Magnus Jepson » busy bee

WooTube – A Basic WordPress Video Theme

Magnus — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:06:04 +0000

After the success of Busy Bee, it was time to focus on a more niche style theme, and since we still didn’t have a video theme in our WooThemes arsenal, I thought it was about time.

WooTube is my take on how a basic video theme should be, basic in the sense that it doesn’t have any fancy homepage with images to link to your videos. It’s just a no thrills video post browser. You add your video embed code, put it in a category, add some tags and your set. It shouldn’t be any harder than that.

The design is a reflection of my past themes and also my personal blog, with subtle gradients, arial/georgia font usage and my (self proclaimed) signature style logo with cute icon (which you can pickup here). Some might say it looks to much like Busy Bee, but I only see that as a positive remark, since the theme functionality is totally different from BB, and truth of the matter is that BB is very popular.

The nice jQuery effect in the slider was done by the awesome Foxinni who works at Radiiate (run by Adii). We’ll hopefully be seeing a lot more stuff by him in the coming year, as he is really much quicker than me on anything that has to do with javascript.

So what do you think of this latest outing? Is there anything that is cool or that you think is missing? Does it serve it’s purpose or is it a MUST with a custom homepage?

Busy Bee – Now Available!

Magnus — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 08:12:02 +0000

It’s been a few weeks since I first sat down to doodle up something in Photoshop and walked away with a brand new theme concept. During that time I’ve been on holiday in Florida playing some golf and visiting my sister. I was supposed to be travelling to South Africa last friday, but on the last day of my stay in the US, I woke up feeling dizzy and almost fell over on my way to the bathroom. Turns out that it was case of vertigo, which led to cancelling my trip to SA, where I would have been caddying on the European Tour and visiting Adii in Cape Town. My balance is almost back to normal, and I don’t look like Ozzy Osbourne when I walk anymore.

Anyways, the cancellation gave me some extra time to finish up Busy Bee, and it is now available over at WooThemes. According to the feedback I’ve gotten on my blog and on the official release post, it looks like the design is to most people’s liking, which I’m really thankful for. I tried to replicate all the things that has made Fresh News the most popular theme on WooThemes by far, so that is why I didn’t try to do anything experimental with this, but rather improve on both the design and the features available in the theme.

Check out the demo and grab a copy if you like it!

I’ve been a Busy Bee

Magnus — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 07:45:34 +0000

On friday evening, I had a little time to myself, so instead of doing the normal stuff (tv, movies or misbehaving in town), I decided to start up Photoshop. I know that sounds incredibly geeky, and I won’t deny that it is… but I enjoyed the heck out of it

A couple of beers later and I had a new theme designed for WooThemes, and we’re planning on releasing it sometime in December. Let me know what you think!