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…

Typography Shortcodes (Click to Preview)

We have included 4 new typography-related shortcodes: a drop-cap for those sophisticated writers, a highlight & abbreviation shortcode and finally, an awesome new shortcode for custom typography, which is powered by Google Fonts. (All of these are displayed nicely in the example above.)

Custom Lists (Click to Preview)

The custom lists shortcode allows you to spice up your ordered & unordered lists with a nifty little icon (we’ve included 6 default styles).

Social Profiles & Icons

With the new social icon shortcode, you can display links to your social profiles with clean, tidy icons (you can even use your own icons!). Add them next to each other and you’ve got a nice little list, like the example above.

Content Toggle (Click to Preview)

And finally, with the content toggle, you can create your own toggle to hold hidden information which you can toggle on / off to view.

Along with these additions, we’ve also included a brand new colour picker for the shortcode generator, as well as the functionality to highlight & auto-insert new content. All in a day’s work at WooHQ.

What do you think about these new shortcodes and the enhanced collection? Anything we’re missing?

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.

Meet the Shortcode Generator

A week ago we stumbled on onto the VisualShortcodes by Rico Gundermann (who is actually a Mac developer) and immediately fell in love with it. Developing a type of WYSIWYG interface for our shortcodes has been on our roadmap for quite a while now, but we have just not been able to find the time to do it. So in true open source spirited, we spoke to Rico about his wonderful piece of code, grabbed a copy of the work Rico did and ported it to the WooFramework.

Click, select your shortcode, add your details and insert into post. Easy.

But what is the Shortcode Generator?

This functionality basically adds a button to the WYSIWYG post editor in WordPress, which allows you to access all of the WooFramework’s shortcodes in a one-click kinda way. You can then tweak the attributes and settings for the various shortcodes and drop them into your post. Quick and easy. Instead of having to type out the shortcodes in your post – like you had to do in the past – you can now tweak them live and even see a preview in real-time, before adding them to your content. Magic.

Along with this integration, we’ve made two new additions to the WooThemes shortcodes family: a contact form and a tabber shortcode. The contact form shortcode allows for the easy addition of a contact form on any page, while the tabber allows for the creation of a tab widget (similar to the Woo – Tabs widget) for displaying virtually any content you desire in a neat, tabbed interface. More Magic.

Video Overview

We couldn’t let this opportunity pass without giving you a nice, little video overview of this new functionality. Here’s what you can expect from the Shortcodes Generator…

Open Source & Head-starts

Credit must go to Rico for handling a whole bunch of the groundwork for this new functionality, as it really gave us a massive head-start in incorporating this into the WooFramework. Since going completely GPL, this is probably the most significant code contribution that has been made to the WooFramework from outside of the WooTeam, and we sure wouldn’t mind more of this in the future…

We also hope that this development shows our commitment to making the WooFramework the most incredible collection of great functionality and superior code available for WordPress. We think we’re onto something here.

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.

I’ve created a quick video below to show off the Sidebar Manager’s work flow. (Please excuse the lack of sound in the screencast.). WordPress101 have produced this very informative screencast on the Sidebar Manager for us.

Best viewed full screen.

How do you get started?

• We have launched the Sidebar Manager in our most powerful theme to date, Canvas, as we are preparing for it’s release in every theme in the WooThemes repository.
• For those of you who are eager to try it out on your current Canvas theme, all you need to do is update your framework to Version 3.0.0+ and follow the installation instructions on the Sidebar Manager page. Follow the “Update Framework” tutorial here.

It requires very little adjustment to your theme, yet opens up a world of possibility! We hope that this feature becomes an instant hit amongst the community. Constructive feedback is obviously most welcome and will help improve the sidebar manager even further.

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.

WP shouldn’t…

Here at WooHQ, we simply believe that WordPress should not try to do or be everything, even though almost anything is possible. We believe that the most viable approach is to use WP for the projects that it suits best, and consider other platforms / development frameworks to develop other things.

In fact, since asking you for ideas, our WooIdeas forum have been inundated with ideas for things that we simply don’t think should be built onto WP. These have ranged from replicating functionality of Basecamp in a WP theme, including an invoicing engine in portfolio themes to re-creating UserVoice itself.

So why are we saying no to these suggestions? Definitely not because we can’t develop them, or that we think it won’t be popular (perhaps), but because we don’t intend on re-inventing the wheel when there’s already amazing 3rd party web applications available. And that is specifically amplified when you’re trying to re-invent a wheel, but built on WP. We just do not think that this is wise…

Niches

As mentioned at the top of this post, we’re planning on tackling a bunch of niches in the coming months, and we’d bet you’ll be pretty impressed with what we’re planning to roll out before year-end. But whilst we’re excited to explore niches, and to increase the possibilities within our theme collection, we’ve also been very selective in terms of which niches we believe are viable on top of WP.

Directories, restaurants & online shops are all things that we believe should be built on top of WP, because it gives you – the user – a leg up in getting an professional website online featuring some great functionality; but at a fraction of the cost of custom development. That’s what is so important to us, and it’s that core strategy that WooThemes have been built on since our inception almost 3 years ago now.

So if exploring these niches means working twice as hard to release themes to enable you even further, then that’s the plan. But there’s that big “if” to consider, which will be our prerogative: we’ll build the niche *if* it’s viable on WP.

Here’s the teaser:

Coming soon to a WooFramework-powered theme near you!

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.

From that definition (and to expand on it a bit), these are the kind of features & functions that a theme framework generally includes:

• Extreme customizability & flexibility to enable a developer to build anything on top of the parent theme / framework.
• Hooks & filters (here’s a good explanation on that) to allow for easy development of child themes (for the more advanced developers).
• A variety of easy-to-use theme options to enable users to customize the theme on the fly (aimed more at end-users).
• Widgetized spaces galore.
• Multiple layout & styling options.
• And a couple more… Here’s another nice overview of some theme framework features.

Based on that above list of features (or can we call it criteria) which would make Canvas a fully-fledged theme framework, this would be where Canvas would be:

• It’s already very customizable (see), even though many of our users aren’t necessarily customizing it using child themes.
• Canvas sports a massive variety of backend customization options & design controls (see: Painting in Canvas).
• It’s got 7 widgetized spaces, 36 different layout combinations (6 width options & 6 column layout options) as well as a magazine & business template (along with the other standard page templates that come with WooThemes).

The only things that are missing from Canvas (compared to the criteria list) is hooks & filters. Canvas currently has 27 hooks, but no filters; so it’s not far off from being a complete theme framework, but adding more filters & hooks would make it much easier to publish child themes too.

Is that making more sense? How does this info influence your suggestions on the Canvas as a Framework post? Is this what you want from Canvas?

We’re not saying that this is the perfect route for Canvas, in fact we’re undecided & happy to take some guidance from you in this regard. We just want to develop Canvas in such a way that would make your job as web developer / designer / webmaster easier and enable you to add more value for your clients. So shoot with those suggestions!

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

So our initial batch of shortcodes are aimed at doing just that, whilst it serves as a quick “beta” for us to get feedback on how you are using them, and how we could build more. We’ve got a few more plans, but we’re happy for you to shoot with some suggestions.

The styling of these elements are currently contained within the WooFramework, which means that it will look just like these examples above when you are using it on your side. You will however be able to add some custom CSS to modify the styling of these to suite the rest of your WooThemes modification and custom styling.

Have fun implementing, or modifying them!

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:

Using the latest functionality available in WP 3.0, we’ve developed something that will be of real value. And beyond this being “just another theme”, we’re also planning some very exciting additions & tweaks to our business model in a way that will influence the way you use WooThemes greatly.

For the moment, let’s just say that Realtor has been built using a the WooFramework + a new, little (!?) add-on.

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.

ScribeSEO analyzing this post

There’s a promotion as well…

Along with the announcement of this integration & support for ScribeSEO, we’ve also teamed up with them to bring you a WooThemes-exclusive offer:

Use the coupon code “WOO” to get their largest package (300 evaluations per month) for a low price of ONLY $27 PER MONTH (normal price: $97). That is a massive 72%+ discount. (Full details on the promotion in our e-mail newsletter here.)

Grab a copy of ScribeSEO now.

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!

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.

This functionality is available in the latest version of our framework, so if you haven’t already got that in your theme, you need to update to the latest version manually. To activate this new feature, you need to go to “Framework Settings” and enable the option before you can use it.

Enable the update funcitonality in Framework Settings

The updating of the WooFramework currently only works with the FTP protocol, so you would need to enter your FTP details when prompted to enable this. This is however the same way in which you can install & activate plugins directly from the dashboard and we have thus kept as much of this consistent with those processes.

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.

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.

Too Easy

Here’s a little preview of the backend:

WooFramework: URL Shortening Settings

And this is what the function (in the front-end) looks like:

Short URL

Instead of thus using a standard WP template tag for the link, we’re now just using one function:

What do you think?

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!

The beautiful new theme option's panel

You can also start to get excited (we’ve been excited for a while now), about some amazing new functionality that will be added on top of WF2 in the next couple of weeks. All I’ll say is that we are currently working on something that will revolutionize your navigational menu’s & structures and that we’re very close to deploying this to all themes. We’ve done some internal beta testing and this functionality should go out to our beta testing group soon, thereafter we hope to start deploying it to our themes in 2 / 3 weeks’ time. (Which goes to show that ExpressionEngine is most definitely not the only thing we are thinking about.)

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…

So what does this really mean?

• The core of our themes has now been standardized, which means updating (and fixing for future versions of WP) will be much easier than before.
• All themes now share more functionality in terms of options & widgets, which improves your overall experience using our themes.
• Our next step will be do start building more and more custom functionality into this framework, which will further enhance your usage of the themes. It should also theoretically mean that the themes will become more versatile and flexible in terms of how you will be able to use them (maybe including tumblelog-type functionality for example).

To say we’re excited would thus be an understatement of the plans we have for the WooFramework moving forward. It’s been quite a journey getting here, but the framework is stable now and the hardest part of the journey (implementing this in all of our older themes) is done. So now it’s just a case of onwards & upwards…

Before we go… We’d just like to clarify what we mean when we say “framework”, because we’re definitely not developing or releasing a theme framework as it is generally called. Instead, we’ve standardized some core functionality in our themes (/functions/*.* & functions.php) and created a proper interacting structure (e.g. /includes/*.*) for that core functionality. So no need for a child theme or other frilly bits; all you need to know is that WooFramework = awesomeness.