Our WooTumblog plugin has been downloaded over 2700 times already, and our Express app for iPhone has already been purchased by over 500 people, which proves that “tumblogging” is a very popular niche nowadays.

We contacted James McDonald and asked if he wanted to design a Tumblr theme for us a while back, and he produced the stunning and detailed Auld for us. With the popularity of WooTumblog, we decided to release it on WordPress instead of Tumblr. The theme was a perfect fit to use with the jQuery Masonry plugin, which allows the post blocks to align perfectly on the homepage in a two column fashion. Check out his Dribbble page for some more great visual design by this up and coming designer.

Most of the WooCrew will now take a long sought after Christmas break, and we’ll be back in the new year with more awesome goodies for you! From all of us at WooThemes, have a merry Christmas and a happy Woo Year!

This one has been in the oven for a good few months and teased numerous times on the blog, but today we can finally introduce you to Listings – a directory based theme with an advanced content builder.

Ever since we released Estate in July of this year we had the intention of taking it’s advanced niche functionality and making a more generic, yet equally powerful version of it that could be used for any type of niche whether you be a book publisher, a recruitment agency, a car dealer, an art gallery, a photographer’s portfolio site, the list is endless.

When I first conceptualized the design and layout in Photoshop I had no idea ultimately how cool it would turn out thanks to some serious development time on it by Jeff and Matty, with Kirstin taking care of the HTML / CSS and initial WooFramework integration. As you can see it’s been a collective effort by the team.

The Content Builder

At the core of Listings is it’s most impressive feature – the content builder. The content builder allows you to create custom post types, then taxonomies for those post types and custom fields for the posts within those taxonomies. This all thanks to WordPress 3.1. To say this theme is cutting edge would be an understatement. I’d go out on a limb and say it is one of the most advanced content-building themes on the market today.

Hopefully that has excited you as to the theme’s capabilities. If not have a look over the home page modular design and start thinking how you can use this theme on your next project.

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It’s almost Christmas and WooHQ has closed it’s doors for the final time in 2010, but don’t worry that doesn’t mean we are going to disappear. We’ve been busy wrapping up our present for all of you, and seeing we are quiet an impatient group we want you to unwrap it now before you go off on holiday.

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It’s been almost 6 months in development since the WPBundle guys – Liam and Spencer presented their exciting project on Kickstarter in July of this year. Although the initial funding was unsuccessful, there was huge interest on Twitter and within the WP community so we approached Liam to see if they’d be open to a collaboration. We believed we could help market their WordPress bundle to a much more targeted market on our site rather than on Kickstarter, where potential backers are not so WordPress savvy.

Today we can finally announce that all their hard work, late nights and caffeine fuelled brain storms has become a reality. WP Bundle is now available and offering some game changing, hugely unique WordPress themes that we are quite certain you would have not seen anywhere else before!

Here are some tasters of what Liam and Spencer have cooked up for you. What is important to note is that all the WPBundle themes are built on the solid and ever improving codebase that is our WooFramework. That means if you are familiar with our themes and experimenting with our code in WooTheme customizations you’ll have no problem at all with the WPBundle themes. You should also be able to chop and change bits of functionality between the themes if you are feeling up to the task in creating dream sites for your clients.

As was mentioned in WPBundle’s newsletter WooThemes users will be eligible for very attractive discounts on the $250 WPBundle:

• WooThemes club subscription members can get the WPBundle for only $100
• Any other WooThemes customers that have purchased theme packages in the past can get WPBundle for $150

To take advantage of these special offers login to your WooThemes account and on the “Add Products” page look for the WPBundle offer, purchase the themes directly from there and you’ll be in business in no time. To find out more about WPBundle go to their beautiful site – www.wpbundle.com.

Here at WooThemes we use a script for dynamic image resizing in all our themes which is called timthumb.php (thumb.php in our themes). One of the main reasons why we haven’t replaced our dynamic image resizing script yet, is because we feel it is superior to the WP post thumbnails that were introduced in WordPress 2.9.

The reason it is superior to WP Post Thumbnails is because it can dynamically change the size of your images. It is widely used amongst WP theme developers, but it also has it’s problems (mostly setup and server performance issues).

We noticed a WP trac ticket (hopefully it makes it into a future WP version) which had a nice function to use the built in re-size functionality which already exists in WP core, and have now added this function to our framework (v 3.1.10) to see how it works.

We have also updated Canvas with a new option to enable the re-size function if you use WP Post Thumbnails, so you can test the new functionality today!

PS! We also have some new framework functionality coming soon which will update the way you upload images in your options panel/custom settings… Stay tuned!

Update!

We have deployed version 3.2.0 of the WooFramework which now uses native WP upload functionality for uploading in the options panel and in custom settings field. Grab it now by going to YourTheme > Update Framwork.

Canvas has been a crowd favorite ever since it was released, which is why it is our “flagship” theme that receives most of the latest functionality. Version 2.0 gave you additional page templates (Magazine and Business) to play with, and now we are adding our latest WooTumblog functionality (no plugin required) so you can use our new Express iPhone App to publish to your Canvas powered blog!

For those that don’t know what Tumblog means, it means making your blog function like Tumblr, which allows you to very easily publish snippets of content, whether they be images, videos, audio, articles, quotes or links.

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Today is a big day for us. Our first WordPress plugin release AND our first iPhone application launch. That’s right a plugin and an iPhone app released on the same day. Why? Because they work beautifully together.

The Woo Tumblog Plugin

Jeff has been quietly and stealthily been working on a free plugin that brings the functionality behind our popular tumblog themes to plugin format. That means you can turn your custom WP theme, or whatever theme you use, into a WordPress tumblog – easily posting images, notes, links and quotes to your site from your WordPress dashboard, or by using our iPhone app.

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Overview

This plugin works with any WordPress theme and activates a custom taxonomy that you will find accessible from your WordPress backend. You can then post to the custom taxonomy from the tumblog quickpress widget on your WordPress dashboard page.

Posting tumblog content takes seconds and it is clearly differentiated from your normal blog posts thanks to some in-post styling icons.

Find out more at the WooTumblog listing page in the WordPress plugin repository.

Yesterday was the launch of our first Shopify themes. Today sees the launch of something quite different, yet we are equally excited about – our first restaurant/bar specific niche theme called “Diner”.

Diner is undoubtedly one of the most powerful restaurant themes available for WordPress. It boasts an impressive feature list including:

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We’ve been in-undated with emails, tweets and blog comments on the expected release date of our much anticipated e-commerce WordPress WooThemes. This post sheds some light on the progress we are making, to keep our community of users in the loop, and not create any false expectations of a unrealistic delivery date.

Nearly there

We’ve been working on the e-commerce themes for a good few months now and made solid progress, BUT not without hiccups along the way! We’ve worked with some great developers on the e-commerce framework, but the sobering news for our eager early adopters is that the project has been larger than we originally anticipated – given our very high standards, and us not wanting to put our names behind something that is only half baked.

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Occasionally at WooThemes we find some time to work on theme designs ourselves, whilst the bulk of it is spent finding and collaborating with other great freelance designers, then developing, marketing and supporting those themes. Both Cobus and myself were lucky enough to jump into Photoshop and push around some pixels a few weeks ago.

Diner is a restaurant based theme that boasts lots of niche functionality empowering restaurant owners with a tool to market their restaurant using a unique food menu page template, boasting custom post types, a contact page with Google Maps & directions integration and even possibly a booking plugin to reserve and manage tables. Expect is very soon.

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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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Today we introduce you to a theme aptly named “Skeptical”. Why should you be skeptical? Because it’s got some pretty neat functionality for a free theme. That’s correct – a free theme.

Skeptical was designed by Nur Fathihah and submitted to us via our “Submit your theme” page, where we often un-earth great designs and talented designers.

Skeptical’s layout is very flexible in the sense that you can display “related posts” next to your latest posts on the home page, OR have a completely widgetized sidebar. Not only that, you can also add your Flickr stream to the footer region and showcase three noteworthy blog posts tagged with a specific tag that you declare in the theme options.

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And you thought being a part of the WooTeam was all about 4 day work weeks, Apple products, X-Box sessions and Woo on the Slopes expeditions?

Hell no. Each member of the WooTeam has been through a grueling test of mental and physical agility….

A digital designer is rarely caught without a coffee, coca cola, or red bull on their desk. Largely due to the late night rushes before a client deadline, but according to Dr. Downie it also fuels creativity.

After teasing it only yesterday, we’ve cruised through the tweaks and fixes (few of course!) reported by our beta testers and are happy to release the Caffeinated theme today, less than 24 hours later.

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I’m not even sure that title makes sense, but it does somewhat describe the next two upcoming themes, and was the title of the email Cobus sent me with the teaser graphics.

Firstly, we have Ryan Downie’s personal portfolio theme design that he originally designed for his own personal use – fueled by his passion for Coffee, Red Bull and lunchtime pot of noodles according to his Twitter stream.

This theme’s release is literally around the corner and boasts more custom post type integration and a great summize of your online presence on the home page.

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