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WooThemes does Commerce
16. Oct, 2008 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
For quite a while now, we’ve been considering expanding and diversifying our themes to other CMS platforms, with Expression Engine always being at the top of that wish list. During this time, we never seriously considered the popular ecommerce platform – Magento – until this great opportunity came along to work with Roy Andre over Ecommerce Extensions.
So as part of this experiment, we’ve worked with Roy Andre Tollefsen to port our Open Air template to a new template for Magento. Since we don’t know anything about Magento’s inner workings (our game is still WordPress), Ecommerce Extensions have taken care of all the development of the theme (preview here), and they’ll also be taking care of all the support, client admin etc. And if you notice that the price of the theme is considerably higher than our current themes, it’s because it’s more complex developing for Magento.
Suffice to say, that this is really new grounds for us and we’re simply experimenting with the possibilities that exist for us to port our work to popular CMS platforms (Joomla, Drupal, Expression Engine etc.). We do however hope that this experiment with Magento & Ecommerce Extensions pays dividends, as I’m sure a total ecommerce solution could be a valuable addition to some of our users. What do you think?
18 Responses to “WooThemes does Commerce”
16 October 2008 at 2:27 am #
Nice! You guys are definitely on a roll here
16 October 2008 at 2:29 am #
This is great news dudes!! Now we’re able to merge two different platforms and keep the same slick looks!:-)
Yeah!
16 October 2008 at 8:16 am #
This sounds great – as ‘newbies’ to Wordpress but designers/programmers of ecommerce sites this sounds like a perfect match.
We look forward to further news on this!!
16 October 2008 at 9:43 am #
Looks great guys. I’m interested though, are you leaning to other platforms because of the open source issues with WP or because you are looking to expand your market?
16 October 2008 at 10:09 am #
Just to clarify: this is not an integrated solution with Wordpress is it?
16 October 2008 at 10:50 am #
@Stu – This is really just an expansion. We’ve just felt that we have these HTML layouts laying around and if we could thus find the appropriate partners, we could increase our sales by casting a wider net targeted at more platforms. We will however always stay WordPress at the core and should we ever fully expand to other platform, it won’t carry the WooThemes brand name.
@Gregg – No, it’s not an integrated solution, but you could run Magento + WordPress on the same website. I also won’t be surprised to see an integration plugin developed, which will combine the poweres of WP & Magento on one server.
16 October 2008 at 12:04 pm #
Have you considered Instinct’s Ecommerce plugin for Wordpress as a way to offer an integrated solution?
16 October 2008 at 12:27 pm #
@Bob – Yes, we have actually been in contact with the Instinct guys and we might release a theme specifically for the plugin in future, but we’re finding it hard to schedule time to do all the things we really want to do!
Obviously with a partnership like this one, we don’t need to do the development, so it’s much easier to cut back on the development time considerably.
16 October 2008 at 1:05 pm #
This is a great step in the right direction. I’m not a member of the club but will be in the very near future, looking forward to the new design for small business in the previous blog post.
As for expression engine, I really like this cms, don’t get me wrong wordpress if fabulous but expression engine is just as solid and with the new version 2.0 coming out it will be even better.
I would love to learn about you guys creating an expressine engine theme club, from my research there are none. And there is a great market.
There are millions (not quite
, for Joomla, ugh! And none for expression engine.
Make It! LOL, Great Job Guys.
16 October 2008 at 9:03 pm #
@Adii – If you can provide us with the source files we can look at doing a WP e-Commerce version? (would everybody like that??)
17 October 2008 at 4:44 pm #
Hot damn! Awesome if you guys start making themes for Magento!
17 October 2008 at 9:35 pm #
Ohh, nice exciting stuff. Great to see OpenAir used for this too, lovely!
17 October 2008 at 11:59 pm #
yeah….would love to see Woo and WP e-commerce work together…I have the perfect site for this solution, but not being a programer…being a graphic designer, I have been too scared to jump in and figure it out myself….what a combo….please do it soon!!!!
18 October 2008 at 7:49 am #
i thought you guys making an ecommerce wordpress theme. but you guys movin to another platform with integration of wordpress.
Looks like a shaddy move, dunno but gut feeling says it would not come up that good, could be big time flop show i believe.
Lets see, wish you guys luck.
18 October 2008 at 9:39 am #
@John – I don’t really understand your reasoning behind this. We’re not doing anything to contradict what we’re doing on WooThemes on for WordPress. But Magento is a great platform and we just feel that offering the same quality designs on there, that we’d be expanding our business.
20 October 2008 at 1:48 am #
@ Adii Rockstar – Mate i said that because i believe you guys have become a good reliable brand of wordpress designs. People have great faith in your products. and switching to a different format, which is new in the market could cause you mess.
I really don’t bother, but just a great fan of your work, so expressed what i felt.
Good luck guys.
21 October 2008 at 5:40 pm #
Having just gone through the pains and loooong hours of customizing 2 of the existing ecommerce type wp plugins…. I THINK THIS IS A FANTASTIC HAPPENING!! btw…wasn’t there a magento for wp plugin this past summer being developed? I would much rather use WordPress admin over Magento’s any day.
28 October 2008 at 4:16 pm #
It would be great to port a few of your themes over to Realm Platform. At the moment we only offer custom designs to our clients, but we are often approached for a template site. This may be worthwhile opportunity.
Thanks.