’s biggest bands. Our other song of choice, Werewolves Of London, was voted out. Hope you enjoy the video (after the jump)!

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We haven’t released any video-specific themes for ages and when Sacha Greif submitted his design for a new video theme, we just knew that this was the design that would spice things up for us.

The new theme, Premiere, is almost ready for release and we’re building quite a few additional goodies into the initial release. We’ve also added an elaborate membership system to the roadmap for Premiere and whilst this won’t be ready for the first version, we’re planning on shaking things up considerably with this functionality.

This is what you can expect to be hitting your computer screens shortly…

As we have mentioned in the last week, we’ve been working on a new version (2.0) of the WooFramework, which we’ll be releasing with Optimize tomorrow. The integration of WooFramework 2.0 with Optimize, serves as the public beta of the new framework and we’d like to fix all of the possible bugs first, before we integrate it into all our older themes (all 54 of them).

So all of our subscribers who will get access to Optimize tomorrow, will have the opportunity to play with the new options panel & framework. For the rest, the following preview video will have to do the trick…

Object Theme

Since we showed you the beta preview of Object exactly a week (and 83 comments) ago, Magnus has been busy implementing some of your suggestions in the final, release version of the theme. So whilst slightly unexpected and unplanned, we’ve decided to push Daily Edition‘s release back by one week in favour of making Object available immediately. So onto the theme…

Object is a flexible photo- & videoblogging theme, which has been crafted using Magnus’ signature and slightly minimalist style (the same style that spawned bestsellers such as Fresh News & Busy Bee). So I’d doubt that anyone will question the potential, flexibility and awesomeness of this theme.

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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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Groovy Video - Perfect for video bloggers

So we finally got our groove on and finished the first theme in the Groovy Series (from the WooContest)… After releasing WooTube (our first video theme) last month, we’re feeling very comfortable with further extending our range of multimedia themes and the newest addition to our collection is Groovy Video, which was designed by the talented Izuddin Helmi.

(We know this has taken long to release, but we’re sure that the end result more than makes up for this!)

Groovy Video carries a similar style to our free theme – Irresistible (also by Izuddin) – but is much more focused in terms of its functionality. Groovy Video is exactly as the name suggests: a video theme with a very trendy and fun design. Coupled with some nice jQuery here and there, you’re bound to enjoy browsing through all the videos on a site using this theme.

We’ve again made including any videos as easy and quick as possible; you literally only need to copy / paste the video’s embed code into a custom field and Bob’s your uncle. We’ve also already integrated the WP-PageNavi & WP-PostRatings plugins for you – so no need to worry about those either.

This theme does what it says it does; and it does that well. It doesn’t pretend to be anything that it’s not and if this theme could talk, it’d probably tell you that it only wants to be groovy…

View the demo of Groovy Video here or consider buying into our awesome club. Feedback welcome as always here at WooThemes…

When we first designed WooTube, we only intended it to be a simple video browser theme. Some complained that the homepage looked like a single post, probably because that is exactly what it was WooTube has been out for nearly a month, and it seems like it has been well received, even though there isn’t any fancy homepage layout for it.

But now there is! A few hours of coding, and voila, an optional homepage layout, which you can turn on from within your options panel. This will add post boxes on the front page, and you have the option of showing the latest video, or disabling it and getting that gallery feel on the theme.

This theme can therefore easily be used as a normal blog/gallery/portfolio or whatever you can imagine it to be. There is no need to add videos to your posts, so you could use it to show of your design work, or run a CSS gallery.

If you already own WooTube and want to know how to upgrade, you should study the changelog.txt and first backup your current theme if you have made any changes to the files.

Let us know your thoughts on the upgrade by checkint out the demo, and if there are any more tweaks that we should add.

You remember when the first TV’s started entering our homes back in the 1930′s and we all sat glued to the screen, as if watching TV was gonna change our lives (I’m improvising here, since I wasn’t born until about 50 years later…). Well, all I can say is that we’ve probably come a long way since then and we’ve even come as far as WooThemes finally releasing a video theme of their own… *gasp* *shock* *horror*

WooTube by WooThemes

WooTube is our first attempt at creating a video theme and will also serve as the basis of our collection of our new multimedia themes collection. This has been a long time coming and many of you have requested more multimedia themes from us; unfortunately until now we’ve been so swamped releasing themes in other niche fields.

So WooTube is another design by Magnus and you’ll see a very strong Busy Bee influence on the design front (purely because Busy Bee has been so darn popular). Functionality-wise, we’ve tried to create a theme that allows you to post video blogs on a daily basis – that’s it. No frilly bits; just a superb code-base to allow you to create & publish your videos.

The great thing about WooTube is that you’re not limited to using any specific video embedding service and that it is ultimately super-easy to use. Along with a few nice additions in the little video slider (sidebar) and the integration of a ratings plugin, we think we’ve covered all of the most important bases in enabling you to become the next video blogging rockstar.

Your feedback is obviously always very important and since this is our first multimedia theme, we’d love to talk to you about the theme itself and where you’d like to see us take our multimedia themes in future. WooTube serves as a marker that we’ve put into the ground and to which we’ll measure our “progress” and innovation in this field in coming months.

So please switch of your TV, read more about WooTube , check out the demo and get talking about the theme!

Just a heads-up that Mark and I recently did a video interview with the guys of From The Couch. They asked us a few questions with regards to WooThemes, WordPress & blogging in general; and the conversation seemed to take on a Proudly-South African vibe in the end… Nevertheless, if you’ve ever wanted to see us in motion, check out the following two links (it’s a two part series):

• Part 1
• Part 2

Note: Magnus was excluded from the interview, because he couldn’t get his butt down to Cape Town in time…

Even though the title sounds almost Biblical, we won’t be that blasphemous… But our latest theme – Open Air – is sure to Woo you to a major extent.

This theme has been a while in the making, but that’s only because we like to produce quality themes around here; instead of having to push out mediocre designs every second week.

So if you want to get an idea of what Open Air has to offer you: read the rest of the post…

Design

a more personal front page. And you’ll note that the differences in the header is quite significant when interchanging between these two options; for the magazine option, you’ll be able to feature an important post, whilst the personal option displays an about the author section, as well as links to his / her Twitter account and e-mail.

Functionality

After releasing 10 themes before Open Air, it becomes really difficult to wax lyrical about all of the features, but when we’re already including all of the standard WooThemes greatness, there’s not much to say… Oh, except for the fact that we’ve added a Video Player…

We’ve decided to experiment a bit (both in terms of the coding challenges, but also in terms of what our users would like us to add to our themes) and the result is a new built-in Video Player. The nice thing about the video player is that it picks up the videos from the posts that you’ve published and you thus do not need to publish video-only posts to have them display there. Nifty, right?

Come on… We know you want to give this air a bit of a whiff…

You should really view the the demo of Open Air here, because the theme is much better than this blog post (which is just a clever marketing attempt on our part).

If you think we’re stark raving mad to think this theme is pretty cool, feel free to tell us that in the comments. But we can’t guarantee that we’re gonna take you seriously… Hope you guys and girls enjoy the new theme and look forward to your feedback!