At its most basic, pretend that you’re building your theme just like you would a new house, but in this case you’re hiring someone else to lay the foundation for you. Without a good solid foundation, it doesn’t matter how well you construct the frame or paint the walls, that house will fall down eventually. This is exactly what a good starter theme is, it’s the foundation, with just about everything you need to start a good theme.

When starting with a starting theme, the first thing you’ll need to do is change the name of the theme’s directory, since you don’t want to overwrite it accidentally, then make sure that you have adjusted all of the references to the directory in the theme’s files. After that, start having fun! Unlike building a house, you can undo your mistakes, and the best way to learn how to develop themes is to just get to work and start making mistakes.

So, have fun with your new starter theme, and if you build something awesome from a starter theme like _s, let us know!

We have another great theme in the works, and I am exciting to give everyone a sneak peek. Gleam will be fun, exciting and flashy. Boasting some awesome CSS and jQuery effects and smooth ajax loading, Gleam will surely treat your visitors to a cool experience. I hope that you like the preview! Let us know what you think.

Black Lines is a very simple WordPress theme with two columns with black and white design.

Gray Storm is a theme with a Flash header.

Let’s Roll is a white theme for gambling blog owners.

Light Blue Flowers is a simple theme with two columns and a light blue design.

MxS2 is a theme in black and white.

Orange and Black is a modern theme with a decent orange and black design.

Rumput Hijau is a clean theme with microformats structure, breadcrumbs, and 2 different layouts.

True is minimal, simple, crisp, clean, bright, friendly, and professional.

So this tutorial will guide you through a quick and simple way to stop a theme being ‘responsive’.

No more media queries

The responsive design works by only serving the layout (sidebars, columns etc) to browsers within which it will fit. This is done using a media query.

So the first step is to remove that code from the layout stylesheet.

Open css/layout.css and find the opening media query which the entire stylesheet is wrapped within. It should look something like this;

@media only screen and (min-width: 768px) {

Comment this out using css comments like so;

/* @media only screen and (min-width: 768px) { */

You could just delete it if you’d prefer, but by commenting it out you can easily add the responsive design back at a later date. Once you’ve commented out the opening of the media query, scroll right to the bottom of the file and comment out (or delete) the closing curly brace too.

/* } */

But I’m using a child theme!

If you want to make these changes upgrade safe (in a child theme) you will need to do the following;

1. Copy and paste css/layout.css from the parent theme to css/layout.css in your child theme
2. Redefine the woo_load_frontend_css() function to look at the child theme rather than the parent by adding the following to your child themes functions.php file;

   function woo_load_frontend_css () {
   		wp_register_style( 'woo-layout', get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/css/layout.css' );
   
   		wp_enqueue_style( 'woo-layout' );
   } // End woo_load_frontend_css()
   

3. Perform the steps outlined above to remove the media query from the layout.css file inside your child theme

Remove the mobile viewport scale meta tag

The vital piece of HTML in responsive design is the viewport scale meta tag. This tells all devices to set the site in a scale of 1.0. IE 1 pixel = 1 pixel. If the design isn’t responsive this isn’t necessary and we will want the user to be able to zoom in and scroll around.

To remove this meta tag, add the following to your theme (or child themes) functions.php;

remove_action( 'wp_head', 'woo_load_responsive_meta_tags', 10 );

That didn’t work!

In some of our first responsive themes, this meta tag is added directly to header.php, so you will just need to open the file, find it and remove it (or comment it out).

Here’s the tag you will be looking for;

<meta content="initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=no" name="viewport"/>

That’s it! – Your web site will now appear in the ‘traditional’ way on mobile devices.

Something to consider

Some of our themes fix the main navigation to the top of the browser window. This is then modified on mobile devices to deliver a different menu system. If you remove the responsive design in one of these themes then the main navigation will continue to be fixed and take up a big chunk of your screen real estate. The solution to this issue is one line of CSS, but that line will differ from theme to theme, so just post on the forum if you get stuck.

WooCommerce continues to grow from strength to strength with it now averaging over 1,000 downloads a day and reaching the top spot for the search term “ecommerce” on the WordPress plugin repository.

Designed in-house by Jay Koster, “Sentient” is our latest WooCommerce powered shopfront theme for serious online sellers. It’s unique selling point is it’s jQuery Masonry plugin usage. Products are cleverly lined up bricks-and-mortar fashion and there’s an option to make all shop pages true-full-width to take advantage of this nifty feature. That coupled with it’s device agnostic design – meaning whether you’re viewing the theme on your desktop, your tablet or your smartphone, it responds and adapts delivering an optimised design for that device.

Different sized products on the homepage, and more product details when hovering.

Sentient loves wide browsers thanks to JMasonry.

The homepage is full of options. Choose whether to display content from a recent blog post or page, how many recent, featured or best selling products to showcase and in which format, grid or slider. On top of that there’s a handy widgetised region and a simple call to action beneath the products inviting your users into the main shop section of your online store.

Careful attention has been given to page templates. See the slick, professional checkout page above.

Of course all the WooCommerce extensions are compatible with Sentient, as are all our WooCommerce themes. That means even more power and functionality is available at your fingertips to take your storefront to the next level.

Unique Features

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  Responsive design

  Possibly the best feature of Sentient is it’s device agnostic design. That means whether you’re viewing the theme on your desktop, your tablet or your smartphone, it responds and adapts delivering an optimised design for that device.

• 
  

  Masonry

  We’ve been fans of the jQuery Masonry plugin for some time, and with WooCommerce the perfect opportunity arose to smartly implement it. Products are cleverly lined up bricks-and-mortar fashion and there’s an option to make all shop pages true-full-width to take advantage of this nifty feature.

• 
  

  WooCommerce Goodness

  As you’d expect, Sentient makes full use of all of WooCommerce features. We’ve painstakingly married theme and plugin to provide a seamless front-end experience. Every single one of WooCommerce widgets has been lovingly styled to match the beautiful design, as has each key component of the plugin such as the product categories, product descriptions, cart, checkout and user account sections. Read all about the benefits of WooCommerce here.

• 
  

  Customisability

  There are several colour schemes built into Sentient ensuring there is a look to match your brand identity.

• 
  

  Custom Homepage

  The homepage is full of options. Choose whether to display content from a recent blog post or page, how many recent, featured or best selling products to showcase and in which format, grid or slider. On top of that there’s a handy widgetised region and a simple call to action beneath the products inviting your users into the main shop section of your online store.

• 
  

  Shortcodes

  We’ve included two custom shortcodes in Sentient. A sticky note which you can use to highlight a message on your site and a sale banner to notify users when you’re running special offers.

Dynamic Registration Links automatically changes your content links for unregistered users by dynamically changing the link target.

Updated plugins

BackWPup allows you to backup your WordPress database, files, and more.

FoxyPress is a custom plugin made to integrate FoxyCart e-commerce functionality into your WordPress website.

Simple Facebook Connect is a framework and series of sub-systems that let you add any sort of Facebook functionality you like to a WordPress blog.

Slick Social Share Buttons allows you to add Facebook, Twitter, Google +1, Digg, Google Buzz, Linkedin, and Stumbledupon social media buttons in a floating or slide out tab.

WP Social Blogroll adds a social blogroll to your blog.

WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile devices.

AzSimple is a clean and simple wordpress theme without many graphic effects, shadows or gradients, but yet beautiful.

Ever is a mix of textures and color tones that easily lends itself to professional or business blogs or websites.

JGD BizElite is ideal for a small business websites or blogs and is packed with options.

_s is a complete starter theme designed to be used as a template for your next great theme, or as described a “1,000 hour head start.”

Part of our 2012 strategy here at Woo is to simplify and re-focus, and one way that we want to do that is by retiring older themes. The reasoning behind this is that we feel we’ve managed to replace them with newer themes that boast more functionality / features and better designs, and also because they only make up a tiny part of our overall sales.

So from beginning of March, we’ll be retiring these 26 themes:

• VibrantCMS
• Mortar
• NewsPress
• Royalle
• Suit and Tie
• Exposure
• Newsport
• f0101
• Antisocial
• Paper Cut
• Cinch
• Productum
• THiCK
• Gotham News
• SophisticatedFolio
• myweblog
• Slanted
• Ambience
• Big Easy
• Unite
• Groovy Blog
• ProudFolio
• Geometric
• Fresh Folio
• Foreword Thinking
• Groovy Photo

Support

We’ll continue to support these themes for a limited time period in our forums after we retire them, so current users of these themes can continue using them if they want. But we also would like to give those users a chance to upgrade to a new theme at a discounted price, so if you own one of these themes and you were thinking of upgrading, be sure to make use of the coupon code below.

It’s been only 2 weeks since the release of WooCommerce 1.4 and our download stats have clocked over 65,000. We are all for keeping this momentum powering WooCommerce forward and that is why we are releasing another pile of powerful extensions today. What is important to note is that these aren’t payment gateway extensions either, all catering for different requests by the community!

Aweber Newsletter Subscription

The AWeber Newsletter Subscriptions plugin for WooCommerce gives you the abillity to easily integrate your WooCommerce site with your AWeber powered newsletters. Customise your checkout to include a subscribe option, or place the AWeber Web Forms widget in any widgitised area on your site to allow for easy customer subscription from any page. The WooCommerce AWeber Newsletter Subscriptions plugin also include a dashboard widget for displaying your subscriber statistics where it matters, on your WooCommerce dashboard.

Aweber WooCommerce settings

Developed by Gerhard Potgieter

Catalog Visibility Options

Transform WooCommerce into an online catalog by stripping out the checkout facilities.

Wait, what? Remove eCommerce functionality? It may sound strange but when you think about it, if you take out the cart, checkout process and ‘buy now’ buttons, WooCommerce is actually the perfect platform upon which to showcase a catalog of products which aren’t currently for sale online. The added beauty of this solution is that when you do want to start selling, you can do so with the flick of a switch.

Remove prices and checkout facilities from WooCommerce

But this extension does much more than that. Rather than just taking the entire store offline, you also have the option restrict it to specific users levels.

You can also configure messages to replace the price / add to cart button components or just remove them completely.

Developed by Lucas Stark

Facebook Tab

I really like this extension that integrates with Facebook to create a tab on the left hand side of your page where customers can view your products and add them to their cart all from within Facebook. They are then taken to your site to complete their order. Seamless integration with the biggest social network out there! You can view a demo of this extension on our very own Facebook page!

WooCommerce on your Facebook page. Awesome sauce.

Developed by dtbaker

Notifications Pro

Consider a store with multiple suppliers, several drop-ship locations or multiple store managers, Notifications Pro allows you to set any number of general notifications or inventory control notifications to manage this in the simplest way possible.

Adding custom notifications is easy.

Perhaps you have a store with multiple suppliers. Simply set each of the suppliers a separate inventory notification – when the stock level reaches the defined quantity, Notifications Pro sends an email advising each of the suppliers of the low stock level – simple! You can even choose which products they receive a notification for.

Developed by Luke Carbis

Currency Converter Widget

A hugely requested feature that Mike has tried to cater for, factoring in the limitations of payment gateways. The widget makes full use of money.js and the Open Source Exchange Rates API allowing it to dynamically grab the latest exchange rates, and substitute displayed prices on the fly. All prices formatted by WooCommerce are updated, even totals. Checkout is still done using your store’s base currency, but the converted price is also stored for your reference.

As an added bonus, when a users checks out, the converted total will also be stored in the order so you know what price they saw.

Developed in-house by Mike Jolley

Export to .csv

With this extension you can export your customers or orders (from a date range) to a .csv file with the click of a button!

Export orders and customers to .csv

Developed by Ilari Mäkelä

Dynamic Pricing Updated

The Dynamic Pricing extension released last week has also been updated with a nice new feature. It now includes an additional mode of discounting, as well as additional options for category based discounts.   The new mode of discounting is Totals Pricing, allowing you to configure discounts based on the sub-total in the cart.   This new mode is great if you want to create a discount, such as purchase $100 or more of goods and receive a %10 discount.

The additional advanced category pricing options allow you to configure how the category quantities are calculated.   We now support calculating the category quantity totals based on individual cart line items, not just the entire sum of the category in the cart.  This is useful if you want to apply product level discounts to an entire category, but require the discount only be applied to the cart items which meet the quantities you configure.   This option makes it more efficient to apply an Advanced Product Pricing type rule en-mass to all products in a specific category.