Those following us on Twitter would know that we switched our servers to VPS.net a few weeks ago, so we thought whilst we’re chilling with @snickn at DIBI this week, we’d share the details of the setup we’re currently running.

So very quickly, this is what is powering WooThemes at the moment:

• 24 VPS.net nodes(i.e. 4×3.6GHz CPU and 9GB of RAM)
• CDN from Akamai
• APC*
• W3 Total Cache*

Dunno if you have noticed, but the site is lightning fast and more stable than ever before. So if you’re considering getting new hosting, you can most definitely consider these guys!

*These were customized & optimized specifically for our needs by @snickn and the VPS.net crew.

Thursday 22nd April was in the diary for the launch of our latest feature packed WordPress theme. We’ve managed to stick to that release date and we can finally introduce you to our latest beauty entitled “Diarise“.

As the name suggests this theme is based around the calendar functionality of the WordPress system. But taking it to a whole other level.

With Diarise you can showcase events and navigate around them with a neat home page JS date picker. That means you could use this theme for your church, school, sports club, or event organising company! To name but a few.

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After months of back-and-forth, we’re really happy to finally announce the addition of Drupal themes to the WooThemes family. Having launched our theme awesomeness on both ExpressionEngine & Tumblr since the beginning of the year, this Drupal release is just another step to take our designs & ideas to all of the popular CMS platforms.

You can consider this a soft launch of sorts for our Drupal themes; you can currently grab the very popular Coffee Break or the free version of Bueno for Drupal. We already have the next wave of Drupal themes in the works and now that the “foundations” have been laid, our development processes in this regard will be sped up significantly.

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This week marks another first for WooThemes (this may not be the only first for us this week btw), with the introduction of a new concept called The WooWeek.

Earlier this month, we realized that due to a “routine” development process of design / developing new themes and fixing bugs in old themes, we don’t necessarily always have the opportunity to spend time working on the non-critical stuff. So with the WooWeek, we’re hoping to take a couple of days and spend it on some non-critical stuff that we hope to improve in & around WooThemes.

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Getting Back to Business

As we’ve been promising, some “good ‘ol traditional” themes are on their way and today’s release is just the start of this sequence which should last for about 5 / 6 releases (before we go a bit niche again).

Our new business theme, is the beautifully designed Boast (done by Liam McKay) which sports a very nice, Apple-like gloss.

The Homepage

Boast’s awesome homepage really makes this theme shine (yes, you get it: the design is glossy) and we’d like to believe that the possibilities & opportunities that this offers you is very valuable indeed.

First up, we have a very different featured slider to the one we normally integrate. We’ve reserved a lot of space for the very first messages that you communicate via your website and as a result, the space is extremely prominent & flexible.

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We’d like to introduce some new functionality that we have added to our three microblogging themes – Retreat, Cinch & Slanted – which should further improve the niche tumblog-like functionality in these themes.

When we first released these themes, their RSS feeds would display in the default & generic structure in which WordPress outputs the RSS, irrespective of the type of theme you are using. So considering that the content for our microblogging themes were unique (compared to that of a traditional blog & default WP install), we wanted to optimize it accordingly.

If we use Retreat as an example, you will see that the default RSS feed looks like this (browsing with the native RSS reader in Safari):

The Default WordPress RSS Feed

As you’ll see that the RSS feed for that post, just includes the post title, date & content and thus ignores the specific custom fields that we have used to turn a generic post into one that fits the niche requirements of a tumblog. With that in mind, we’ve added a new custom RSS (tumblog) feed that looks like this:

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As part of our continuing quest to add value for our users – not only via new themes, but also via the surrounding WooThemes resources – we’re proud to announce the new addition of the WooCodex to our support offering.

Since standardizing all of our themes with the implementation of a core set of functionality via the WooFramework, we’ve been finding ourselves using the WooFramework for all of our projects; not just in our themes. The reason for this is simple: The WooFramework already includes so much functionality, which makes it perfect for any kind of WordPress-powered website.

So as an added benefit, we’ve made the WooCodex available to all of our users, which will allow them to use the core WooFramework functionality to further extend their WooThemes modifications, or even use it for websites that don’t even use one of our themes. As an example, the WooCodex includes information on adding more theme options, modifying the custom write panel or bending our image / video embeds to your will. We believe that this resource now makes using these functions even easier and more accessible to the vast majority of our users.

The WooCodex is still under construction and we’ll update it as we go. Feel free to leave suggestions & feedback about the WooCodex in the forum and we’ll update it accordingly.

Otherwise, check out the WooCodex now.

Our next ExpressionEngine theme is now ready and by (extreme) popular demand, we’ve decided that it could be no other than the business theme supreme, Optimize.

As has been evident in all of the WP themes that Bjorn has “ported” to ExpressionEngine, Optimize includes some amazing EE features. You’re missing out if you haven’t already played with one of our EE themes… Check out the demo now, if you’re not convinced…

Magazine page template

We have had a lot of people request some extra functionality in Canvas, and we promised to deliver on some of the requests. After a bit of a delay, we can now finally show you a couple cool new features that will add an extra layer to this popular theme.

Magazine Page Template & Business Page Template

The two major updates in this version are the custom page templates. You can now add a magazine (view demo) or business (view demo) page template to your Canvas theme.

Both page templates have a featured jQuery slider, that can show posts or pages. The slider on the magazine template shows posts which have been marked with a tag, and the business template shows pages that you have setup in the options. Here is a screencast previewing the new templates:

We hope you enjoy this update, and let us know how we can improve this theme even more in the future!

A quick Google search would tell you that the idea of great customer service being marketing is most definitely not a new one. In recent months however, we’ve started to truly see the power of valuing excellent customer service…

We get a slew of e-mails every day and most of them are our own imperfect doings (i.e. our themes do at times have bugs, user accounts are sometimes exposed to glitches, and our website isn’t always as clear as it could be). The tone in these emails normally ranges between being neutral and being negative; and we have thus learned that the only way to counter these imperfections is via truly valuing our users and giving the best possible customer service experience.

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