Mimbo Pro 4 Released – and a Change in Philosophy

So – Mimbo Pro 4 has now been released.

This version brings with it a lot of changes, but before explaining the improvements I wanted to explain a change in our philosophy as well.

When Darren and I first created Mimbo Pro and Pro Theme Design we wanted to build something amazing. We were one of the first theme shops and we were forging a new path – everything we did was new to WordPress – and so we wanted to impress people as much as possible. Because of this we built things like contact forms as part of the templates, TimThumb for resizing images, child themes for changing colours, custom widgets to add extra stuff to your blog. All sorts of things – and we thought this was great.

At the time it was, but over time we have come to realise that actually – the part people are paying for is the theme itself. These extras can be introduced through plugins and extensions. And these plugins often work better than our custom code does. And so, recently, we have been deleting stuff.

It’s liberating.

Removing old stuff feels great. It improves the theme no end, making it slick and streamlined once more. What’s more it allows us to concentrate on perfecting what is available in the core theme – without having to worry about all the extra fluff.

If a you want one of the features we have removed, then you can download one of the hundreds of free plugins from WordPress.org. Sure – it’s a bit more work – but with WordPress built in auto updater and plugin searcher it just makes sense to make use of the massive community around the product and not try to reinvent the wheel.

Again – doing this allows us to focus on improving the things that plugins can’t change, and allows us to focus on the core theme making that as awesome as possible.

And so on to Mimbo Pro 4.

You can see many of the new features and improvements in the video below.

The functionality I am most proud of is the flexibility of the theme. Despite removing loads of old elements – and slimming the theme control panel down to just 4 different options – I would say it’s more flexible than it’s even been.

Combining the new colour scheme editor and the flexible sidebar options – you can get exactly the layout you want with Mimbo Pro 4.