Announcing YOOtheme Pro 2.0
We have been a bit quiet lately, but today we are excited to announce YOOtheme Pro 2.0! We have been working on it over the last 10 months, and finally we are on the home stretch to bring you its most anticipated features: dynamic content and the template builder.
Dynamic Content
With the YOOtheme Pro builder you can already create single pages and posts with static content. Currently, the only dynamic content you can load into your layouts are Joomla modules and positions and WordPress widgets and areas respectively. YOOtheme Pro 2.0 will change that completely. It will allow you to load dynamic content into any element from the element library and not only from the post itself, but also from any other content source in WordPress or Joomla. And with the new template builder you can create site-wide templates for categories and their items. This means you will be able to build complex catalog- and magazine-like websites and manage the content in WordPress or Joomla without even using the builder.
Here are three quick examples of what you will be able to do with YOOtheme Pro 2.0. First, you can add custom fields to a page and load them into the builder layout. This means content editors can fill out the fields in Joomla article or WordPress page itself. Second, you can load content from different sources into your layouts. For example, you can show the latest posts in a slideshow, slider or grid like you can do with Widgetkit. And third, you can use the power of the YOOtheme builder to create templates for the blog and its single posts including all important functionalities like the pagination and comments. This will not be limited to the blog. You will also be able to template other taxonomies and post types or for example our ZOO extension.
And that's not all. YOOtheme Pro 2.0 will also come with a brand new refactored framework, and so much more. We are really excited about it!
Theme Packages
Our designers are already working on five new theme packages which will show the power of YOOtheme Pro 2.0. Apart from the blog, the demo websites will have an additional catalog with a real category structure filled with about a hundred items. We are really looking forward to sharing these new theme packages with you. To make up for the pause of new theme packages till YOOtheme Pro 2.0 is released, we will release all five of them shortly one after another. So you will still have the usual amount of theme packages a year.
Roadmap
We plan to start with the beta phase in December and to have a stable release in January – all fingers crossed! 🤞 We hope you are as excited as we are about YOOtheme Pro 2.0. Let us know what you think in the comments below.
Update (24 January)
The first phase of beta releases is completed. It introduced the new YOOtheme Pro framework, and thanks to your feedback, we ironed out all the issues. Today the second phase started with Beta 6 which introduces smaller layout features needed for the upcoming themes and important bug fixes. We are finishing up the dynamic content feature, but there are still some improvements which need to be added. We are now looking at a slightly delayed release in mid February.
Update (28 February)
Finally, YOOtheme Pro 2.0 for Joomla is ready to be released! We are now wrapping up the documentation and media material. We just merged 1155 commits and as of now, the third and last beta phase started with Beta 9 which includes the dynamic content feature. The Joomla stable release is scheduled for next week and will be followed by five theme package releases on a weekly basis. The implementation of the latest changes for WordPress will take approximately two weeks. YOOtheme Pro support for ZOO is coupled with the ZOO 4 release which will be our next focus. Thank you so much for your patience ❤️ We hope you are as excited as we are!
Update (5 March)
We have a final release date! YOOtheme Pro 2.0 for Joomla is coming 15:00 CET next Tuesday. You can watch the countdown on our home page ⏳🏁 It also looks like the WordPress beta will be ready next week! So that's the last update for this post, which, by the way, has broken the comments record from our Mega template. See you next week for the release 🥳
