Therapeutic WordPress

We know we’ve been sending so many new theme teasers your way and that some of you feel like those teasers never get released, but this time that’s not the case. Exactly a month ago we showed you a teaser for Therapy and today Therapy is available for purchase.

The only themes that ever get released this quickly (on WooThemes), is the kind of themes that Magnus ends up designing & coding in a weekend, so whilst not unprecedented, it’s also great for us to be able to push out a theme a month after teasing it.

We think Therapy is an amazing alternative for those personal bloggers out there and coupled with the spiffy social media widget, we’ve pretty much covered your bases. In fact the feedback on both the teaser and the beta preview persuaded us to actually release this as a paid theme (we did initially consider to release this as a free theme).

So give your WordPress a little bit of TLC, R&R and then some Therapy. You may just need it and we think you thoroughly deserve to treat yourself a little! Get Therapy Now!

Rock Out with Rockstar!

5 weeks ago we asked you whether you wanted this on WooThemes and after 73% of you begged us, we’ve made Rockstar available for download.

This is the slightly tweaked design that I previously used on my blog and since the feedback on the design has always been pretty good; I really didn’t want the design to go to waste. So we’ve spent a bit of time to bring it up to WooThemes-quality (since when I code for myself, I include only the absolute necessities) and it is now rocking out with the latest version of the WooFramework.

You’ll also note that the demo includes examples of posts with both images and videos, so you’d be able to replicate my videoblogging efforts if you were so inclined.

Overall though, I think (as well as our beta-testers – that have had a play around with Rockstar – tend to agree) Rockstar is a great, free alternative if you’re looking to spice up your personal blog a little. It’s nothing fancy, but gets the job done stylishly enough to warrant a little play, don’t you think?

Check out the demo or download your free copy over here.

I’m excited about this theme! Almost a month after teasing you with some original screenshots of Liam Mckay’s awesome design we have finally completed the conversion to a flexible, neatly coded WordPress theme. You commented, and we listened and built some awesome functionality into this theme.

Breathing some new life into the incredible success of Gazette Edition we wanted another news/magazine based theme that was minimalistic enough to let your content speak, whilst customizable enough to brand however you like. We approached our friend Liam McKay as we thought this was just up his alley, and did he impress!

The JQuery-based featured scroller was coded from scratch by Fox, can you believe his skills! With the “Talking Points” module also uniquely coded to showcase articles perhaps gathering dust, that can be showcased on your home page by pulling through a specific tag’s results organised from most commented to least.

With 19 alternate styles designed by both myself and Cobus there should be a style that closely fits your brand. By clicking a few buttons in the theme option’s panel you can have a completely different home page in seconds, see the two example screenshots below:

Please leave a comment below with your thoughts and constructive feedback. If you like the theme you can view more information and purchase it here, or test drive it on our demo server.

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.

If you wanted some more proof of the flexibility of the theme, consider that you can use it as a 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 column design with 15 different styles and an extremely elegant interface to publish BOTH photos and videos. Magnus also spent quite some time perfecting the image gallery functionality on single pages, which uses a very pretty jQuery slider.

All-in-all we wanted to release a theme that does a great job at publishing videos & photos, because we felt that there was a slight gap in our (multimedia) themes collection. And on top of that, we figured that Magnus’ design style was perfectly suited to create an easy-to-customize, superbly coded, flexible theme.

What do you think? Not convinced by our words yet? Then have a look at the demo and the short screencast and leave your feedback in the comments.

Get out & meet real people

Personally this is one of my most anticipated releases on WooThemes ever (I get overly excited at times, okay?) and judging by the feedback you gave us on the teasers before, you’ve been looking forward to this release as well. But let’s get back to the beginning…

Antisocial was designed by Tim van Damme and it was based on his very popular personal “business card” design (or at least in principle). The ideas behind Antisocial is to create more of an aggregation space for personal users / bloggers to create an overview of their online activities and this should already be evident on the homepage, which looks more like a social profile, instead of a traditional blog.

For the first time ever, we’ve also implemented a little bit of something the geeks like to call Microformats. Essentially all this means is that there’s a little hCard in the sidebar of Antisocial, which can be indexed in a more unique way. Sounds tricky? Not at all… Antisocial features a little section in the backend where you simply need to enter your personal details and we’ll create your hCard for you!

Another first with Antisocial is that the theme has been localized** (read more on localization). This means that the theme can now be translated to any other language without having to modify the source code. So with Antisocial you’ll be able to make new friends in a variety of other languages!

Here’s a look at some of the other styles that has been included in Antisocial…

The Light Blue Style

Lovely in red, right?

Dark & minimalist beauty

Before you give us some awesome feedback on the theme, why not check out the theme demo first and indulge in its awesomeness before posting your thoughts. Look forward to being social in the comments…

**Coffee Break, Fresh News & Busy Bee have been localized and we’ll spend the next month localizing all of our older themes. But we’ll write a post about this next week. In the meantime, find a tutorial on translation here.

Wallpaper Preview

The Wallpaper

To celebrate the release, Tim van Damme made you all a nice little desktop wallpaper, to remind you to “Get out and meet real people”… So download the wallpaper, add it to your desktop and show off some Max Voltar awesomeness to your PC / Mac.

Now don’t say that we never gave you anything for free…

• Antisocial Wallpaper – 1920 x 1200 pixels
• Antisocial Wallpaper – 1680 x 1050 pixels
• Antisocial Wallpaper – 1440 x 900 pixels
• Antisocial Wallpaper – 1280 x 1024 pixels
• Antisocial Wallpaper – 1024 x 768 pixels

Built on an awesomely flexible grid structure that enables you to select how many columns you want on your home page and archives page and then arranges your posts according to their height and width using the JS Masonry layout plugin built by David DeSandro (Source code available here). The rest of the design is governed by the fabulous Grid 960 framework for easy modifications.

Default Style - 3 column layout selected

As is noticeable in the screenshots no space is left unused between post boxes and the posts don’t need to be equal heights like other WooThemes, making for a much more fluid, fun, collage-like layout. With an optional Twitter, Ad Banner and About module the home page can take any form you so desire.

City Life Style - With 'About' module enabled and 4 column layout

The ‘City Life’ theme style is one of my favourite styles with a background image of a London city skyline I snapped a few months ago, with a layered semi-transparent grid over it highlighting its sharp edges and urban feel.

Pink Texture Style - 2 column layout selected

Enjoy building onto this theme’s flexible layout and we look forward to seeing some creative showcase submissions. As can be seen in the screenshots its usage could be limitless, a photographer’s portfolio/diary, a web designer’s showcase gallery or an online magazine for a publishing company.

As with all our themes we welcome your constructive feedback, but make sure you’ve had a good look around the demo and seen the sub-page layout of the blog posts, single pages and full-width content before judging this theme

Thanks for all the great entries. We had 6 quick submissions so we have rewarded one extra. The winners are - Adam Kayce, Javier Zuloaga, WP Themes, Joe Botha, Prashant and Iain Broome. Well done! Please email us with your account details, or desired username and password if you are not already a member, so that we can link you up with the Mortar theme.