The Morning After

A few weeks ago, we got an e-mail from Arun Kale – the mastermind behind one of the first, and most significant, magazine themes in the WP community – asking us whether we were keen to purchase the theme and take control of it’s future maintenance.

Considering the significance of this theme, we jumped at the opportunity and as of today The Morning After now has a honorary spot in our themes collection.

Arun handed over an awesome theme and as a result we didn’t want to change much in the theme (for now anyway). We also didn’t want to tinker with an obvious winning formula, considering that the last version of TMA, received over 60 000 downloads on Arun’s own site. But we couldn’t claim this to be a WooTheme, if we didn’t add a few, new awesome Woo-typical features.

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Half the year is gone and that’s reason enough to be happy, right? Well, irrespective of the validity of our happiness claims, we figured it’s a great time of year to launch a new 5-for-1 promotion for our WordPress themes. Here it is:

• Buy any Standard Package ($70) or Developer Package ($150) and get 4 bonus themes. That’s 5 themes for the price of 1.
• Buy any subscription with a 50% discount on signup: get a Standard Subscription for $62.50 (And $15 monthly) or a Developer Subscription for $100 (and $20 monthly).

As simple as that. Only valid from the time this post goes live (now) until midnight on the 30th of June.

Enjoy!

One of our biggest selling points for WooThemes has always been the fact that our themes extend & improve your experience and usage of WordPress. In a similar vein, most of you would use multiple plugins on every new WordPress install as a away of adding functionality to WordPress which isn’t native to the core thereof. Most plugins also work out-of-the-box and don’t require special consideration when it comes to adding it to a theme, but there are some plugins that require a higher-level of integration for you to experience the full effect.

So in the last couple of days, we’ve spent some time adding proper integration & support for the awesome, forms plugin – Gravity Forms – to ALL of our themes. This means that you are now able to purchase a license for Gravity Forms, plug it into any WooThemes-powered WordPress install and you’ll have fancy, customizable forms within a few minutes. To get an idea of what this will look like, here’s a screenshot showing Gravity Forms integrated with our latest theme, Coda:

Quick & Easy Contact Forms

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As an alternative to the contact form template that comes with most themes, all Woo Themes now have built in styling for the Gravity forms plugin (http://www.gravityforms.com/)

Gravity forms is a premium form management plugin that allows you to create multiple custom forms easily and comes with additional features such as reCaptcha and file uploading.

All Woo Themes have the additional styling so all you need to do is install and create your forms. A quick and easy tutorial is below on how to install and add the plugin and you can get additional documentation and support from the Gravity forms website. (http://www.gravityhelp.com/)

Installing the plugin

1) First of all you need to purchase the plugin from http://www.gravityforms.com/purchase-gravity-forms/

2) To install the plugin, just upload the plugin into the /wp-contents/plugins/ directory – more information can be found here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Managing_Plugins#Manual_Plugin_Installation

3) Once activated, click on ‘settings’ in the ‘Forms’ menu in the dashboard’s sidebar.

4) Add in your license key and reCaptcha details (if you want to use this function) and make sure that ‘Output CSS’ is switched on – this will allow the forms to be styled by the theme’s stylesheets. Check out the screenshot of the settings page below with the basic settings applied:

Setting up Gravity Forms

5) To create your form, simply go to ‘New form’ and drag and drop the elements you want in the form. Additional help and support can be found on the Gravity forms website

As the Soccer World Cup is heating up and moving into the business end of the tournament, we figured that we’d do something of equal awesomeness here: allow you to buy any of our themes individually for only $40.

At the moment, our cheapest package is the Standard WordPress Package (at $70), which includes 2 bonus themes, on top of the purchase. Many of you however only require one theme for a quick project and with this new purchase option, you are now able to get in on the new, theme action for an even more cost-efficient price.

To take advantage of the offer, simply browse to the theme’s listing page (i.e. Coda) and then select the $40 option. Enjoy!

Kill The Spill

In the past couple of weeks, the world has been hit by the devastating news of BP’s oil spill in the Mexican Gulf. Whilst this hasn’t affected a lot of us directly (just as a result of our geographical locations), we can all agree that this is a massive man-made disaster that needs to be fixed.

Considering that this disaster has been playing out over the last month – with BP pumping thousands of gallons of oil into the Mexican Gulf – both the animals and sealife have been greatly affected by this. These shocking images posted on The Big Picture recently seem to show just how much devastation this disaster has created.

So we’ve teamed up with 3 amazing companies – MetaLab, Squarespace & CampaignMonitor – to assist with the restoration of wildlife in the area: Kill The Spill is a new initiative from the 3 companies and it hopes to generate funds that will be donated to the National Wildlife Foundation.

The 4 companies involved have also committed to match every dollar donated by the public (to a limit of $35 000), to show that we are serious about helping out. So if you’d like to help out to, jump over to Kill The Spill and make a donation.

As you all should now by know: WordPress 3.0 was finally released at the end of last week.

So this is a quick note to tell you all, that all our themes are already WP 3.0 compatible and there’s no need for you to upgrade your theme. This also means that you can happily upgrade to the new version of WordPress, without any hassles from a WooThemes-side (even though we’d suggest checking plugin compatibility).

Further more – as noted here – you are now able to use the native WordPress Menus functionality instead of the WooNav, if you so wish. To start using WordPress Menu’s simply activate them from the Appearance > Menus tab, and it will replace the WooNav functionality (note: you will need to re-create your menu if you switch).**

Lastly, you can expect some new themes from us in the near future which will be using some of the other new features in WP 3.0; more specifically custom post types which we plan on using in a very unique way…

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Coda is our latest magazine theme, designed and coded by our own Forum Ninja, Kirstin Pauk. What sets Coda apart from the rest of our magazine themes is it’s unique single post layout, which makes use of a jQuery tab to split the article from the comments.

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As a company we’ve continued to evolve as our users, the community, technology, WordPress etc. have imposed certain demands on us. One of the areas of our business that has undergone a complete revolution since Magnus, Mark & I started the company, is the WooTeam which now has 8 full-time members (almost 3x the size of the team when we started out in 2008).

So how did we do this? I’d like to believe that we’ve always allowed our team to grow from within. For example, prior to Cobus & Fox joining the team, they were working with me on a side-project (radiiate) – so I had known them both and even though it was with a difference, they grew into more prominent positions.

In a similar vein, Tiago started out as a (junior) support / forum ninja and grew into the position of Master Ninja in our support forums, whilst also becoming our lead (and only at the moment) Drupal developer. Kirstin too started out as a (junior) forum ninja, turned into an Affiliated Woo Worker and we’ve now also released some of his designs as themes on WooThemes. The latest feather in Kirstin’s cap is the upcoming release of Coda, which Kirstin both designed & developed.

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Headlines for business done the right way!

We love this modification of Headlines on iContact’s blog, because it uses the default sexiness that is packaged with the theme as the base and purely builds on that to achieve their business goals. Beautiful!

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So here’s an early, sneaky teaser of our next theme (which was designed & coded by in-house ninja, Kirstin Pauk) which should go out soon. As you’ll see on the little teaser graphics, this is a new magazine-type theme with a few extra goodies sprinkled everywhere.

Expect to love this one!

We’re honoured to be featured on the 37Signals blog in a series called Bootstrapped, Profitable & Proud.

The post includes our journey in establishing WooThemes, growing it organically without VC funding and facing the challenges that are associated with a team that is based remotely.

Aaron's Life on Canvas

In recent months Canvas has become a massive fan-favourite within the WooThemes community and the modification of Canvas on This is Aaron’s Life probably shows just why it’s so popular. You aren’t gonna see many better modifications to Canvas than this.

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After our recent release of Snippet on Tumblr, our themes collection with them has grown to 5 themes (including one which is free). Judging by the initial responses & feedback (it’s been a little more than 2 months since we released our first Tumblr themes), we’re very keen to build on the momentum we have on the platform and keen to bring more Woo-specific innovation & awesomeness to Tumblr.

In the next few weeks, we’ll be working on a few more Tumblr themes (don’t worry, we’ve got some secret – yet incredibly awesome – WordPress stuff on the way as well), but instead of pushing the same old, same old at you, we want to explore new territory with those Tumblr themes.

So we don’t do this often (as it generally leads to an free-for-all), but please tell us what kind of features you want us to include in our future Tumblr themes. Also feel free to suggest any specific designs that you want us to consider or new niche ways of using Tumblr. Simply put: shoot with those ideas! (And we’ll try make them a reality!)