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.
Here’s a couple of current WooIdeas that we think may have legs, but we need your comments and votes to determine whether they’re viable and have enough traction:
- Mega Menu’s. These seem to be all the rage now and the suggestion is for us to develop functionality that would enable Mega Menu’s as an add-on the the native WP Menu functionality.
- Easier Theme Updates. We’re always keen to improve your user experience when working with our themes and whilst we can envision some extreme challenges with this, we’d love to know how we can possibly improve on our existing theme updates.
- A Personal / Resume-type theme. Except for Antisocial, we probably don’t have anything close to this suggestion. What would you include in such a theme? Design inspiration? Ideal features?
- New, niche application-like themes. These could include – but aren’t limited to – themes that mimic the functionality of a Q&A website or even a Product Comparison theme.
43 Responses to “New Ideas: February ’11 Edition”
2 Thumbs UP for Mega Menus!
I used up all of my votes on WooCommerce.
No!
Howzabout a theme that’s geared towards community participation – say, ratings and reviews of products/services (like Yelp, for instance)?
It’d need ways for people to create profiles, add ratings & comments to various “items”, etc. Thoughts?
Add the suggestion to WooIdeas.
At this stage, we’re really open-minded and willing to consider anything the WooCommunity throws at us. If the idea gains traction on WooIdeas, we’ll highlight it here and explore it in more depth. If after that we believe that we can do it in a viable way, then we’ll get cracking on some new awesome.
Some kind of ratings and reviews implement would be great – especially with a theme like Bookclub, but also for any of the themes really. It could just be some kind of elaboration of the contact form.
Yes for MegaMenus!
Most definitely finally a DECENT to ingenious Q&A website!
Are there any others available at present?
Yes.
I like http://stackoverflow.com/ and http://shapado.com/
I would like a e-commerce solution for wordpress. Hope some day will come
Umm, WooCommerce is “coming”…
Mega menus are cool, but there are already excellent plugins that do it, and it seems to be the kind of functionality that’d be better from a plugin than from a theme.
Good point and something we’re definitely keeping in mind.
Thumbs up for Mega Menus..but..what about “Knowledgebase”? Isn’t this an Q&A Theme?!
Knowledgebase is one awesome theme! Love Liam’s work on it
And I would give Mega Menus a thumbs up!
Have seen a lot of those mega menus on many Joomla themes
Adii…when will the new videoblog theme be out that you mentioned on the Ideas forum? I saw your comment on my idea to update Woo Tube. Let me know. Krista
It’s in development now, so we hope next month
Yay!!!
http://ideas.woothemes.com/forums/72423-ideas/suggestions/1001043-estate-ajax-support?ref=title
Currently #6 on the list. Still waiting for the estate 1.2/custom theme with this included as it says it is on the roadmap. Must be a really long road…
Long road indeed… We prioritized the time we would’ve spent on Estate to instead develop its bigger brother: Listings. On the Estate / Listings roadmap is a merge of the functionality and respective feature requests as soon as we get around to it.
I would like to see:
- a visual design interface for Canvas where you can drag/drop/resize content boxes on a page template/post template and then fill them with content.
- more shortcodes, they’re awesome.
- for Canvas, the ability to easily plug-in functionality to a page/post template from other WooThemes without getting into the code. Functionality modules.
mentioned this to Matty today and he’ll investigate it when he develops next version of Canvas.
Woo rules!
Advanced search added to Framework (the drop down one on listings/estate/bookclub is absolutely perfect). WordPress basic search is well…basic.
Adding that would again set you apart from the rest like you did with the amazing core navigation and sidebar manager.
Mmm… Can you elaborate on this idea and post it to WooIdeas?
The main challenge in this regard would be that the search in Estate / Listings / Bookclub is geared towards searching across multiple taxonomies & post types, which doesn’t apply to 99% of themes and / or websites. So it’s not as simple as just dropping the functionality from those niche themes into a general theme.
Done Adii.
Sometimes I’m not the best at explaining things but I’ve had a go here.
http://ideas.woothemes.com/forums/72423-ideas/suggestions/1526807-search?ref=title.
Really hope you consider it… even if its just the simple version to start with.
Appthemes!!
Coupon Clipping like RetailMeNot.com
Q&A based themes
Product Comparison themes
Event Listing Directories
etc. etc.
Please make something different other than business/magazines type themes.
Thanks!
WooIdeas it and we’ll make a move on the ideas that gain the most traction & popularity.
Buddypress integration has already happened? I must have missed that memo… or blog post
Can someone point me to more info on this?
Oh, and as far as my new idea goes – I would kill for (ok, maybe not actually kill, but I would pay a lot of money for) a wordpress theme with wiki functionality. Not even full wiki-like functionality, and definitely none of that annoying wiki syntax. Just a front end ability for site visitors to edit and contribute content really.
Can you imagine a “city guide” type theme where users can contribute to the text of the guide? Awesome.
Click the “Blog” menu item in our nav to view all our blog posts
http://www.woothemes.com/2011/02/canvas-buddypress-making-a-new-friend/
FYI- Easier Theme Updates is linked to Mega Menus page. And I AM looking forward to Mega Menus!…
The Personal / Resume-type theme one, is that gonna look sort of like flavors.me ? I love mine (www.design-by-maya.com), but lack of content management is a real party pooper.
More niche-themes!
Guys. Do a simple personal blog theme. No, I mean like really simple. A theme that brings up the writing with absolutely no distractions, like in the style of Spencer Fry. Other inspiration would include young master Van Damme’s Maxvoltar, the new Readability and the splendid journal of Mr. Simon Collison
The resume section would fit this type of simple theme very well, possibly with custom print.css
Ideal situation would be if widgets, twitter updates and all that jazz could be as minimal as possible, or even non-existent in this type of theme.
A huge YES to megamenus and listings/woocommerce!!!
Hi, I would like to paticipate in Wooideas, but it seems that I can’t access ideas.woothemes.com
MegaMenus are a big yes please!
Landing Pages:
Also if we could incorporate landing pages into themes that would be awesome. Basically a different page that maintains the visual aesthetics and offers a call to action and contact on the same page.
As long if we are asking… how about the ability to have some A/B testing for the landing pages, similar to: http://wpmu.org/how-were-using-our-ab-theme-testing-plugin-google-analytics-to-increase-conversions-at-wpmu-dev/
May not happen, but I’ll ask anyway:
The ability to create an email newsletter that strips the thumbnails and post excerpts to an email. The reason is some prefer emails and just will never get RSS.
Thanks.
A simple, personal blog theme (no tumblr, like in the style as your Placeholder-theme) is overdue.
I think BuddyPress integration should happen with whole WooFramework in order to have all themes automatically skinned for BuddyPress and not just with Canvas theme.
That would require a lot of custom styling per theme, so we couldn’t make it into our framework. It would have to be done on a per theme basis like with Canvas.
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