Shawn, our screencasting guru, has been hard at work creating the third video tutorial dedicated to Listings – our directory based theme with a powerful content builder.

In this tutorial, that we believe deserves it’s own blog post, Shawn takes us through the easy process of building a directory site of musical bands. All thanks to the power of the content builder, that makes it easy to create custom post types, taxonomies, and custom fields.

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A while back, we wrote a blog post detailing how we’ve been successful as a team, because we’ve allowed the individuals on the team to specialize in the stuff that they’re most passionate about. This however comes with one proviso: there’s still a to-do list and all the tasks need to be completed; so everyone can’t *just* do what they want or feel like on any given day.

The way to achieve this, is to balance out the specialist skills by also diversifying the skill set you have available on your team. This should be done in two ways (using the example of a web design / development agency or most online startups):

1. Make sure that you have a good balance between designers & developers on the team, but furthermore a balance between designers who prefer Photoshop over CSS, and CSS over Photoshop. Similarly make sure that you balance out PHP or WP or jQuery skills on the team, so that you can cover all of your bases equally well.
2. If you have a developer who is great at PHP, have a secondary developer who is almost as great at PHP, but prefers to do mostly jQuery work. You do this as a contingency plan to make sure that if your #1 guy is away from work for weeks (due to illness for example), the team can still function without him or her. Neither diversity or specialism should come at the expense of making sure that the team can still function when some of the team members aren’t present. That’s just silly & semi-suicidal.

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We’re all still basking in the euphoria of WP 3.1 finally being released and as we noted yesterday, all of our themes are indeed compatible with WP 3.1. We are however pushing a minor update to all of you that are using any of our tumblog themes.

One of the major new features that WP 3.1 has included is the new, standardized Post Formats (we actually worked with the core team on this, as we were the first theme developers to have used different post types / formats before this was included in the WP core). The latest versions – now available in your dashboards – of our tumblog themes now includes the use of Post Formats, which is obviously also perfect timing considering the launch of Tumblr2WP.

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Say “Hi!” to our latest project coming to you from the WooHQ: Tumblr2WP, the perfect tool for you to migrate your Tumblr blog back to WordPress.

This has been something that we’ve been working on for quite some time now, but had to wait for WordPress 3.1 to finally be released (as Tumblr2WP supports post formats, which was not available pre-WP 3.1). In the last 6 months, we’ve been putting many of our assets in place to allow us to replicate the popularity of Tumblr’s functionality on WordPress and our new migration tool is one of the final pieces of this jigsaw puzzle.

If you haven’t been following our progress in this space for long, here’s a recap:

• We now have 8 tumblog themes available for WordPress, which gives you a Tumblr-like blog hosted on WordPress.
• For those that don’t want to use our own tumblog themes and prefer to create their own, we have the free WooTumblog plugin (downloaded almost 5000 times already) to replicate Tumblr-like publishing functionality on *any* WP installation.
• We have our very own iPhone app – Express.app – which enables you to publish to your WooTumblog-powered blog from your iPhone. Hot. Over 1000 downloads already.
• And now we have a migration tool for those of you who have been wanting to move to WordPress and copy all your existing Tumblr posts across.

That’s the complete package right there.

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So WordPress 3.1 is just about to go out (it should’ve been out already, but who are we to judge) and we’d just like to let you know that you’re good to upgrade.

We’ve had a play with the beta versions and Release Candidates and so far none of our themes have been broken. As soon as WP 3.1 drops, you can thus upgrade with peace-of-mind, knowing that your WooThemes will work just fine.

We’ve been running WooIdeas for the last couple of months now in an attempt to interact with the WooCommunity and to better understand what you would like to see us working. We just want to give you the opportunity to significantly influence the things that we are spending our time on in the hope that we can continue to deliver incredible new products to you.

Quite a few big ideas that were generated via WooIdeas have already been implemented (like BuddyPress Integration, a directory-type theme, more shortcodes & a theme that is perfect for restaurants) and we’re hoping that you can help guide us on what we should be working on right now.

From time-to-time, we will we highlighting some of the more prominent ideas that are submitted via WooIdeas and discuss them on the blog. We also plan to highlight some of the top, new ideas that are presented to us every month in the hope that it will put them under proper scrutiny before we can decide whether to prioritize resources for this.

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Just a week after announcing a design power-up at WooThemes and teasing our new collaborative theme with Chris Rowe, we’re happy to release a yummy new magazine theme, Delicious Magazine.

We can already hear a couple of groans (“Not another magazine theme…”), but as long as the WooCommunity is demanding these types of themes – which is the case if you take a quick glance at our Theme Leaderboard – we’ll deliver accordingly.

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We’ve blogged about how important & valuable design is for any business before, but we’ve not yet explained how we believe that it’s even possible to design our code.

Looking around the web, you’ll see that all of the most prominent platforms (i.e. the one’s with thousands / millions of users like Google, Facebook, Flickr etc.) understand one thing: to service that amount of users, you need to be designing & developing a product that is usable in the hands of their community. This means that things like a superior UI becomes paramount in their ability to influence both the emotions & experiences of the users whilst they are interacting with your product(s).

Since they are however hosted platforms, the users never touch the code behind the UI, which means the UI itself is purely a question of how well the designers & front-end developers have executed their jobs. Sure, we all know that there’s obviously thousands of lines of code that are making that awesome UI do its job, but the users themselves never comes into contact with that code. Which simplifies the whole situation greatly…

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Comparing the CV’s and previous work experience of the WooTeam members, you will find we all have one thing in common: we have all worked on client projects, either by means of freelancing or working at an agency. The second truth in this regard is that, that is one of the main reasons why we love our jobs at WooThemes so much.

We bet that most of you will share common testimonials of bad experiences that you have had with clients: demanding clients, crappy jobs with very limited budgets, clients who believe they’re the better designer, etc. In all of these cases there seems to be a recurring theme of feeling limited as the designer or developer on the project. Sound about right?

Well, this is something that we’ve attempted to change at WooThemes.

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In all 3 years of WooThemes’ existence, there’s one “feature request” that has truly stood the test of time: BuddyPress integration. Ever since BuddyPress’ first release, we’ve been inundated with e-mails and comments about releasing BP-specific themes and we’ve been holding off on making a move in that space. Until now…

Before we get into the exciting news though, we’d just like to explain why it’s taken so long. Since the release of the platform we felt that it was still very much a WordPress experiment and theming it just wasn’t viable. Not necessarily because theming itself was going to be hard, but we had other considerations as well, especially those around support. To this day, BuddyPress is not close to being as mature as WordPress itself, and if you’ve tried your hand at using the platform, you’ll know that it’s got a bucket load of potential, but many frustrating elements to it too.

All of that said though, we’ve finally taken the plunge with the release of Canvas BuddyPress.

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We’ve always believed in being open and honest about the things we’re working on, the stuff that excites us, as well as the times when we’ve messed up. Sharing the good stuff is easy, but publishing about a major delay (and general crappy situations) isn’t as easy…

It’s not just about publishing blog posts either; by admitting to a screw-up via e-mail is just as hard. If we had a choice, we’d want to be perfect in every situation, and would prefer all of our users to be oblivious to the mistakes.

Eliminating mistakes completely (as a company) is impossible and trying to contain them / keep them secret is an exercise of volatile PR. We’d rather not even try that… Instead we believe that these kind of things are better said and admitted to, than just ignored, and figuratively speaking – a layer of wallpaper stuck on to cover the crack in the wall. We have found the WooCommunity to be appreciative of our transparency in this regard.

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Ever since the birth of WooThemes (more than 3 years ago now), we’ve never been afraid to ask for some outside help and this has seen us collaborating with some really well-known designers. We’d like to think that these guys & girls represent the best of the best.

In the next couple of weeks, we’ll be continuing this legacy by collaborating with the likes of Cameron Moll, Matthew Smith & Orman Clark, which obviously means that you can expect some extreme awesome on the design-front.

We’ve done this, because this obviously helps out with the capacity in terms of designing new stuff, but also supplements our own design work in keeping the styles & ideas fresh. One of our collaborative designers that has become more prominent in recent months, has been Chris Rowe, who we just recently worked with on themes such as Elefolio, Air & Spectrum. These designs (themes) have all proved to be very popular, which has resulted in us taking our collaboration with Chris to a new level.

Spectrum is now our 14th best-selling theme of all-time

Chris has signed up to become an honorary member of the WooTeam for the next couple of months, which will see him working on at least 6 new designs for us. Our decision in this regard was easy based on the quality of Chris’ design work and we’re hoping that we can leverage the relationship we’ve built to improve our future collaborative designs even further.

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Since releasing our shortcodes (which are included in the WooFramework), we’ve really been enjoying your feedback in terms of how you were using the shortcodes, and what kind of shortcodes you would like to see us develop, & include going forward. This feedback lead us to including a spiffy new shortcode generator a little while ago, and since then develop a bunch of new shortcodes which we hope will further cosmetically enhance your content, and increase the speed of doing the mundane tasks.

These new shortcodes are included in the latest version of the WooFramework (version 3.6.x+) and you only need to update your version of the WooFramework to have access to these immediately. This is how the new shortcodes look…

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In this Where’s Wally? inspired version of WooVille, we thought a quirky, tongue-in-cheek representation of the WordPress theming community was in order. You’ll find all your favourite theme providers in the colorful WooVille eco-system, but your challenge is to find the WooNinja hiding somewhere…

Beware though! He’s a sneaky guy… Pow!

Everyone loves physical merchandise from the brands they support, right? Well, we’re keen to experiment a bit in this regard and are considering selling our new WooVille (Where’s Woo?) poster. Have a look at our test-run printed version of the poster:

Wouldn't this look great in your office / workplace?

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