I just couldn’t wait. I needed to tweak and play and test drive and kick tires. But I couldn’t stand it: I needed to be on WOO Canvas.
It was about a year since I switched to a ThemeForest theme, but WOO was going crazy with new themes in the WordPress theme world and WOO Canvas in particular. The more I got under the hood, the more powerful features I saw. I had hoped that all WOO themes would have the same admin panel with the same options, but I realized they don’t: Canvas really does offer quite a bit more than other themes.
There are just a few features that make it worth the switch right off the bat. Take the Layout Manager. Not only can I quickly and painlessly choose from different layout widths (940, 960, etc.), but I can even adjust the body/content and sidebar widths individually. If you know anything about CSS you know this can be a can of (gooey) worms.
Layout Manager
White Label Branding
I’m not going to get into all of the details, but Canvas makes it easy to use your own logo and images for otherwise WOO or WordPress collateral. The login screen, the tiny icon in the WP admin sidebar, even the WOO admin panel logo. You can brand that all your own. Wow WOO, really? Awesome.
Built-In Layouts
It’s not just right sidebar or left sidebar, it’s the Magazine Layout, the Business Layout (with panorama slider), the Blog Layout and then shortcodes to spruce any of those up.
Fonts and More (Google) Fonts
Did I mention Google Web Fonts? So not only can you set the font for your Heading 1, your Widget Heading, or your nav bar text, but you can choose, on the fly, no installing, no Javascript coding, from hundreds of Google Web Fonts. Done, bam, wham, thank you Sam.
Portfolio
I need to stop! But there are just so many features! The portfolio in itself is fantastic. Tricked-out features with categories of portfolio items and your visitor is seeing the variety of your portfolio collection on one Ajax-speedy-loading page. All built in, all ready to go. Just add images.
Tumblog functionality with iPhone App publishing!
Canvas even has features I’m not familiar with. I know kinda what Tumblog is (something between Twitter and a Blog), but if you know and care, Canvas has that built in too. And then iPhone publishing? Bring it on.
WOO Commerce
Almost forgot. I’ve been wanting to put some A La Carte items up for sale on my site (services we provide) and was thinking of Gravity Forms or maybe just a straight PayPal link. But no, why bother. WOO Commerce is a plugin that rocks the socks off of other WP e-commerce plugins and then it integrates seamlessly with the Canvas framework. E-Commerce? Done.
I’m going to stop now. I’m going to keep tweaking Canvas, playing around, maxing it out, and seeing how far it can take me. I’ve already used Canvas for several projects and so far, so great. Enjoy the power.
