The WooThemes Blog

Since releasing our shortcodes (which are included in the WooFramework), we’ve really been enjoying your feedback in terms of how you were using the shortcodes, and what kind of shortcodes you would like to see us develop, & include going forward. This feedback lead us to including a spiffy new shortcode generator a little while ago, and since then develop a bunch of new shortcodes which we hope will further cosmetically enhance your content, and increase the speed of doing the mundane tasks.

These new shortcodes are included in the latest version of the WooFramework (version 3.6.x+) and you only need to update your version of the WooFramework to have access to these immediately. This is how the new shortcodes look…

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When we released V3.0 of Fresh News last week, it included a brand-spanking new WooFramework-based feature that we’ve specifically kept quiet until we could write a proper blog post about it.

The WooFramework has had shortcode capabilities for quite some time, but using them has always been a very manual process. With the upgrade of the WooFramework to V3.5 though, we’re aiming to make shortcodes easier and more fun to use; the shortcode is now automatically inserted into your posts and page.

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We’re ecstatic to launch the latest addition to the WooFramework – Sidebar Manager.

The Sidebar Manager comes from years of my own personal experience with WordPress themes, having been frustrated with the rigid sidebars and widgetized regions. Blog sidebars quickly become static, boring and life-less when every page renders the same widgets time after time on every page – not giving your users a very dynamic or targeted experience.

The Sidebar Manager gives you the power to create a unique sidebar for specific pages of your site. You can now tailor make each page with specific content and functionality across almost every aspect of the template.

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In the last year, WordPress has undergone a few significant changes in transforming it from a simple content management system to an extremely flexible platform for web development. We’d go as far as saying that you can probably build *any* kind of website, or web application, on WordPress with the only question being how much of the native / core functionality you use/exploit.

This means that – up until now anyway – we’ve prided ourselves in developing WP into a Tumblr-like tumblog website, real estate directory & soon we’ll be doing a theme for restaurants, a complete & customizable directory theme, and the cherry on the cake: e-commerce themes. Because WP has made all of this possible…

But we’ve found – despite a few claims to the contrary – that 99% of WP popularity stems from the type of websites that it was originally intended to help build: personal blogs, news and magazine sites, websites for small to medium sized businesses & designers’ portfolios. So regardless of any new “trends”, our user statistics emphasize that WP is still most popular and most used in those categories.

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In reference to this tweet, you can soon expect to find something new (and ready for beta) in the WooFramework, which will make the management of widgetized spaces on different posts, pages & WP templates so much easier…

Here’s the teaser:

Coming soon to a WooFramework-powered theme near you!

Earlier in the week we asked you how we could make Canvas more of a theme framework and you have responded with some great suggestions. But whilst we have been considering your suggestions & feature requests (and hence our lack of response), we couldn’t help but feeling that either our own message or your expectations were misguided / misaligned.

So we wanted to circle back to a “simple” question: What is a WordPress Theme Framework? The suggestion that initially came up in the Open Forum was for Canvas to be more of a Theme Framework and it seems that some suggestions relate to Canvas as a framework, but most are more straight-forward theme feature requests (i.e. those could apply to any of our themes; not specifically Canvas as a framework).

This is how WordPress.org describes a theme framework (with a bunch of examples too):

A Theme framework is a Theme designed to be a flexible foundation for quicker WordPress development, usually serving as a robust Parent Theme for Child Themes. Some Theme frameworks can also make theme development more accessible, removing the need for programming or design knowledge with options pages.

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We’ve seen many comments about WP shortcodes on Twitter, and on a few blogs lately, so we figured whilst everyone was talking about it, we’ll just get going on implementing it.

The latest update to the WooFramework (which now takes it to version 2.9) features the addition of shortcodes for a variety of buttons, info boxes, related posts, as well as some social bookmark buttons. The idea behind the shortcodes is that it makes it easier for you as publisher / website admin to re-use certain popular elements within your blog post, without having to worry about re-doing large sections of code (that’d just be mundane).

An overview of the elements you can create using our new short codes

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Some things take time as a result of indecision and inefficiencies. Other things deliberately take time, because they are aimed at being perfect, and developed specifically to outperform anything else that could be deemed as competition.

In recent months, you may have been able to criticize us for a *supposed* lack of updates, theme releases at a fast rate & maybe even innovation. But we have been quietly working on things that will absolutely blow your mind, and the best news is that these will be available to you within the next 6 – 8 weeks.

First up, we have a brand-new real estate theme that will revolutionize the way you are building these type of websites with WordPress at the moment. On show today, is Realtor:

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We have continued a trend – after announcing the integrated support of GravityForms in all of our themes last week – of adding even more value to our existing crop of themes. This time we’ve integrated support for the fantastic SEO & copywriting tool: ScribeSEO.

ScribeSEO – an inspired project from Brian Clark of ScribeSEO” – CopyBlogger fame – is a “search engine optimization software service that analyzes the content of web pages, blog posts, online press releases, or any other web content … all at the click of a button.”

We love it, because it seamlessly & easily plugs into a WordPress + WooThemes setup, which means that you have copywriting & SEO on steroids! Since adding advanced SEO support to the WooFramework, the integration of ScribeSEO has been top priority as we believe that it adds a lot of unique value in terms of enabling you to publish even better content and reach a bigger audience.

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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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Sometimes we release stuff without telling you guys and in recent weeks we’ve probably made it a habit to do a soft release of new features (to serve as a beta of sorts), before announcing these features publicly.

So another one of these features to have (silently) made it into the WooFramework, is the ability to automatically update the WooFramework from older versions. The early version of this functionality looks like this:

Quick, easy & in the WooFramework.

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As part of our continuing quest to add value for our users – not only via new themes, but also via the surrounding WooThemes resources – we’re proud to announce the new addition of the WooCodex to our support offering.

Since standardizing all of our themes with the implementation of a core set of functionality via the WooFramework, we’ve been finding ourselves using the WooFramework for all of our projects; not just in our themes. The reason for this is simple: The WooFramework already includes so much functionality, which makes it perfect for any kind of WordPress-powered website.

So as an added benefit, we’ve made the WooCodex available to all of our users, which will allow them to use the core WooFramework functionality to further extend their WooThemes modifications, or even use it for websites that don’t even use one of our themes. As an example, the WooCodex includes information on adding more theme options, modifying the custom write panel or bending our image / video embeds to your will. We believe that this resource now makes using these functions even easier and more accessible to the vast majority of our users.

The WooCodex is still under construction and we’ll update it as we go. Feel free to leave suggestions & feedback about the WooCodex in the forum and we’ll update it accordingly.

Otherwise, check out the WooCodex now.

We have just completed the roll-out of a nifty, new feature to the WooFramework, which now includes support for URL Shortening. The basic idea is to offer you a template tag which would output a shorter URL – currently only supports TinyURL (default) and bit.ly (with your API key) – which you can then publish as added meta on your posts.

This functionality was inspired by the implementation thereof on various Tumblr-powered sites (for example: Matthew Buchanan). The benefit of publishing a shortened URL is in minimizing the amount of time that your readers will need to link to your content (i.e. increasing their convenience). So it’s a pretty nifty feature to have we believe!

As mentioned, this functionality is available in the WooFramework now and we’ll soon be publishing a little tutorial with regards to the backwards integration thereof. Both Cinch & Slanted have been updated to include the backend functionality, as well as the publishing of “Short URL” links in the front-end.

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Here’s a preview of a little something-something that we’ve been cooking up behind the scenes. When we release this beauty next week, you can be assured that it’ll be unlike anything else that we’ve released before. Promise.

We’re glad to announce that all of our themes (yep, every single one of them) have now been updated to the latest version of our WooFramework. Version 2 of the WooFramework (which we first previewed last month), includes a complete re-design of the theme option’s panel, as well as the inclusion of a new basis for us to deploy more features in the next couple of weeks.

In the last couple of weeks, WF2 had been available in a handful of our themes and we are extremely happy about the feedback that we had gotten from both our beta testers and the users of those themes. All of the major bugs have been squashed properly and at the time of writing this post, we aren’t aware of any other bugs that have not been treated. So you can upgrade with some peace of mind!

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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…