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14. Jan, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes, WooThemes News
This definitely took us a while longer than we expected, but one of the biggest and most ambitious days in our history is finally here – we’re proud to announce the addition of ExpressionEngine themes to our collection. With that we hopefully welcome a whole lot of first time visitors to our site, and ExpressionEngine evangelists.
If you have been following us, you’d see that this is the first of the “bigger” things that we’re announcing this year and hence why we’re so excited & slightly nervous at the same time. ExpressionEngine is obviously a relative unknown to us, but for months now we’ve earmarked our expansion to this platform as a top priority. Today, months of hard work and extreme patience (whilst we waited for EE to roll out version 2.0) comes to fruition at last.
So to kickstart things, we’re releasing two paid EE themes – Coffee Break (our fastest selling theme in 2009) & Fresh News (our best-selling theme ever) – and one free theme in Bueno, which is fast becoming one of our most popular free releases.
To produce these themes, we teamed up with one of our friends & EE developer extraordinaire – Bjørn Børresen – who will be responsible for all the development & technical support work associated with our EE themes. And for those concerned: this means that our WordPress work and the capacity to release themes & new stuff for WP, won’t diminish, as we have added Bjørn to the WooTeam for added capacity. 
The Themes & The Future
So that’s the announcement bit… For our EE themes, we’ve drawn on our 2-odd years of experience in creating beautiful, customizable and extremely user-friendly themes. We’d like to think that our mentality with regards to template / theme development has now been tested in more than 50 themes (which we’ve released until now) and by our 20 000-odd users. So in our minds, we just needed to take what we’ve learned from WordPress and fuse that with EE’s own awesomeness (this is where Bjørn was a real rockstar!).
The "WeeFramework"
Bjørn also did an excellent job of porting our powerful new WooFramework over to EE, which looks very slick inside EE’s control panel. We’ve really tried to take all of the great things from our WordPress themes and port them to EE, which allows you to first pick your CMS of choice, and then pick the WooTheme to go with that. On top of that, we have our extensive support resources to help you if you get stuck.
In the next couple of months, we’ll be focussing on porting all of our most popular themes over to EE at a rate of about 2 new themes / month. We also anticipate having to spend a lot of work on improving our EE themes yet, which whilst they have been beta tested, still need more testing out in the wild. Hopefully you guys & girls will purchase the themes and help us with that though…
On Pricing & Licensing
We’ve decided to stick closely to ExpressionEngine’s own pricing & licensing conventions, as to not “confuse” any long-time EE users. Our themes will be available for $90 on a Standard Package (with a single-site license) and $180 on a Developer Package (multi-site license, plus the inclusion of our PSD files). For the time being, we also won’t be including the EE themes in any club subscriptions, but we do plan to introduce them into our subscription structure as soon as we have a few more EE themes under our belts.
The EE themes will also not be licensed with the GNU General Public License (as is the case with our WordPress themes), which is why we have split the packages to be single & multi-site licenses respectively.
We hope that you are just excited as we are about the addition of EE to WooThemes (hence the WeeThemes), as this really is a massive leap forward for us. We’ll definitely be sharing some of the strategic considerations (behind our EE release) with you on the blog next week, as we think it’s important for all of the amazing Woo fanboys & -girls to understand where we’re going with WooThemes. So check out for that.
For now, rest assured that WooThemes is in a much better place than it has ever been and things are only gonna get even better from here on.
Now please excuse us as whole WooTeam sit back and enjoy a beer to celebrate this massive day…
For Our Affiliates: Note that we have added a few lovely EE-specific banner ads to your backend if you wanted to climb aboard this train and promote some WeeThemes…
14 January 2010 at 10:22 am #
Yee
Congratulations guys!!
14 January 2010 at 10:38 am #
Congratulations!!
14 January 2010 at 10:45 am #
Well done, guys! Congrats. EE is a great platform. Good times ahead.
14 January 2010 at 10:46 am #
Good job guys !!
14 January 2010 at 10:47 am #
Congrats! Guys .. Been Waiting for EE at WOO!!
14 January 2010 at 10:55 am #
Congratulation on the launch
14 January 2010 at 11:34 am #
Congratulations! I’ve known this was a plan of your for awhile, but I’m curious about something… Why did you pick EE as your first platform to expand onto, rather than Movable Type, which I thought would have a bigger user base? Are businesses big buyers of EE?
14 January 2010 at 11:46 am #
Mainly because we knew Bjørn, who knew EE extremely well and it felt natural to explore that path first
14 January 2010 at 11:51 am #
We are also really excited about EE 2.0 that was only recently released. We believe the new features and functionality will really help boost it’s appeal and usage.
15 January 2010 at 4:50 pm #
Whoa. I just went over to the beta page for EE 2.0. I hadn’t really looked into EE’s specs in awhile, and it’s certainly getting more interesting.
It’s built on CodeIgniter! I had no idea. The interface has certainly improved too…
Well, if the WordPress community ever fell through (hopefully it won’t!) I just might go with EE. CodeIgniter is just awesome, and it looks like the “packages” are fairly analogous to WP’s plugin system.
14 January 2010 at 12:16 pm #
EE 2.0 ftw!
14 January 2010 at 11:39 am #
Thoughts on why this might not work, although I hope it does
14 January 2010 at 1:09 pm #
Woohoo.. woothemes are expanding
Awesome.
14 January 2010 at 2:54 pm #
I don’t really know much about expression engine. Does it have different / better functionality?
Why would I use Expression Engine over WordPress?
thanks.
14 January 2010 at 3:50 pm #
I think Bjørn would be the best to answer that, as we obviously are biased towards WP. But http://expressionengine.com/ should have some good info…
14 January 2010 at 5:21 pm #
Because EE is far more flexible and customisable than Wordpress both on the front and back-end. Although if you’re in the market for buying these sort of themes, that kinda of flexibility in functionality may not be something you’re that concerned with.
15 January 2010 at 3:04 am #
ExpressionEngine enables you to build a more advanced site more quickly. And a wootheme could also be used as a starting point for such a site, to get it up and running fast.
For example – if a client asks you to build a site with a simple news section, a login member area where the user can register some extra information about themselves and then select a “subscription” package from a dropdown list, and then be billed. Sure this can be done in WP, but I can guarantee you’ll be able to do it quicker in EE if you know EE. In cases like these, you can save hours, give your client a pretty fair price and still make good money – so the EE license pretty much takes care of itself.
14 January 2010 at 4:52 pm #
Amazing! Good luck you guys
14 January 2010 at 7:09 pm #
As a developer club member and a former EE user, I can tell you there is no good news in this post for me whatsoever.
Firstly, our studio stopped using EE a year ago, partly because of the cost and licensing issues, and partly because they don’t listen to their users and took so long to develop their 2.0. We just gave up. And I’m glad.
It seems like this is a big step backward for WooThemes. So you’re selling these themes for more money, I don’t get them even though I’ve just paid top dollar for a developer subscription, and your licensing terms are more restrictive.
Frankly, I don’t know why most of your customers would be excited at all by this announcement.
14 January 2010 at 7:31 pm #
I’m sorry you feel that way about EE and our launch, but we feel it is a step forward and a good first step into exploring different CMS markets.
15 January 2010 at 1:00 am #
I must echo Magnus’ sentiment here and I do apologize if this is seem as a purely commercial move on our part. I would however like to believe that the decision we’ve taken with regards to EE should diversify our business model even further and hence should make our future operations more sustainable (I’ll be blogging about this in detail next week).
And then, please consider that whilst you have paid top dollar for the Developer Subscription, you have gotten 57+ amazing WordPress themes for that. When you had decided to become a subscriber, you also found value in that decision / purchase, so I think you’re being slightly unfair to expect us to include the EE themes in that subscription. In future, we do plan to evolve our pricing structure & subscription options even further, but considering we only have two paid EE themes now, we need to wait a little before we can do that. More will however be apparent in the next couple of months; so hopefully you will keep the faith!
15 January 2010 at 4:34 pm #
Fair enough, WooFriends. Perhaps my post seemed a bit harsh. I do think it’s good for your business, and I do intend to remain a member since this does not negatively impact my subscription.
I do appreciate your business model in general, I appreciate the fact that you share insights into it, I appreciate that you have 57+ GPL’d themes, and I think you’re nice folks. And it is interesting to see how you approach a different platform, I was curious how you would handle that. I certainly wish you the best of luck, and I’ll try maybe to keep my issues with EE between myself and EllisLabs.
15 January 2010 at 3:11 am #
It’s all about choosing the right tool for the job. If EE can save me a couple of hours, that’s licensing covered right there. Yes, EllisLab focused on 2.0 – I’m glad, it’s out now and it’s great. I feel your pain in working with 1.6.8 btw
15 January 2010 at 1:42 pm #
Not sure how you see this as a step backward. They’ve articulated above that it won’t deminish their capacity – so you’ll continue to get all the value for your top dollars. You signed up with no expectation of EE templates, so not getting them should be no issue (plus you stopped using EE). And the best news for the rest of us is that anything they learn from what they’re doing with EE will be brought over to WP (like what they’re doing by taking the WooFramework over to EE). That’s always the benefit of innovation – the additional synergies that are created.
Great job woo!
15 January 2010 at 12:08 am #
congratulation to wooteam, woothemes have achieved a new milestone
15 January 2010 at 12:13 am #
Congratulations Guys. And what do I see? You guys crached the entry into the techcrunch. Well done.
Only the future will tell but its a nice brave step. Personally I am reluctant on EE side because 1) its paid 2) the main user base is developers who code very well and would prefer to do it on their own.
It also remains a mystery for us on predicting the future on future market of the themes/templates on other platforms. Best of luck.
15 January 2010 at 12:55 am #
EE in that sense is a gamble, as it is totally different to WP in many aspects: the commercial aspect thereof, the nature of its community and also the CMS as a whole. We are however quietly confident that we can build an awesome collection of EE themes that will also add value to their community.
15 January 2010 at 3:08 am #
I was waiting for! I am going to check!! Thank you.
In my oppinion one of the problems of ee is that importing post from wordpress is quite hard but maybe now and thanks to woothemes they will give the wp import tool a try…
15 January 2010 at 6:23 am #
In future, are you gonna launch unique EE themes (i.e themes only for ee and not for wp).
Or will you have the same theme for both platforms??
15 January 2010 at 6:32 am #
For now, we will focus on porting our most popular themes to EE. I don’t see any reason for having EE unique themes though
15 January 2010 at 7:58 am #
I can see reasons for unique EE themes if we want to expand and do more than just blog themes (ie one could a full-featured community site theme w/forums and everything).
15 January 2010 at 7:13 am #
Will there be a way to translate the ee-themes into other languages as in Wordpress with those .po-files?
15 January 2010 at 7:57 am #
Currently we haven’t added support for this. If it turns out to be a major request I’ll happily add it in a heartbeat on all converted themes
15 January 2010 at 2:55 pm #
Congrats to the Woo Team. The EE community is very much in need of quality themes.
16 January 2010 at 12:30 pm #
With the premise that I’m pretty much a complete novice when it comes to web design/development/whatever (as you’ll certainly note from looking at my site), what are the odds of being able to port a fully functioning EE 1.6.8 site into one of these 2.0 themes (assuming I don’t mind leaving behind modules, plugins, extensions, and so on that are currently not validated for 2.0)?
18 January 2010 at 12:01 am #
At the moment, our themes work best on a clean EE install, but we will be writing additional add-ons to making this a more viable option in future.
18 January 2010 at 2:10 am #
Thanks for the reply. As an update, I successfully migrated the vast majority of the content elements of my old EE site to Wordpress today (and picked up some Woo Themes…:) )
Sorry I can’t share in the excitement of the new EE Themes launch anymore, but I was struggling mightily to update from 1.6.8 to 2.0 as it was. In retrospect, given the relative simplicity of my site, and my own relative simplicity when it comes to web design and coding, I probably should have been with Wordpress from the start. Enjoying it, and the themes, so far. Thanks again.
16 January 2010 at 9:46 pm #
Congratulations! Woo Team!
18 January 2010 at 11:18 am #
@Bjørn Børresen: We used EE in the past and switched to WP to create a multilanguage website with the WP plugin qTtranslate. Is there a similar plugin available now for EE to create multilanguage websites?
18 January 2010 at 1:34 pm #
Hi Thomas, I’m not familiar with qTranslate – but EE 2.0 is built on the open source CodeIgniter framework which comes bundled with language support (the use of language filesd and keys to get sentences for the various languages). EE also comes with a translate tool to edit these language files. As for content, EE is all about creating channels (content/blogs) so one channel for each language would work.
20 January 2010 at 7:12 am #
Thanks Bjørn. Using a channel for each language you need to maintain two blogs. Seems that I rest with WP…
20 January 2010 at 7:47 am #
Or you could add a field for each language in your one blog. So title_fr, title_de, title_en. Or use MSM (MultiSiteManager). Or someone has probably created an addon that works the way you do it in WP today .. EE works in mysterious ways
20 January 2010 at 10:07 pm #
Congratulations! Good job
25 January 2010 at 7:37 pm #
This gives me hope for some Drupal theme ports
26 January 2010 at 12:35 am #
Soonish. We’re definitely working on some Drupal stuff (in fact, Coffee Break has been successfully ported to Drupal and we will be starting beta testing on it soon).
26 January 2010 at 3:30 pm #
Any forum themes coming up?
26 January 2010 at 4:20 pm #
We are considering this as we go – I’d def. like to add some forums into the mix as well:)
3 February 2010 at 10:50 am #
As someone that does development in both Wordpress, for simpler blogs, and Expression Engine for more complex CMS, I look forward to themes being available for EE on WooThemes!
3 February 2010 at 11:45 am #
Sounds great, cant wait for it to be updated for Busy Bee…
3 February 2010 at 9:23 pm #
I’m sure it’s clean and loaded with some nice features, but it just seems too expensive. The multiple license is limited to 3 sites. If you have more than 3 sites, the incremental cost adds up quickly.
4 February 2010 at 12:23 am #
Huh? Our multi-site license isn’t limited in any way…
4 February 2010 at 2:07 am #
From ExpressionEngine site:
The Multiple Site Manager 2.0 enables you to create and manage multiple websites from a single ExpressionEngine installation. Up to 3 sites (including your main installation) can be managed. Additional EE 2.0 Sites can be purchased (personal 24,95 – commercial 49,95).
With WEEthemes multi-site license isn’t limited.
13 February 2010 at 12:28 am #
This request is for Bjørn. I know you said that you will be converting WordPress themes at the rate of two per month. Would you consider converting “The Journal” theme in the next few months? I really like that theme and would be very happy to use with ExpressionEngine.
Thank you for your great work. We need more themes for ExpressionEngine. There are a lot of us design-challenged and technically-challenged people out here!!
14 February 2010 at 12:02 pm #
Cornelius, for feb the plan is “The Station” and “Optimize” (Delegate is also considered). We are going more for the business ones this month. But yeah, I’ll make a note of your request for The Journal.
Thanks for the kind words!
15 February 2010 at 11:32 pm #
Thank you for your quick response Bjørn. I looked at “The Station” theme and it will serve my needs as well.
I am very encouraged by the fact that you will be releasing 2 themes per month. I can easily see myself buying a whole bunch of themes from you guys; and I can evangelize to others. Over the years, I have been able to convince products worth thousands of dollars — if not more.
The market for templates is driven by people who have other things to do with their time than design web pages. We have serious businesses to run — which require serious time commitments. We don’t have time to sit down and learn all the mind-numbing details about XTHML and CSS. We need templates and we need them now. There is a tremendous market opportunity that is not being exploited by others. Their loss, your gain!
ExpressionEngine can also do more to promote use of templates. They should allow a way to load a template after a site is up and running; and slowly allow users to migrate the pages or whatnot.
16 February 2010 at 4:09 am #
I agree with you – EE 2.0 did it a lot easier by allowing for bundling of templates (w/snippets, global variables, template groups, etc.) – the only thing missing now is switching themes on a live site
20 February 2010 at 10:28 pm #
Bjørn: I spoke with several of my customers and they are VERY interested in buying your themes for EE. Many of these people are making a lot of money running blogs and really don’t mind spending money — if it allows them to make more money. What I mean to say is that their time is expensive; and they don’t want to tinker with a half-baked product. If a company like WooThemes is standing behind EE templates, then they are more likely to commit to the platform.
There is just thing that many of them have reported. The current WooThemes for EE are very weak on SEO. Many of my customers care deeply about SEO and have commited to WordPress themes like Thesis precisely for SEO reasons. (Thesis shines in this regard!) My question is — why is WooThemes ignoring the SEO aspect? I want to see SEO options for each and every entry for a blog or a static page. If one is not provided at the publish time, default metatag description should be used instead. Bjørn, it would be very easy for an EE-expert like you to provide this functionality — out of the box. Charge more money for your themes — if you have to, but we need this functionality. If you can save a couple of hours of my time, I can easily pay more money.
I appreciate the time you are taking to respond on this blog.
21 February 2010 at 5:57 am #
Cornelius, this is a great feature request you have here. For the existing theme users, it’s really just a matter of adding custom fields for this in their channels (description, keywords, etc.) — but as you say; the themes could benefit from having this functionality out of the box. It would probably work better with a custom module / fieldtype also.
I’ll have a look at how Thesis does it today (I think I remember seeing it – or at least I’ve used the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WP) and see if we can implement something similar. If you have any additional ideas on how this feature could work best please let me know here (or email me at mail@bybjorn.com )..
This is not something we have ignored purposefully, I’ve just not thought about implemeting it before I read your comment just now
Thanks again!
21 February 2010 at 10:47 pm #
Bjørn: I will definitely send you an e-mail with all my suggestions. What I am asking for is not something overtly complicated, but a simple solution that will deliver 90% of the desired functionality with very little additional work on your part.
26 February 2010 at 8:44 am #
Thank you so much for doing these! Any word on when the next set will be out?
26 February 2010 at 9:38 am #
Hopefully next week!
1 March 2010 at 1:51 am #
Congrats on the expansion mate, looking forward for more innovative breakthrough from you guys!
1 March 2010 at 5:02 pm #
I heartily second the request for The Journal or for ANY decent EE news theme for that matter. The EE universe is completely devoid of legitimate news themes.
1 March 2010 at 9:47 pm #
Love the new The Station theme. I will be buying it shortly. Just 2 observations: First, the search functionality is not fully functional; it is searching only the article titles — and not article content. Second, the template that handles the “Sign Up for a Newsletter” form is the default EE template; it should be changed to look like the rest of the site. For that matter, all the system templates should have “The Station” look. Visitors to our sites are expecting a finished product; not work-in-progress. Sorry to be so critical, but people’s expectations are through the roof and there are only 24 hours in a day.
I would also be interested in knowing what other color schemes are available.
2 March 2010 at 2:33 am #
np, thanks for your feedback. I’ll have a look at the search – it’s normally just a setting in the backend “Is this field searchable?” for that specific piece of content.
The newsletter signup template is something called “User Message Templates” that exist in the database after an install – it cannot be bundled out of the box with EE. That said, I agree with you – it shouldn’t be there. I’m pretty certain that we can make an extension to EE to remove those ugly user messages … and ship that with our themes.
About the color schemes – you can preview them all here:
http://ee.woothemes.com/demo/