If you are one of our Advanced Newspaper theme users, tune yourself in for some exciting news.

Earlier this year, we sat down and scratched our brains to find a solution to a tricky premise ““ whether to release new WordPress themes – or – to improve the functionality of our previous themes. In the end, it turned out to be a tough balancing act especially since we had great ideas and an impressive line-up of WP themes for 2010 release. Moreover, we are planning to release Gabfire V3, a couple of new CMS themes including a travel magazine concept and some more surprises. Yes! We always love surprising our beloved customers with updates, new features, enhancements to existing themes, and much more.

This time around, we are excited to announce the release of Advanced Newspaper v1.3, which includes the following enhancements:

1. Extended Theme settings page to make customization and configuration easier
2. Multi-level dropdown navigation
3. Localization (gettext) support
4. Category-based ads – yes, you read that correctly. Category-based ad capabilities
5. Improved search engine optimization
6. Enhanced site features

Wait! There’s more…

Since our customers have given us such great feedback, we have implemented some new features based on your suggestions. For example, to highlight the latest posts on your site, we have decided to display a larger image for the latest post in the category / archive page, while the rest of entries are depicted with smaller thumbnails. And if that was not enough, we implemented a new Author page wherein one could find articles by a specific author including their bio and picture. Additionally, videos can now be displayed on both the featured slider and media slider located on the home page.

Given all these wonderful updates to Advanced Newspaper, we have decided to make it the official framework to build/update our other WordPress themes. Therefore, you can expect the team will be releasing updates to existing themes and launching new themes throughout 2010.

As always, we’ll continue to bring you the best themes and service possible.  Thanks to all our supporters and customers for their loyalty and feedback. It looks like 2010 is off to a terrific start!