Everything at WooThemes is the way it is due to an evolving process.

See, when Mark, Magnus & I started WooThemes we had limited experience & knowledge in running a business, and much less in establishing new online brand. To say that we’ve had to learn on the job would thus be a gross understatement; beyond knowing how to design & code, we really don’t *know* much more.

That is why I started off by saying that what you see in front of you today, is a company & brand that has undergone continuous tweaks & changes in the last 2-odd years and the only reason we’ve managed to pull it off is because we have never been fearful of taking a few risks and investing heavily in our ideas, vision & ambitions. Had we however allowed that “fear” to consume us, things may have been a little different… Let me explain…

As an example, I’d like to point to our existing backend system: when we first launched WooThemes, we realized that it had some glaringly obvious limitations and whilst the launch of WOO2 last year went a long way in addressing some of those limitations, we still don’t have a perfect system. Consider the odd login & billing imperfections / glitches in our system and it is clear that we’re a long way off from offering our users a perfect environment. But that’s not the point…

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We just wanted to give you a quick update on the integration of the WooNav into the core of WordPress 3.0 (final version to be available mid-April).

Jeff has been working really hard to get everything ready and the basic functionality for the Custom Navigation (as it is now being called) has already been included in the WP 3.0 nightly builds (after last week’s WP dev chat). The most significant amount of work centered around moving away from Woo-specific branding, uses of prefixes and coding preferences, which means Jeff had to create a patch using all of the WP core standards & defaults. It is now that patch which is available in the nightly builds.

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First off, we’d like to say thank you to everyone who participated in the Send Some WooLove campaign; we have a bunch of new users as a result, and we think it was a fun promo all round. So it’s definitely something that we will explore again in the future when we will reincarnate this awesomeness in another form.

Then we probably need to announce the winner of the shiny, new MacBook that we are giving away… Massive congratulations to Adam Pickering from ThemeCouponCodes who generated the most affiliate sales during the WooLove period. Thank you for the loyal support in promoting our products Adam; you’re MacBook is already on its way!

To those of you that participated, but didn’t win, we’d like to say thank you as well. It’s awesome being entrenched in this vibrant & ever-growing community that is WooThemes, and we really hope that in the future we’d be able to do more of these kind of promotions, where we get to interact with our amazing users & fans!

Since we’re getting closer to releasing our two new tumblog themes towards the end of the month, we wanted to keep the momentum and hype going with another little teaser.

When we teased you with these previews a week ago, we mentioned that the themes would include some jQuery wizardry, as well as progressive usage of CSS3. To give you an idea of what we’re talking about, you can view Cobus’ new design which he launched over the weekend.

We’d like to think that considering that Cobus designed both Cinch & Slanted and that since he’s responsible for the front-end coding, you can expect some similar awesomeness from our tumblog themes. So click around his new site and start anticipating the awesome that we will be releasing soon.

Two weeks ago when we launched the WooNav, we knew it was something special and would be well received by our users, together with our recent release of WooFramework V2 our theme development was certainly hotting up. Then, out of the blue, we were contacted by Jane Wells of the WordPress Core UX development team who was planning the final iterations of the menu management system’s core features for WordPress 3.0. Unbeknown to us Jane had been playing around with our WooNav functionality:

We have a developer working on it, and have gone through several rounds of community feedback and iteration, and it strikes me that what we’re probably going to end up with is a lot like what you guys have in your Custom Navigation option, so I thought I’d get in touch with you guys to talk about it

After a few emails it was pretty obvious that this made perfect sense for both us and the core team. It would save the WordPress developers hours of coding to build something that already existed and did the job well, and WooThemes would finally be acknowledged for it’s work in furthering WordPress theme development.

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To celebrate this year’s Valentine’s Day, we’ve decided to create a unique, little promotion that is sure to attract the attention of your loved ones and friends. We’ve been known to do the occasional “X-for-1″ promotion and whilst we know you adore them, we’d like to challenge you to send the WooLove to others this time.

So here’s the deal: We’ve created a new Valentine’s Day section in your user account dashboard which will allow you to send as much WooLove to as many of your friends, family members, and business contacts as you like. This WooLove will be sent out in the form of a special Valentine’s email that will include your details, and more importantly: a unique 50% OFF discount coupon for individual theme purchases for every friend that you send it to!

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We’re very happy to finally introduce you to our newest creation – Canvas.

In the last couple of weeks Magnus has been spearheading a project to develop a brand-new theme that would add a few touches of uniqueness to our collection. Along with the odd contribution from the rest of the WooTeam, we managed to create a new & improved starting point for your blog.

Canvas started out as a re-write of the starter theme that we were using with WooFramework2, to develop all of our existing themes on-top off. But we seemingly got carried away a little bit and Canvas truly came into its own right, serving its own purpose and satisfying some of your more specific needs.

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We have been working on our tumblog themes for quite a while now and the only reason that we haven’t produced something more concrete until now, is because we wanted to make sure that the themes would be truly groundbreaking in every single aspect thereof.

So this is the first preview of our first two tumblog themes – Cinch & Slanted. Both were designed by Cobus and will feature amazing jQuery wizardry and some CSS3 advancements (for those cool kids that know all about using superior browsers). In the backend we’re also planning a few surprises that we hope to get as close to a proper Tumblr-style tumblog experience as possible.

Both themes should be ready later this month, but for now these teasers will have to keep you satisfied…

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We know we should’ve done this a long, long time ago, but when things are moving so quickly (and you’re releasing 3 / 4 awesome new themes every month), the smaller things tend to fall from the radar. But better late than never, right?

The Playground is a WPMU setup, which allows you to test-drive our themes and experiment with the backend features (which has been impossible on our demo’s). So if you’ve been contemplating buying one of our themes, you should seriously consider playing with it first and making sure that it’s the right fit for you.

Here’s a preview of a little something-something that we’ve been cooking up behind the scenes. When we release this beauty next week, you can be assured that it’ll be unlike anything else that we’ve released before. Promise.

As I sat down at my desk this morning, I set about doing some catch-up on the conversations that happened via e-mail and on our Basecamp over the weekend, when I suddenly realized that something new & unexpected was brewing within our team & the business as a whole.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve been spending a lot of time working on the new WooFramework and then shortly thereafter we followed that up with the introduction of the new WooThemes Custom Navigation functionality. Now it is especially the development of the Custom Navigation that has surprised me a bit.

See, we’ve always been WooThemes (with the emphasis firmly on “themes”) and with the Custom Navigation functionality, we’ve developed something this isn’t core to the themes anymore (in the sense, that you could previously achieve a similar effect with plugins). So this is a bit of a shift away from our themes-only focused production line, whilst still staying relevant to the core business focus.

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