With only 3 days left of this year we thought it only fitting to sum up the whirlwind year that was 2011. I asked a few of the WooTeam members what their favourite themes were, and their favourite moments in the year, to summarise how much we actually packed into the last 365 days. In no particular order:

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We wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas, so we had Matty write a little poem for you instead…

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the forum
Not a ninja was stirring… not even Warren.
The tickets were cleared by the dozen with care,
In hopes that to “zero” count, soon would be there.

The users were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of theming danced in their heads.
And Jeff in his coup, and Mole in his pen,
Have settled their heads until 2011′s end.

When yesterday there arose such a clatter,
Of year-end forum threads and final Lighthouse matters,
Away to our laptops we flew like a flash,
Loading Google Chrome and clearing the cache.

(several verses removed for brevity)

With all tickets cleared and a new year upon us,
Let us reflect on the year, and all the Woo-greatness,
As we close up our laptops and logout on the site,
“Happy Woo-mas to all, and to all a good-night!”

Merry Christmas everyone!

Today we get bring two amazing plugins together with the launch of our Gravity Forms Product Add-ons extension, developed by Lucas Stark.

And as this is to be the last WooCommerce drop before the new year, we’d also like to briefly recap our achievements since WooCommerce launched back in September.

Gravity Forms Extension

With the Gravity Forms Product Add-ons extension, advanced product configuration forms can be built and linked to any product in WooCommerce. Forms that contain conditional logic, pricing fields, user input prices, conditional-pricing fields, conditional submit button logic can all be created for your products. Additionally, any product that contains a Gravity Form is tracked in the cart to ensure, no matter how complex your product form only unique configurations are added to the cart and duplicates are incremented in quantity.

The Gravity Forms Product Add-ons extension gives you full control over how the display of the prices in the store should appear. You can use the default price displays that WooCommerce will display, or in the case of a configurable product containing pricing fields, set the price to something such as “As Low as $1000”.

You also have control over when the built in automatic price calculation will be displayed, if at all, and have the ability to configure each label individually.

A demonstration of what's possible with Gravity Add-ons

2011 – A great year for WordPress e-commerce

The final quarter of 2011 has been a very exciting time for us. Not only have we released some awesome themes, but in September we also dived in at the deep end of the WordPress plugins ecosphere with the launch of WooCommerce.

We’ve worked incredibly hard on building a reliable, feature rich eCommerce solution. It has since been supplemented with dozens of premium products which either extend the default functionality, or provide a gorgeous front end to your online stores.

To reflect on our progress, here’s a quick roundup of our WooCommerce specific achievements;

• Almost 40,000 downloads, eclipsing the codebase from which WooCommerce was forked
• Launched 49 premium extensions including payment gateways which make WooCommerce a realistic option for businesses the world over
• Nurtured an active WooCommerce developer community enabling Woo members to monetise their own WooCommerce extensions, ipso facto delivering a greater number of high quality extensions to the WooCommunity at large
• Launched 15 WooCommerce specific themes including child themes for some of our most popular parent themes, and our free theme; Wootique which has been downloaded over 10,000 times.
• Facilitated many free plugins built upon WooCommerce

WooCommerce has truly taken the eCommerce niche within WordPress by storm. We’re extremely proud of the progress we’ve made so far, and excited to continue that through 2012.

Merry Christmas

Just in case you’ve missed it, don’t forget to check out our WooCommerce Xmas bundle. 3 WooCommerce themes, 8 extensions (including table shipping) for $150 – a massive saving of 45%.

And for today only you can get 35% off any individual WooCommerce product using the code 12DAYSWC.

Have a great Christmas!

We recently ran a survey to which 2000-odd of you responded (thanks for that by the way). We wanted to figure out how you were using WordPress and how we could potentially improve that experience in 2012.

Some of the interesting facts that we managed to extract from the survey:

• 74% of you regard yourself as a designer or a developer and rate yourself a 3 or 4 (out of 5) in terms of your technical ability with WordPress. We like this!
• Most of you have worked with WordPress for more than a year and almost 50% of the respondents have worked with WordPress for more than 3 years.
• A whopping 90% of you believe that WP is a fully-fledged CMS already. (We’d like to believe that we’ve helped to show what WP is capable of through some of the extensive features that we have included in our themes in the past.)
• 26% of you said that WP Menu’s (which we contributed to the WP core) was the best recent feature addition to WordPress. Muchos!

Even better than a few “boring” numbers & percentages, we designed an awesome infographic, thanks to the talented Studio Muti, to showcase our findings from the survey: 

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The mysterious Bek.

A rather confusing title I bet you’re thinking?

Back in June this year a freelance digital designer by the name of Bek, from Moscow, submitted a design to us called Olya. I had difficulty finding Bek’s full name (it would help if I understood Russian), or the meaning of Olya, but we loved the design submitted and were keen to develop it as a theme.

6 months later we’ve finally had the time to give it the TLC it deserves, and pack it full of useful features. Today we’ve launch this versatile AND responsive business/portfolio theme.

The homepage of Olya comes with a slider, powered by the FlexSlider script and it’s own custom post type. With some creative placements of imagery, videos and content (as you can see in the demo) the slider really can pull off quite a variety of tasks. All the while being viewed on most mobile devices. The homepage also allows you to display portfolio items, blog posts and featured content in “Mini-feature” modules.

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When we first released WooCommerce almost 3 months ago, we always felt that the amount of payment gateways that we support would be crucial in making WooCommerce accessible to as many users as possible. Payment gateways are still very localized to this extent and even a platform as big as PayPal, isn’t available in all countries.

So with this in mind, we’re releasing three new payment gateway extensions today:

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WordPress 3.3 “Sonny” has been released. Frantic updating ensues… Right?

We’ve been testing WP 3.3 internally for the last couple of weeks and it’s already running on all of our demo’s. We’re happy to report that we’ve not found any issues with our themes running on WP 3.3, which means you are safe to update and take advantage of the new goodies included in Sonny.

We did however notice that in some rare cases, the spiffy new media uploader seemed to be broken when using a WooTheme. This is however solved by clearing your cache and refreshing your WP admin page. So don’t be alarmed if your first image upload doesn’t go as well as planned.

If you’ve already upgraded to WP 3.3: What is your most favourite new feature?

The nominations for the 2011 Crunchies are now open and we’ve been nominated in 3 categories. We’re hoping that the whole WooCommunity can get behind us and vote for us!

Here’s the categories we’ve been nominated in (click on the links to vote):

• Best Bootstrapped Startup
• Best International Startup
• Best Design

You can vote once per day until Tuesday, 13 December. Please click on the links above and vote for Woo!

Today’s release is a beauty. A few months back we asked the talented Mr. Chris Rowe, who’s helped design a handful of our business, photography and personal themes, to design his first WooCommerce specific theme. Needless to say, he didn’t let us down and brought his usual attention to detail, clean styling, and crisp typography to the table to produce “Sliding”.

Sliding is a design that although hugely flexible in implementation I believe is tailor suited for online fashion stores. With a flexible slider designed for portrait shaped imagery your product line is presented professionally, whilst easily accessible. They key to any online store’s success is good photography and this theme shines with it.

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Our latest theme release has been sitting on the backburner for a while now, ever since it was initially released as a Tumblr theme (which we’ve since discontinued). Not letting it go to waste the designer, and co-founder of WooThemes, Magnus Jepson hoped to find some time to give it some WordPress love and subsequently a more impressive feature-set. As can be seen on this blog we’ve been pretty busy this year so he only found the time a month ago, but we are very happy to finally get this out.

The Beveled homepage.

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The WooAffiliates widget options.

Over the past few weeks we’ve been brainstorming ways of helping our affiliates advertise our themes in an efficient, professional manner. Previously, you’ve been limited to advertising banners and text links that you can manually place anywhere in blog posts, text/adsense widgets, sidebars and footers. Today we launch the “WooAffiliates” plugin that takes this a step further.

Available from the WordPress plugin repository you can now download and activate this light plugin that then enables a “WooAffiliates” widget. This widget comes with numerous simple display controls and a place to add your WooThemes username that automagically recognizes you as a WooThemes affiliate. Place this widget in a widgetized region and voila, you can proudly market WooThemes and start making money from sales referred from your site.

With version 1 of the plugin you can display a specific theme, the most popular in the past 30 days, a random theme, or the latest theme. Place this widget more than once if you like to highlight different themes in different areas of your site.

The code wranglers Matty and Warren have loads of plans to make this plugin/widget even more powerful and useful as a sales tool for you, all the while giving you complete control as to what and how you want to display it – subtly or more prominently.

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You may know who WooThemes is and what it is we do, but you probably don’t know much about each individual ninja. We’re hoping to change that now with a video series we’re calling, “Getting To Know Woo.”

This was an idea I had to not only show off our genius ninjas, but as a consumer I also like to see the people behind the company. This is our attempt at opening ourselves up a little more, and having some fun while we’re at it. I know Adii talks and blogs a lot about how WooThemes as a business is run, now let’s meet the people behind the themes, plugins, designs, and all the WooThemes goodness.

Our first brave guinea pig is Jeff. Checkout our interview below. Apologies if you have a hard time hearing, our audio will be better for the next one.

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Seems like everyone is wondering where this year has gone? Here at WooHQ we know exactly where it has gone for Jay and Mike in the WooLabs – in developing a wealth of value with WooCommerce extensions, themes and child themes for a fast growing community of users.

WooCommerce 1.3

Today see’s the release of WooCommerce version 1.3. A significant upgrade with a rewritten tax module, Schema.org markup for products and reviews (a standard used for Google to make products machine readable), free shipping coupons, improved interfaces for orders and various other improvements and fixes that can be viewed in the changelog.

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