At LightSpeed we have a long relationship with premium WordPress theme provider WooThemes. We’ve found that their themes offer great functionality and the opportunity to build websites that conform to our exacting standards and the needs of our various clients.
Of all the themes on offer by WooThemes, the Canvas theme stands head and shoulders above the rest as the flagship theme. Canvas was released in March 2010 and we started developing with it straight away. Ever since we’ve been using it as the basis for most of our websites, including most recently Ideas Mag, Home Mag, Thunda Celeb News and FairLady Testhouse.
Canvas improvements
The team at WooThemes are constantly updating and improving the Canvas theme, and 2011 saw the following changes:
- The release of Canvas V4
- The release of a Canvas child Theme for BuddyPress
- The release of a portfolio module (This included the testimonials/feedback functionality. These features have proven easy to extend to other areas of Canvas using filters and actions, as we did for the gallery post format on Sports Illustrated)
- The release of an eCommerce Canvas child theme for their newly launched WooCommerce plugin
- Canvas became fully multilingual, by being made compatible with the WPMU plugin
Why do we love this theme?
By default Canvas is very plain, with web standard fonts, navigation menu, main content area, sidebar, and a footer with areas for widgets. This can be misleading, as once it has been activated, a new collapsible menu is added in the WordPress admin section, that transforms canvas into the most functional WordPress theme available.
This Canvas Menu provides access to all Canvas features and options.
Theme Options
The Theme options section provides a vast array of adjustable styling elements that provide even more freedom once you drill down on the individual sections:
Canvas Theme Options
Widget Styling options drill down
The extensive theme options allows you to style your blog/website in any way that you want, with settings covering everything from layout, typography, Header-, post-, widget and footer styling, as well as the choice between predefined templates for Magazine and Business site layouts. It’s really easy to add your own using the function provided for in canvas
Hook Manager
Hook Manager allows us to insert HTML, Javascript or WP shortcodes at designated parts of the page templates. This makes additions to code rather easy, and the Canvas theme has an impressive list of hooks that allow users to modify areas of the WordPress theme with short snippets of code. The user friendly interface of the Hook Manager allows you to enter your code in the text fields provided.
For example, we could insert a search bar into the header by adding it to the ‘woo-header-inside’ hook or place a Facebook ‘Like’ box and easily style or position it from there, without having to sift through code, or having to write a custom function.
This allows users to customize the way Canvas looks and functions without editing any of the templates
Layout Manager
In the theme options, the Canvas Layout options allows you to set the general site width and layout. Canvas comes with 6 pre-defined layouts and additional layout options for the Footer widget areas.
The new Layout manager gives you even more control by allowing you to freely set the width of your content and sidebar areas, by simply dragging the column divider to your liking.
On the individual post or page level, Canvas gives you even more flexibility by allowing you to set a specific layout for the post, overriding the default site layout.
Meta Manager
The Meta Manager is similar to the Hook Manager, except it applies only to the post meta on posts.
Post meta is the meta data relating to a post, such as author, date publisher, category etc.
You can now easily customize what you would like to display above and below post content, and the order in which it will display using text, HTML and WP shortcodes. There is a handy short code reference below the input fields in the meta manager which lets you display commonly used content such as a post’s categories, tags, date, time, author.
On Sports Illustrated we used the Meta Manager to replicate the meta from the Crisp theme.
Sidebar Manager
The Sidebar Manager allows you to create custom sidebars for specific sections of your site.
Once the custom sidebar has been created, it can be selected from the Widgets page.
Custom Sidebars can be created for:
- Individual pages
- Page templates
- Categories
- Post tags
- Template hierarchy (i.e. for example for single posts or for search results)
- Custom post types
- Post type archives
Canvas Features list
The Canvas theme offer a wide range of features unique to this theme:
- Customize the style and typography of every element in the design
- The ability to use your own images in the design
- Google font support
- Magazine and business page templates
- A revamped templating engine. (While a bit confusing at first, this is one of the best parts of Canvas, and really flexible)
- Manager modules for “Layout, Hooks, and Meta”
- Tumblog functionality
- Shortcodes
- It’s child theme friendly. (By this we mean that it has loads of hooks and filters that are key for creating unobtrusive child themes. It also has a fair amount of functions that are ‘pluggable’ or wrapped in a conditional that checks if it’s been declared already)
- Now includes LightBox. (Lightbox is the preferred way to display images and video, and once our clients see it, they always want it on their site)
On top of this Canvas also supports all the usual features of the WooFramework:
- Sidebar Manager
- Custom Navigation
- Backened Theme options
- Built in SEO options
- Cross browser compatibility
- Localised for translations
- Custom Page templates
Canvas Support
To help developers understand the full power of Canvas and the extent to which it can be customized WooThemes has published a Canvas How To section.
They’ve also published some interesting Case Studies on how Canvas was used in the development of various websites:
Conclusion
WooThemes Canvas theme offers incomparable functionality and opportunities for customization. It’s easy to work with, has excellent support and continues to get better with every new release. It’s easy to see why we choose it as the basis for most of our projects.
Contact us today for more information on how LightSpeed can use the Canvas theme to provide you with the best WordPress website available and take your business to the next level.
Awesome write up and have to agree with you Canvas is amazing. It was the first theme to make us move away from Thesis another great theme. Now we build all our sites and client sites on Canvas and use the Woothemes premium club membership exclusively.
Thx Tj. We’re glad you share our enthusiasm for Canvas!
New to WordPress, Canvas was the first theme I bought. It works out of the box, which for a newbie is very good news. Very flexible and the support is good. Oh, and I almost forgot, it is a South African venture. Viva Canvas Viva.