Dear Woothemes Member,

We've got a couple of very important announcements for you, so we're hoping to steal 2 minutes of your time to keep you up-to-date on a few new things...

Recent TimThumb Security Issue

TimThumb (or thumb.php as you know it) - the open-source script we use in all of our themes to do dynamic image resizing - recently uncovered a critical security flaw in the script. This flaw is vulnerable to a potential hacker that could gain access to your server. This affects all of our existing themes and thus everyone that are currently using our themes.

Luckily we've moved very quickly and the script authors (along with the greater WordPress community) released an update which fixes this vulnerability. We have released updates to all of our themes and we highly recommend that you follow this guide and the steps set out in that to secure your theme / website.

Whilst this is a major security flaw, it should be treated in the same way as previous security issues with WordPress core. Most of the time when WordPress releases a major new version (i.e. 3.2), they will follow it up with an incremental release (i.e. 3.2.1) to fix security vulnerabilities. No need to panic thus, but you should act swiftly as we've described here.

If you have any questions, please e-mail us ASAP and we'd be happy to assist you in this regard.

NOTE: We recently worked with WordPress lead developer, Mark Jaquith, who did a full security audit of the WooFramework and we've implemented a couple of fixes in recent weeks. So beyond the above vulnerability, you can rest assured that your themes are very secure. More info here.

New Theme: Announcement

We couldn't just be "serious" and "business-like" in this e-mail, could we? :) The rainbow on the other side of this "storm" is the fact that we've just released our brand new theme Announcement.

Announcement is a niche theme that is perfect for the most special announcements in your life. Use any of our preset homepage templates to announce your wedding, the birth of a new baby, the graduation of your eldest or the launch of your new business. The possibilities are endless. :)

View our full release post for Announcement here.

Some Planned Downtime Next Week

Lastly - and this should really make you both curious & excited - we're planning a big roll-out across the whole of WooThemes on Monday (22 August) next week.

To get this done, we'll be turning the server off and putting it into maintenance mode at approximately 7:00 GMT+2. We're likely to have the server in maintenance mode for about 4 - 6 hours. This will allow us to roll out the new stuff efficiently and without any hiccups (*touches wood*).

During this time, please feel free to reach us via e-mail should you require urgent help or have any questions.

We're very sorry about any inconvenience that this downtime may cause. We promise though that the awesome new stuff will definitely make up for that once we go live. :)