The download package includes 5 PNG icons (sized 32×32, 64×64, 128×128 & 256×256), as well as Veerle’s original .ai (Adobe Illustrator) file to allow for some easy customization.

Download the Twitter Birdie Icon (Both the PNG’s & AI files are included)

So… We’d like to launch a new initiative, whereby our themes will be translated into as many languages as possible. There’s obviously a lot of value in this for us and we’d like to reward everyone that actually contributes some translations to the project. How cool would it be to have every WooTheme available in 20-odd languages?

You can help! If you read / write / speak English, as well as another language you can help us out and translate any of the themes we have available. We haven’t limited this to WooThemes-only users, as all of the .po files have been made available here. We think the reward for contributing should persuade enough of you to help us out here…

We would’ve loved to do this ourselves, but unfortunately we’re not as multilingual as we’d need to be to handle this internally. So we’re hoping we can count on all the Woo fanboys & girls to work with us to improve our themes even further!

And with his new design – Headlines – that’s exactly the situation once again.

Headlines (which changed slightly from the initial teaser we posted in September) is a superbly designed magazine layout, which we’re sure will quickly jump to the top of the (already great magazine themes) pile. Whilst not reinventing any wheels with the release of Headlines, we wanted to prompt the users of old-timers such as Busy Bee or Fresh News to give their blogs a little overhaul before the start of the new year.

Clean & sophisticated means that Headlines will be extremely easy to bend & break according to all of your creative requirements and you should see a spade of amazing user modified versions to be added to the Showcase in the near future. It is however the pretty new featured slider that we’re sure will woo all the fans the most…

The sexy new featured slider used in Headlines

We’ve also experimented with a little bit of new functionality on Headlines… First experiment allows you to set the alignment of the post images / thumbnails right from the backend; so no more editing pesky template code. The second “experiment” (we’ve done this in one or two themes before) is to allow you to switch between using a left- or right-aligned sidebar. These surely aren’t groundbreaking on their own, but both are representative of our new development mindset which is geared to release our themes in a much more modular way in future.

Image Alignment Options: From left to right in one click

If you’re not convinced of the awesomeness yet, have a play with the demo and read up on the nitty-gritty with regards to Headlines’ theme features. Irrespective of whether you like Magnus’ design style; you will love this theme!

In the end though, this wasn’t about us, our celebrations, or our unique marketing campaign. Nope, it was all about raising money for a worthy charity in the aid of global breast cancer awareness.

So it’s with pride today that we get to announce that our selected charity – Breast Buddies – will soon be receiving a cheque for a whopping $5330.00 USD. We’re hoping to meet up with them soon and will post some pictures when we do.

In the meantime, please accept a sincere thanks from our side in making this a wonderful & successful campaign. We’d also like to make special mention of Brian Gardner who helped with & sponsored the #woobs giveaway. Hoping we can count on all of your support again in future!

Today is a very special day for us. The great thing about it (for you), is that we’re totally into sharing that special feeling.

Our very first theme was released on 2 November 2007. Now almost 2 years down the line, we’re extremely proud to announce that we’re releasing our 50th theme today. This is a significant milestone for us and one that we will definitely enjoy with a celebratory drink (or two) later.

A quick count of our themes collection would tell you that there were only 48 themes prior to today, which means that the two beauties (literally) we’re unleashing onto the world today will be theme numbers 49 & 50 respectively. To make these two themes even more significant, we need to mention that this is the first time ever that we’re releasing two themes on one day, AND both of these themes also celebrate the end of our Breast Cancer campaign for the month of October.

So you can understand why we’re pretty excited, right? Wait till you see those themes…

Royalle

Pretty in pink

The first theme we need to show you is Royalle by Sarah Parmenter. The best way to describe Royalle would be to say that it’s Antisocial’s pretty, younger sister. The design oozes lady-like sophistication & beauty. The theme however is about so much more than that…

Built on the robust WooFramework (as always), Royalle is a flexible theme that could basically be used for just about anything. At first glance, you’ll see that the theme is all about blogging & social media, and we can’t deny that those are the main features of the theme. But the design can easily be swapped around and be used for a wedding website (for example). The only limitation of the theme is therefore your imagination.

We also know that the pink default style will most likely not be the guys’ favourite choice, never fear the theme is packaged with 5 awesome alternative colour schemes; so there’s one for everyone.

Read a little more about Royalle’s theme features or check out the demo and start conceptualizing the next project you’ll work on using this theme.

f0101

Illustrative Beauty

Next one is the awesome f0101 by another top female designer – Veerle Pieters. To describe f0101 is a pretty hard task, because whilst it looks like a simple theme, it packs a hard punch.

Similar in layout to Veerle’s previous theme for us – Abstract – we asked her to design something that was representative of her amazing, illustrative style. So f0101 is also probably best suited for personal bloggers, as it sports strong blogging & social media sections just like Royalle. The illustration on the left (which can be swapped out for an illustration or photo of yourself) is also probably a sure sign of f0101’s blogging focus.

But as I did with Royalle, I’d like to challenge everyone to think outside the box when viewing the demo of f0101. If you strip the theme of its personal / blogging focus, you are left with a very clean & sophisticated design that could be used for anything.

Just from the top of my head, I can see f0101 being adapted as a photoblogging or portfolio website, which can also be used by small agencies (not just individuals). f0101 also includes 10 alternative styles (for both the guys & girls) to get you started on that unique personalization of f0101.

Read the theme features for more details on f0101.

Doubling up on some 4-for-1 fun…

And in true WooSpirit, we’d like for you to celebrate this special milestone of ours with us by doubling up on our permanent 2-for-1 offer.

From today until the end of October, you’ll be able to purchase any 4 themes (on either a Standard or Developer package) for the price of 1. Essentially what this means is that you’re saving a further 50% on our standard 2-for-1 promotion. That’s 50% off!

So grab any of our themes and join in on the action. Also remember that if you buy either Royalle or f0101 we’ll donate all of the proceeds from those two themes to charity; so pick your purchases wisely!

Go pink, double up on the 4-for-1 and celebrate this day with us!

To take advantage of this offer simply pick 1 of the themes you would like and go through the purchase process with it, you’ll then be prompted to specify which 3 bonus themes you want to receive.

A desk at Woo HQ: Not empty anymore...

A month ago we set out to expand the WooTeam and add another developer to our ranks. Today we can announce that the new, awesome developer that will be joining our team on 1 December, is a talented, local (South Africa) developer that goes by the name of Jeffrey Pearce.

We’re extremely excited to have Jeff on board and we’re already brainstorming quite a few new ideas that we’ll be pursuing in the new year. Jeff brings a fresh set of eyes & ideas to the table and he’ll be working closely with Foxinni on stuff related to our WooFramework backend, some advanced additions to our themes and then a few things that we won’t share for now (we don’t want any of the bad boys copying us).

So for now… Welcome to Jeff! And to the rest of you: watch this space.

Designers like Firman Daus & Armono Wibowo have made a big impact with their submissions, whilst we’re also excited to preview a new, unseen design by the talented youngster, Ajmal Eylia. There is however one name that shoots to prominence when thinking about young, unknown designers that have made their debut on WooThemes: Izuddin Helmi.

We recently had a chat with Izuddin – who has designed 7 themes for us (including my.stream, which is yet to be released) about his involvement with us to try determine how that might have influenced his design work / career.

One of the first things that Izuddin will tell you is that he has had no formal design training, but he believes he’s got a natural eye for design. He also noted that through his collaborations with WooThemes he has developed immensely as a designer and that Magnus is one of his all-time, favourite designers.

Quizzed on how his WooThemes work has influenced his career thus far, Izuddin simply said:

“I’m very grateful and happy that enquiries about my freelance work have increased 10 times ever since I started designing for WooThemes. Thanks guys!”

We’d also like to believe that we had a major influence on Izuddin’s new business venture, where the experience he gained from working with us, is proving to be very helpful.

So where are we going with all of this?

Designing For WooThemes

We think the above proves that we have a knack for knowing good design from bad and subsequently we’ve got a keen eye in spotting amazing design talent. In the past however our collaborations were rather exclusive in that you needed to be invited by us. That’s however changing slightly.

We’ve decided to open up a brand new section of WooThemes: Submit Your Design. So this is your chance to get in on the fun, get paid to work with WooThemes and be featured next to the most popular designers on the web in our portfolio of themes.

We’re hoping that this will spark the next wave of design innovation at WooThemes and we’re looking to make new friends through the upcoming collaborations. So read through the details of this new campaign and if you’ve got some good ideas, definitely send them our way.

The good news is however that tumblog themes have not dropped off the radar and the future (which includes a very early, very sneaky preview of an upcoming tumblog design) is looking very good indeed (there are even rumours of an iPhone app to support our themes).

I’ve personally goofed around with some potential functionality for our first tumblog theme, whilst working away on my own site. So I intend on getting a little technical now, but here are some of my thoughts on functionality…

Media Types

The essence of a tumblog is its ability to support different media types (we will support: text, images, video, audio, links, quotes & dialogues / chats)  and format the content according to those media types. For this to be effective, the WordPress theme needs to determine in some way what “type” of post you are adding. In my mind, we have the following options:

• Using categories or tags, which you can specify in the backend. This would mean that if a post has been published with a specific category or tag i.e. “Images”, the display format will be for an image as specified by the theme’s design;
• Adding an optional drop-down on post-level to (manually) select which type of post it is you’re publishing; or
• Developing the theme in an intelligent way i.e. if you’re embedding a video via our custom field, it will automatically be rendered as a video post by the theme.

Now it’s probably possible to use a combination of the above, but I’d think that the use of categories & tags makes the most sense. Using categories & tags would mean that you could access the archives for all “quotes” posts or all “video” posts, as they are linked to a specific category or tag (which you have specified in the theme options). This makes even more sense when you have a look at most tumblog designs, which are normally quite visually labelled with their media type to make navigation easier.

If we go that route, I’d also think that we should include a fallback in the case that the appropriate category or tag isn’t present. In this case, I think the drop-down select on post-level probably makes the most sense!?

QuickPress

This is something which we’re totally borrowing from Tumblr, but it is a must-have if we’re gonna be serious about our tumblog themes.

WordPress already includes QuickPress functionality, but we’d like to take those ideas a little further and develop a WooThemes Tumblog widget for your WP dashboard, to allow you to quickly post any type of content to your tumblog theme. With a little jQuery & AJAX magic, I’m sure we’ll be able to integrate something superbly usable & user-friendly; plus it maintains the spirit & principles of tumblogs in general.

Feedback

This is still early days yet for WooThemes tumblog themes, but we have quite a few ideas (as you’ve seen above) on how we’re going to pull this off. We would love however to hear what you think at this stage…

Are we missing some crucial functionality? In your ideal world, what would you like to see in our tumblog themes? Or is there any aspect of Tumblr themes that we can improve when we release our WP-equivalents? Fire away!

This is Exposure

It’s not every day that we can sit around the (virtual) Woo boardroom table and get this excited about an unique new theme that we’re releasing. But I think – and I believe the whole WooTeam would agree with me here – the release of Exposure is one of those kind of themes to make you sit up and notice.

So here’s my grandiose claim for the day: Exposure is one of the most unique WordPress themes – albeit inherently simple (will get to that now) – that will be released this year. Think I’m being silly? Gimme a few minutes to explain it to you (and then you can decide whether it’s all just smoke & mirrors)…

Core WordPress Media Management

We all know that WordPress has built-in media management (images, audio etc.), but it admittedly isn’t as solid as the rest of Wordpress is (apparently this is getting a massive upgrade in the upcoming version 2.9). But that said, it’s still solid enough to allow you to do some pretty cool things with it.

With Exposure (which we’ll officially dub as a photoblogging theme), we wanted to create a theme that uses these often-overlooked functions that are already bundled within WordPress; thus no need to run 3rd party gallery plugins, because admittedly they’re usually pretty tedious and buggy. We also wanted to create something that is superbly flexible and hence our extensive use of theme options & widgets (more on these later) to control the output / layout of the theme.

So you’ll note on Exposure’s online demo, that a category is a parent gallery, with the posts in that category being the sub-galleries and the photos within those posts being the actual gallery images. I know that sounds a little verbose, but that’s technically what the result is with Exposure. This also means that comments can appear on both gallery- & individual image level, which in our minds just further fuels that flexibility we are after.

Widgets, options and oh, more widgets…

If you click on the thumbnail to your right, you’ll be able to view one of the most elaborate widgets that has been used with WordPress (another grandiose claim). This is the widget that powers the homepage of Exposure and from the amount of options available, I’m sure you’d agree that at least in theory it should be rather flexible.

Options for image size, titles, optional jQuery sliders / scrollers (and settings for that) etc. definitely looks as if it may be quite useful, right? Well, why not watch the next little video of this Exposure widget in action?

Exposure – 1. Customize Your Homepage from WooThemes on Vimeo.

In terms of inner pages (category / tag / date-based archives and single.php pages), we have also included quite a few options to allow you to tweak to your heart’s desire. Have a look at this screenshot of the theme options panel to get an idea of what we’re on about. And how about seeing those options in action here:

Exposure – 2. Customizing a post Gallery from WooThemes on Vimeo.

So after all of that… What do you think? Is this as grandiose as I claimed it to be at the beginning? Play with the demo for a bit and then pour out your heart in the comments field…

What we’ve found though is that irrespective of implementing specific strategies; it has been our persistence that has paid the biggest dividends in our growth over the last 12 – 18 months.

So what is this persistence that I’m referring to? Well, basically it’s just deciding on a plan / strategy and then sticking to your guns in executing those decisions – even if you can’t necessarily immediately see the effects of those plans. Here’s a few reasons why persistence pays off…

1. Persistence leads to improvement. By continuously working away at your ideas and building your business, The natural result of this is the fact that you’ll get better at what you’re doing, which means your products / services will improve. It also goes without saying that improved products / services are much easier to take to market…

2. People love companies that work hard. I think people actually notice a strong work ethic and in this regard, they will recognize one’s persistence. This obviously also bodes well for after-sales service, which is becoming much more important than the initial product / service that the customer purchased.

3. People like to be reminded of awesomeness. The conversation with your customers should never come to an end, as people ultimately love to be kept up to date, and essentially stay in touch with what their favourite businesses are cooking up. If you’re not gonna tell them; nobody is.

4. Staying Visual. You need to make sure that your business and marketing efforts are constantly in front of the eyes of existing & prospective customers. The more visual and accessible your brand / business is; the more likely those customers will be spending money with you.

This has most definitely worked for us and we’ll continue to tweak our approaches, try some new strategies, but ultimately stay as persistent in our execution & implementation of these. This is the only way we know how to market WooThemes and from our success and growth, we’d probably be mad to change any of that just yet…

What’s your take on this though? Do you find our persistence to be a vital cog (as this post suggests) in our marketing machine? Have you seen other companies implementing a similar approach?

If you haven’t seen it yet, then you’re not following us, are you?

Anyway… We’re all about the design, the WordPress goodness and the themes; so we’ll get to it already. We gave Sarah a very clear & simple brief (that’s what we’d like to believe okay) about her design for WooThemes: “Design a girly / alternative version of our Antisocial theme to support our Breast Cancer Awareness campaign.”

The end result? Royalle…

Royalle - Homepage

Royalle - Inner Page

Note: If the guys are feeling left out, we’ll also be releasing Royalle in a variety of colours; so there will be quite an extensive list of styles / colour schemes to pick from. You can preview the blue version (Homepage and Inner Page) so long.

Basically we wanted Sarah to create something that is a blog, but is not a blog at the same time. We’re finding that there’s a big move away from fully-fledged blogs for individuals these days in favour of aggregation spaces (like Royalle or Antisocial) or tumblelogs (which we’re working on). For us, it’s a case of not trying to reinvent in the wheel – Antisocial has been very successful and we wanted to build on that momentum.

So what are you thinking? Do you like? Anything we missed in Antisocial that should make the cut this time? Fire away with those ideas / suggestions / feedback, so that we can release another top-notch theme for your perusal.

And beyond that, *please& support our Breast Cancer Awareness campaign.

So if you’re keen to possibly win almost $2000 USD in prizes and you’d like to do a great thing (in supporting breast cancer awareness), then you should seriously consider publishing your #woobs tweets before Wednesday… Here’s some of the funniest tweets thus far…

No lollipops for ignorance. Ignore the twins and it will suck. #woobs – Published [#} by @lnicole.

#woobs I did it again! I took the twins to the Dr. for a check and he gave me a lollipop. More than I get when I check them myself. - Published [#} by @haydenbond.

I bet the Twins would be World Series-bound if they used lollipop-shaped bats, just saying! #woobs - Published [#} by @rkudeshi.

And so, my fellow lollipop enthusiasts, ask not what the twins can do for you; ask what you can do for the twins! #woobs - Published [#] by @kr1st.

The Hoff Agrees that we all must save the twins! #woobs http://pic.gd/99adbc – Published [#] by @valopez.

So go on then… Tweet your #woobs entry now!

The second article about two mainstream news websites in Iowa who have also adopted the WordPress + premium themes approach, just drives the point home: premium / commercial WordPress themes save you both money & time.

Objectively though, I can totally see where this approach fits into the website design & development industry. Coming from my background of doing client design & development work with Radiiate, I can attest to the fact that both the time & cost budgets are much larger in comparison to the budgets you’d need to buy a WooTheme and have it modified by one of our Affiliated Woo Workers (only accessible to our members).

This does come with a proviso though… Sometimes it will be best to get a website custom designed & developed from scratch and a WooTheme won’t be suitable for every need / niche under the sun. But I think our themes collection is becoming more diverse & flexible by the week, so this should at least be a viable option.

I mean – just a quick glance at our Showcase (of user modified WooThemes) shows you how our users are implementing our themes. And I can promise you one thing: none of them had massive custom design & development budgets…

What do you think? Think I’m getting this spot-on or being totally subjective in promoting our products / services?

Therapeutic WordPress

We know we’ve been sending so many new theme teasers your way and that some of you feel like those teasers never get released, but this time that’s not the case. Exactly a month ago we showed you a teaser for Therapy and today Therapy is available for purchase.

The only themes that ever get released this quickly (on WooThemes), is the kind of themes that Magnus ends up designing & coding in a weekend, so whilst not unprecedented, it’s also great for us to be able to push out a theme a month after teasing it.

We think Therapy is an amazing alternative for those personal bloggers out there and coupled with the spiffy social media widget, we’ve pretty much covered your bases. In fact the feedback on both the teaser and the beta preview persuaded us to actually release this as a paid theme (we did initially consider to release this as a free theme).

So give your WordPress a little bit of TLC, R&R and then some Therapy. You may just need it and we think you thoroughly deserve to treat yourself a little! Get Therapy Now!

This may come as a surprise to many of you, but when it comes to competition within the WP community, all of the competitors (in the corporate sense of the word) are very friendly with each other. And as evidence of that awesomeness, Brian Gardner (founder of StudioPress) contacted us with a great idea in support of our We Love Boobs campaign. So here’s the down-low:

The Giveaway

Before we tell you how you can enter this competition / giveaway, here’s what you can win:

• 2 x 3-month Developer Club Subscriptions
• 4 x Developer Package Themes**
• 10 x Standard Package Themes**
• 5 x Awesome WooThemes Ninja T-Shirts

**What makes this even cooler, is the fact that Brian has committed to contributing 50% of the costs of these themes ($650 USD) straight to our We Love Boobs campaign, so that’s another $650 USD that will be going to the awesome organization we’ve identified in aid of breast cancer awareness.

So this is how you win…

Twitter #woobs

To enter this draw, you only need to craft a clever & fun tweet… But we’ve got some “rules”…

1. The tweet needs to include the hashtag #woobs; and
2. You also need to use the words “twins” or “lollipops” in a fun & creative way.

Here’s an example tweet…

I checked in on the twins today and they look both happy & healthy! #woobs

We will then randomly select the 19 people who will be winning the 4 Developer Packages, 10 Standard Packages & 5 WooTee’s, whilst the 2 Developer Subscriptions will go to two tweets that we deem to be the most creative! (The most creative tweets would most likely include both the words “twins” and “lollipops”… Just sayin’…)

Get it? Remember that ultimately this campaign is about raising funds & awareness that will benefit the fight against breast cancer. So keep things clean & respect that people have lost loved ones to this horrible disease.

When we first decided that we wanted to support International Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we approached Veerle Pieters (who we had previously worked with on Abstract) to design a theme that would not only celebrate women, but also support our own awareness campaign during October. And so F01.01 has been born…

F01.01 - Homepage

F01.01 - Inner Page

From the above screenshots, you’ll see that the design is perfectly suited for all our girly personal bloggers out there, as it sports a pixel-perfect (and custom) illustration in Veerle’s signature style. But beyond the obvious awesomeness of that illustration, the whole design carries a sophistication that you would only experience in designs created by designers of Veerle’s quality; it definitely looks like every piece of text, every link and every button has been hand-crafted to perfection to make F01.01 one of our most stylish themes to date.

If at this stage, you’re wondering how the girly illustration will relate to your own personal branding, we’ve devised two possible plans at this early stage:

• We will be making it easy for you to simply exclude the illustration from your design and thus only use the rest of this amazing design; or
• We hope to work with other illustrators to customize the illustration enough to be representative of more women (hair colour, ethnicity etc.) with a few more colour style options in terms of clothing.

And in terms of the guys, we haven’t forgotten you either… Whilst the focus of the theme is definitely on enhancing our “We Love Boobs” campaign, Veerle has also created F01.01’s sibling aptly titled M01.01…

M01.01 - Homepage

M01.01 - Inner Page

So what do you think? Excited about this release (which will happen in the next week or two btw)? We’re really hoping that we can count on your support for both this theme, as part of our awareness campaign, so shoot with those suggestions and ideas which will hopefully make this another top-notch WooThemes release…

Part of the excitement however comes with a sense of humility, as we need to apologize for the downtime we have suffered in August & September (and even with this downtime, we managed to record two record months in terms of traffic; so thanks has got to go out to all of you for your patience!). The downtime has definitely been part of the reason for us switching to a new server and we’re hoping that you will love the speed & stability of the new server.

So we’d really like to thank Fused Network for bringing us here, as they’ve been a vital cog in our journey up until this point. There is no doubt they are a top-notch hosting provider and they remain highly recommended to our users. Part of our problem was the fact that we were in completely different time zones and although support was fast and efficient there was still times when we needed support at 3am state side.

As for RSAWeb… they are a South African based hosting company, with servers both locally and in the US. The huge advantage is that we know these guys personally and can pick up the phone to speak to them whenever we want. We’ve been impressed by their ideas in terms of optimizing our server and whilst there are definitely still a few kinks to be worked out, we’re sure that within a week or so, we’ll be rocking a super-optimized server. We also plan on working with RSAWeb on some new web hosting packages that will integrate seamlessly with your WooThemes account. Whilst there is currently no timeline on this, we hope to make this available early 2010.

So again – thanks for all the patience and support during the last couple of months. We do however hope that downtime is something of the past now and that your experience on WooThemes going forward will include super-fast browsing!

Affiliate banner ads now available

We’re starting October with a bang and you’ll see the themes that we release this month will have even more of a wow factor. So we hope you are all ready?

Since October is the international breast cancer awareness month, we’ve decided to pinkify WooThemes a little in the aid of creating more awareness around this terrible disease. You can find all the information about our promotional campaign over here.

This is only the start of the campaign and we’ve got a few things planned throughout the month to really make it a fun, interactive, but ultimately a worthy experience for all involved. So we hope we can count on your support to make it a truly smashing month?

Rock Out with Rockstar!

5 weeks ago we asked you whether you wanted this on WooThemes and after 73% of you begged us, we’ve made Rockstar available for download.

This is the slightly tweaked design that I previously used on my blog and since the feedback on the design has always been pretty good; I really didn’t want the design to go to waste. So we’ve spent a bit of time to bring it up to WooThemes-quality (since when I code for myself, I include only the absolute necessities) and it is now rocking out with the latest version of the WooFramework.

You’ll also note that the demo includes examples of posts with both images and videos, so you’d be able to replicate my videoblogging efforts if you were so inclined.

Overall though, I think (as well as our beta-testers – that have had a play around with Rockstar – tend to agree) Rockstar is a great, free alternative if you’re looking to spice up your personal blog a little. It’s nothing fancy, but gets the job done stylishly enough to warrant a little play, don’t you think?

Check out the demo or download your free copy over here.

Behind The Scenes: SVN & Development from WooThemes on Vimeo.