So you are about to head off on an adventure around the world, or perhaps just an extended road trip up the east coast? You’ve promised postcards to friends and families, but what a mission, post offices are so last century! 🙂

See you’ve decided to buy a domain, install WordPress and this really cool theme from WooThemes instead. Friends all around the world can track your progress, see exactly where you’ve been and the photos you’ve taken. They’ll share the experience with you, leaving you comments and advice of where and what you should be doing.

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One of the most commonly asked questions by Woo users is how to modify the navigation in the theme, by excluding items, adding external links etc. We recently added Jeff to our team, and started him off with a project we had been planning for a while; A new custom navigation admin page, where you would be able to really build your own navigation without touching any code.

It didn’t take long for him to come up with the wireframe, and then Cobus added some nice styling to the UI, and we can now proudly present it to you! We’ll start off slow by adding it to our newest themes first, and we hope to get feedback and squish any possible bugs that should appear before rolling it out to all our themes.

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As most of you probably already know, WordPress released version 2.9 last night, with some nice new features added. None of the new features affect any of our themes, and we have updated all our demos to 2.9 and they are working without any problems.

We recommend everybody to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. If you believe that you have found a bug or compatibility issue with 2.9, then please make a post in our forum, so we can quickly determine if it is caused by the new version.

Today is a pretty big day for us at WooThemes. Firstly, because we can finally launch this theme that has been so hyped and received such glowing feedback from our beta testers, and secondly because it is our first theme sporting our brand spanking new theme option’s panel.

Optimize is another pixel perfect business theme conceptualized and coded by the Magatron. Living up to it’s name Optimize has been lurking around, behind the scenes, being tested by our wonderful beta testers for a couple weeks now, with lots of new features being added and optimized according to the feedback we have been given.

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It is with great pleasure that we can FINALLY announce the launch of our awesomely unique niche blog design for bands and musicians, entitled Backstage.

Backstage was first conceptualized by the talented British web designer extraordinaire – Elliot Jay Stocks way back in June. We thought Elliot was well suited for this kind of design as he himself is quite a musical genius.

Fox has spent the past few months, off and on, hard at work creating powerful widget goodness and theme options for Backstage. With custom category templates for the discography, latest news, video and image archives this theme really helps empower artists and bands with the tools they need to promote themselves. An upcoming shows widget helps manage your events, whilst a home page featured slider can easily be enabled/disabled via the theme options panel.

It’s probably best letting the images below, and the demo, do the talking don’t you think?

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Unique Features

These are some of the more unique features that you will find within the theme:

• A home page slider showcasing band/musician photography.
• A home page dedicated module to the band/musician biography.
• Unique page templates for your discography/music archive, and image & video galleries.
• Neat theme integration with media attachments.
• Custom Woo Widgets for use in the sidebar and in the home page widgetized zones: A media widget showcasing images, videos or music, a recent news widget, an upcoming shows widget, Flickr and advertising widgets amongst others.
• 7 stylish alternate colour schemes to choose from.

A few months ago, Adii started talking about a new charitable organization that he wanted to create that would benefit amazingly talented, yet underprivileged young girls (through educational opportunities, love & great support structures) in South Africa. Last week, the dream took another step closer to formalizing when Adii & his team launched The Rockstar Foundation.

In October, we managed to raise more than $5k for breast cancer awareness. But going forward, we’ve decided we’d like to be more involved in helping worthy causes. So we’re teaming up with The Rockstar Foundation, where we will be sponsoring all of their general overheads & day-to-day expenditure on a monthly basis.

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If WooThemes were a work desk, it would be one of those really messy desks littered with sketches and papers at the moment. We have so many theme concepts we are currently working on both in-house and with theme collaborators. It’s most certainly a creative place to be.

A couple weeks back I opened up Photoshop and dusted off the toolboxes to start experimenting with a travel blogging theme design, fresh after my recent holiday to the Greek Islands.

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Liam kindly spent some time with us chatting through what was involved in his recent collaboration with WooThemes on the Daily Edition theme.

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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!

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It’s been quite a while since I’ve contributed anything to the WooThemes repository, so when I finally managed to sneak in some Photoshop time, I wanted to draw inspiration from our own WooThemes website design, as we have been getting quite a few e-mails asking if our theme is available for sale. Obviously we want to keep our own design unique, but I  designed Coffee Break with a similar layout, so we could offer the public something similar in style.

The homepage layout consists of a jQuery slider at the top, which is great for showing of your most important content. We then added a nice mini-featured area below the slider, similar to the one we have on our homepage. You can add the sections with an icon to the left by just adding WP pages, and adding them to your options panel. We also added two sidebars, one for the homepage and one for the blog, and also a nice 2-column footer where you can have some basic information about the website.

Do you like the theme demo and the 17 alternative styles? Any other features that you think we missed? Let us know in the comments.

Some theme launches here at WooThemes are hyped for weeks and weeks on Twitter and in our blog, others we silently and secretly work on and launch for our community as a nice little surprise. Mortar is one of those that I’ve been working on for a few weeks.

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.

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We’ve had the pleasure to collaborate with another hugely popular half-English web designer – this time the graphic designer, web developer, musician and Apple enthusiast Dan Rubin. This collaboration has brewed and matured over months and months, in fact we got our first preview of this theme in November last year! Hopefully this demonstrates to a lot of users that we don’t rush our themes in order to release two a month – quality and quantity go hand in hand here at WooThemes.

Dan is a genius when it comes to web design, he gives a lot of careful thought to his designs and with Big Easy his personal style shines through. For his alternate styles to Big Easy he scanned and tweaked an old (circa 1970s) leather case with some lovely stitching, and a book cover from 1934 to form large repeating patterns. For the neat typography Dan introduced us to Cufon and implemented it meticulously with some “graceful degradation of text-shadow” <– You know you are working with a hot shot designer when he throws in words like that!

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