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July 5, 2011 - 24 Comments
Independence Day was celebrated in style at WordPress headquarters with the launch of their latest version of WordPress 3.2 (dedicated to noted composer and pianist George Gershwin), that after 15 million downloads of WordPress 3.1!
If you haven’t already seen what the faster, cleaner version 3.2 offers watch this great video by WordPress which summarizes it’s new features and optimizations nicely.
July 4, 2011 - 11 Comments
Today we welcome a new team member to WooThemes Headquarters in Cape Town. Warren Holmes joins the development team to help with the heavy lifting of the WooFramework and theme building.
Warren grew up in Zimbabwe and is a keen golfer and fisherman, so we are quite sure he’ll get along with Magnus at the next Woo get-together! He’s also a recovering java developer.
Warren’s job will be bridging the gap between our support ninjas, who’s role it is to take the beautifully crafted photoshop files and magically transform them into WooFramework powered themes, and the code wizards role of applying advanced unique php/jquery/ajax features to a lot of our themes.
June 27, 2011 - 13 Comments
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!
June 14, 2011 - 4 Comments
Being the newest member of the WooTeam, it’s safe to say I was probably the most nervous for our recent trip to the UK. Not in a bad way though.
I’m the new kid in class, so to speak, with that I knew I had some harassing coming my way. Which I got in the form of initiation shots. 🙂 Surprisingly, I didn’t butcher anyones name, especially with my Midwestern accent. Nor did I get lost as others did in London. This was my first trip across the pond to the UK and besides meeting all of my coworkers and seeing the beautiful UK, it was the first time the latest iteration of the WooTeam was together working from one place.
While this was a fun trip for all of us, we also did our best to tend to all of the Woo business while we hung out and got to know each other. An interesting concept if you think about it: most companies don’t take trips together and if they do they aren’t tending to any work. WooThemes runs itself a little “backwards” from most. We work apart for the majority of the time and when company fun time comes, we meet up and continue to work while doing so. I’d often work off some jetlag by staying up and answering emails. Definitely safe to say we love our jobs here.
May 30, 2011 - 12 Comments
When we initially sat down to discuss features for FaultPress you may imagine the words “bugs, tickets, milestones, priorities” being thrown around a lot. And you’d be right. But beyond which functionality we built into FaultPress we were keen to ensure it’s usability was as good as it’s feature set. Not only on desktops, but on a variety of different devices.
“Responsive design” were two other words which kept cropping up. Mobile perusal of the web is an increasing trend and we decided to embrace this by delivering a device agnostic design. In Laymans terms this means that whether you’re checking out FaultPress on your desktop, your iPad or your smartphone, content is delivered to you in an intuitive and appropriate way.
May 26, 2011 - 25 Comments
In February we worked with the design talent that is Cameron Moll on a portfolio/tumblog theme, similar to Elefolio given it’s popularity.
Cameron is a seasoned speaker, a graphic designer with proficiency in website interface, a letterpress & videography enthusiast, as well as the owner of Authentic Jobs – which only yesterday launched it’s new Authentic Jobs UK division. Quite a creative talent.
With the “Briefed“ theme that Cameron designed for us, it caters for creatives like himself – one’s that don’t fit into a box. The comment Cameron provided with the initial concept of Briefed sums up the design well:
May 23, 2011 - 18 Comments
As our flagship theme, Canvas has seen many enhancements and additions since it’s released early last year. The response to Canvas’ flexibility and ease of use from users at all levels has been incredible. With this in mind, it was time to give Canvas a bit of a tune up under the hood and overhaul the code for even more flexibility.
When approaching a task of this nature, which concerns users of all types and skill levels, it is important to take that into consideration as a primary pillar on the project- users of all skill levels need to be able to take advantage of the new features. Enter the Manager modules.
The Manager modules, “Layout”, “Hooks” and “Meta”, provide users with an easy-to-use interface for making use of advanced functionality in Canvas (such as it’s bundled hooks via the “Hook” Manager and filtering common areas via the “Meta” Manager). This means that, without understanding too much about what a hook or filter is, a user can make use of them. Therefore, at a basic level, these advanced functionalities no longer seem daunting and unapproachable. More advanced users can, of course, still make use of a standard coded filter in their child theme, once comfortable with the concepts of what hooks and filters are.
May 20, 2011 - 13 Comments
This guest post was written by Nick Daugherty of Skyrocket Websites who has an impressive portfolio of clients and extensive WooThemes modifications.
To go along with the release of Canvas v4, the WooThemes guys asked me to write up a case study for some of my recent Canvas-based projects, which I’m absolutely thrilled to do.
My name is Nick, and I’m a full-time web designer from Los Angeles, California, USA. I’ve been a WooThemes user (and fan) since they first released the Vibrant CMS theme back in the dark ages of WordPress (2008 to be exact).
This post is all about TheButterflyCircus.com, which has been my most ambitious Child Theme modification to date.
So buckle up, grab a pencil, and put on your thinking caps. It might get nerdy.
May 19, 2011 - 23 Comments
At the end of last month, we mentioned the possibility of having a little London meetup on our upcoming trip to the UK. And now we can confirm that this is indeed happening… 🙂
May 11, 2011 - 16 Comments
One of my favorite parts of working with the WooCommunity is hearing from a satisfied customer. We aren’t always able to make everyone happy, but for the most part I’d say we get the job done and have many happy WooThemes fans from it. 100% Satisfaction is always something we’re striving for, but for some people we just won’t ever be able to put a smile on their face. I do think I’ve developed a bit of a strategy though in my short time and experience working with Woo.
Here are the ways I’ve found to make and keep WooUsers happy…
April 18, 2011 - 21 Comments
As with all industries, WordPress theming has it’s fair share of trends, flowing in and out of popularity as the WordPress product and community evolve. Through these trends, needs for supplementary resources evolve, where users aim to enhance trends via additional products or services. A trend that has been growing in popularity in recent years is that of “Theme Frameworks” or “Advanced Parent Themes”. These themes, while bundling in large amounts of valuable code, can become confusing to modify and upgrade for the end user. This, following the flow of trends, grew the awareness and need for the use of child themes.
Child theming has been around in WordPress for a considerable amount of time, allowing users to create a smaller theme that piggybacks off of a larger theme, with it’s own CSS and customised PHP functions. A perfect fit with “Advanced Parent Themes”, yes? So why are some users apprehensive about it? Fear of the unknown.
March 30, 2011 - 3 Comments
A custom home page featured slider to showcase particular video posts, all powered by jQuery. Full control over what appears here and where the caption must be positioned.
Custom home page layout with video tabber and widgetized regions for blog and other content.
A neatly designed single video page template that has social links allowing you to share your video on Facebook, Twitter or even email a link to the post. Related videos show below the video content.
An optional page template that allows you to have a front end form that can capture video details submitted by your site visitors or WordPress users.
An optional integrated portfolio section driven by custom post types, which utilizies jQuery prettyPhoto script to display your work in a lightbox.
The theme takes full advantage of the new custom post types functionality that came with WordPress 3.0, so adding video posts is dead easy!
You can customize the typography in the theme to suit, and there is full support for Google Fonts in the font selector.
The theme has 1 widgetized sidebar (homepage excluded) and 4 footer widgetized regions, and as always comes with 8 custom Woo Widgets (Ad Space, Blog Author, WooTabs, Subscribe, Feedback, Search, Flickr and Twitter).
The theme includes 11 alternative color styles which you can preview in the demo, and also has styling options for background color/image and setting link and button color.
March 30, 2011 - 34 Comments
Don’t worry we aren’t going all Hollywood on you and creating “The WooThemes Network“… I think if we did it would probably be more a WooVille Manga animated film…
Instead, today we are announcing the release of a brand spanking new video-based theme – Premiere. Almost 2 years to the day since our last video theme – Groovy Video.
March 23, 2011 - 10 Comments
As you may know WooThemes hired their first Community Manager when they decided to hire me. Community Manager is a new term around here so what does it all mean?
Adii found this great infograph on GetSatisfaction that in my view of things does a great job of summing it up. Click here to see it full size.
This infograph takes a very broad view of what a Community Manager does, but it still makes good points in how the position applies to the WooCommunity.
Let’s take a look at a few things what they mean for us starting with Pinata, Sponge, and Gardener. My favorite description is under the Pinata, and a big part of what I aim to do with the WooCommunity.
March 22, 2011 - 8 Comments
With an ever-growing theme catalog, as well as continued improvements and new features being added to our themes and the WooFramework, it can sometimes become a task in and of itself to check your theme regularly and make sure you’re using the latest version (which is, ofcourse, preferred). What if there was an automated solution that notified you when an upgrade became available and easily upgraded your theme to the latest version?
Here in lies the conversation…
As I’m sure you’ve all seen, WordPress has a neat “Updates” screen which allows for the upgrading of your themes and plugins, as well as WordPress itself, through a neat and automated interface. Through our popular WooIdeas forum, we’ve received a thread regarding theme updates and would like to delve into this further. A quick warning, folks: This may get technical. 😉
March 16, 2011 - 15 Comments
Early last week my wife, Xenia, and I launched an online project that we’d been working on behinds the scenes for a while. African Cartel is an online marketplace for African artists, with the first feature being on a group of disadvantaged, pre-dominantly Zimbabwean artists who’s livelihood and income revolves around selling their township paintings at a traffic light intersection in Cape Town, South Africa. These artists are known as the robot artists.
My involvement with African Cartel was developing a website to house the artist listings, short film, art pieces, and e-commerce facilities to sell the art, whilst Xenia wrapped her head around the logistics of it all. I thought it would be a good idea to write a blog post about how I went about building the site, based on products we’d developed at WooThemes. I am fully aware some will perceive this as a shameless self-promotion, but to those genuinely interested in how we built the site please grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the read.
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