Our Development Cycle & Release Schedule

If you’re an outsider, our development cycle – and especially our release schedule – may seem completely random at the best of times. This is probably compounded by us showing you teasers of upcoming themes and then releasing other themes before those we have showed (which frustrates you, since you want those awesome concepts to be released like yesterday, right?).

In actuality though, our development cycle and release schedule is far from being random; it’s just very, very agile & flexible. So whilst we always have an idea about which themes we’ll be releasing next, we’re more than happy to chop-change that according to the “outside” demands. So here’s a little run-through of our development process…

#1: Getting the design (PSD)

This is probably the most “volatile” part of the process, because it’s always prone to designer’s block. The designs that we come up with in-house have no specific schedule and we probably do these based on momentary inspiration, instead of prudent planning. But once we have a new design that we all like, we definitely give these preference over others in the rest of the development process.

For the designs that we’re commissioning from our awesome collaborative designers, we’re obviously exposed to their schedules and creative process (which will be different to ours). So we can’t necessarily say that designer X will finish a new design by date Y and we can release on date Z.

During this stage, we then have to be very flexible in terms of which theme goes into the next phase of development when. This is also why we always prefer to have 4 / 5 designs in the backlog, as it gives us greater freedom in deciding which themes to release when.

#2: The WooFramework (HTML / CSS + Basic WP)

The next step is coding the design into the WooFramework, which is essentially just HTML, CSS and some basic WordPress PHP code on top of our core functions. During this stage, we’ve normally got a better idea about which themes we’re releasing when, since the themes are normally about a day or two’s work away from being released at this point.

Along with having 4 / 5 designs in our backlog, we’ll also normally have 2 / 3 themes that’s been coded into the WooFramework already. Since we’re not all involved in every step of the development process, we thus get to jump in at random and wrap up themes as we like.

#3: WordPress Magic & Wrap-up

This is where we develop the unique (PHP) functionality associated with a specific theme, along with the theme options for that theme. Generally this is the phase we procrastinate on most, since the work isn’t generic anymore, but once this is done obviously, the theme is basically set for release.

The only things left to do then, is to tie up all the loose ends, do the alternative colour schemes along with user testing and squashing a few initial bugs.

#4: The Release Schedule

The last thing on the list is to decide when to release the themes and here things get a little trickier. We have an ever-changing Writeboard (on our Basecamp setup) with the release schedule for our themes for the next 3 / 4 months. This list is totally influenced by where the different themes are in the development process, along with our decision in terms of mixing / matching the release of different types of themes.

Our decisions here are also influenced by your responses to the teasers we’re posting, as that gives us a good idea of which themes will sell better (and obviously we want to get those out the door first).

So all-in-all our decisions & release schedules are influenced by a bunch of different things, which we can’t necessarily control and therefore we need to be totally flexible in terms of the themes we’re releasing. This obviously doesn’t make things easier on you, but at least it explains our public non-committal to specific release dates for specific themes.

Things making a little more sense now?