Breathing even more life into WooCommerce

Written by Mark Forrester on January 5, 2012 Product News.

So 2012 has finally arrived and we are getting back into the swing of things at the speed of Woo…

Shelflife is our first 2012 theme, designed and developed in-house by the talented Mr Cobus Bester, a.k.a. Fresh01. Shelflife is a clean, e-commerce focussed theme with a homepage dedicated to featured, popular and recent products with dedicated spaces for mini-features and promotions powered by their own custom post types, as well as a widgetized sidebar and footer regions. Think of it as a hybrid business and e-commerce theme where your products can be as much or as little a focus as you desire with a dedicated shop page available too.

The shop page with it's dark, prominent sidebar.

It’s default styling is clean, with heavy contrast of blacks, greys and whites with a responsive layout adapting it’s display for your media type and browser width.

The homepage promotions module powered by it's own custom post type.
As you've come to expect with most our WooCommerce themes, the layout will adapt responsively according to different media types..

Let us know what you think! Any feedback is welcome in the comments below.

Discount Coupon

Grab Shelflife with a 12% discount coupon, valid until 12 January 2012. Just use SHELFLIFE12 as your coupon code on checkout.

cta-banner-10-product-page-v2_2x

37 Responses

  1. Suren H
    January 5, 2012 at 3:42 pm #

    @Cobus Bester

    It is really fantastic theme release for the year of 2012.

    Well done! 🙂

  2. Sergei
    January 5, 2012 at 3:45 pm #

    I think it’s one of the most balanced and versitile out of all released so far and I really like it!

    One thing I would like to report tho:
    My PC went into heavy stuttering while I was browsing it (W7 x64, Chrome 16.0.912.63 m). Basically it was impossible even to close the process since there was 5-10 seconds delay between action and input. Might be some other piece of software causing it — had several programms running simultaneously.

    • Sergei
      January 5, 2012 at 4:10 pm #

      Yeap, managed to recreate it. Turns out everytime I hit “Shop” in the menu — my PC goes into heavy stuttering which one can only end up by using hard-reset.

      • Cobus Bester
        January 5, 2012 at 4:50 pm #

        Hi Sergei,

        Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We are currently inspecting the situation and will report back as soon as we’ve discovered what the problem is.

        • Rahul Sharma
          January 5, 2012 at 10:34 pm #

          I face the same problem… I had to restart my browser to get the problem solved…

          when I hi shop… entire system slowed down :/

        • rusti
          January 6, 2012 at 4:43 am #

          I just fired it up on my site and everything was going fine, then I forgot that you usually have to save all changes on the theme options when I switch between woothemes. THEN it farked the whole site and locked up even before I left the admin page. Tried another browser (chrome and firefox now) it locked up FF. They locked up so bad I had to restart the computer.

          Hope you get it fixed, I’m really looking forward to this one!!

          • Ryan Ray
            January 6, 2012 at 9:40 am #

            It’ll be fixed ASAP I presume, sorry for the trouble!

          • Cobus Bester
            January 8, 2012 at 10:03 am #

            Hey guys,

            Sorry for the troubles. It turned out to be a bizarre issue with the Google font we were using. We’ve replaced it with a different font and all should be working fine now.

  3. Case
    January 5, 2012 at 6:00 pm #

    I like this a lot, very cool theme. Nice work. 🙂

  4. Mark
    January 5, 2012 at 6:19 pm #

    This is by far the best WooCommerce theme you have. I can’t wait to see what you guys have coming up this year with WooCommerce. I was listening to the Mac Power Users Podcast with Horace Dediu the other day, and he talked a lot about disruption in particular the iPad and how it is disrupting the educational environment. . I think what you guys are doing here at Woo is completely disrupting eCommerce. This is a great start to 2012.

    • Ryan Ray
      January 6, 2012 at 9:40 am #

      Wonderful words Mark, thanks for the compliments. 🙂

  5. Lee
    January 5, 2012 at 7:32 pm #

    Nice work, guys. 🙂

    Just an FYI, something’s amiss with the purchase link in the demo top frame. It’s linking to this URL http://woo.com/2011/12/shelflife/ and 404ing.

    • Rahul Sharma
      January 5, 2012 at 10:35 pm #

      works properly for me

      • Lee
        January 6, 2012 at 6:30 am #

        It seems to have been fixed. 🙂

        • Ryan Ray
          January 6, 2012 at 9:40 am #

          Someone snuck in and fixed it. 😉

  6. Matt Alexander
    January 5, 2012 at 9:04 pm #

    Lovin’ the clean design and responsive layout. A masterpiece as always! 😉

    • Ryan Ray
      January 6, 2012 at 9:41 am #

      Many thanks Matt, are you going to put it to work sometime? 😉

  7. Rob
    January 6, 2012 at 12:15 am #

    This theme looks awesome. I have a project in mind that this will work perfectly for. I was considering using Argentum but I like this one much better as a starting point.

    Great work guys!

    • Ryan Ray
      January 6, 2012 at 9:41 am #

      Awesome, keep us posted on the progress!

  8. WPSPY
    January 6, 2012 at 10:11 am #

    Great Start.
    Any plans for a bookstore theme with woocomm

    • Jay
      January 6, 2012 at 3:11 pm #

      We like the idea but not sure what the uptake might be like. I though book stores were (sadly) dying?

      We will be looking at building more ‘niche’ WooCommerce themes in the near future though.

      • Vince LaMonica
        January 7, 2012 at 4:21 am #

        I’m in the process of creating a bookstore theme – based on woothemes/woocommerce. I run my own online bookstore at Amazon, and want to have a better storefront than what Amazon gives me, so… 🙂

        I’ve used Listings/BookClub, but it’s not quite what I’m after. Because 99% of the items I sell will actually be linked to the entry on Amazon, I decided a few weeks ago to switch to a non-listings theme. The site will be 99% woo-powered, and 1% vjl-powered. 🙂 I’ll post it in the showcase when it is done, as right now the stuff I’m doing is very, very raw. I’ve been modifying one of your woo-commerce extensions [the data import one] to work better with my book inventory software, so right now, it’s been all back-end and very little front end [i save that for last!].

        The nice thing is, when all is said and done, I’m hoping to be able easily have the setup that one can either click the Amazon button [and be taken directly to the seller’s listing] or buy direct from the seller. There are major disadvantages to doing that, so it will be an option [a lot of my inventory is physically in Amazon’s warehouse, so i don’t want to accidentally offer that for non-Amazon purchases; also, when one sells outside of Amazon, the seller is responsible for a different type of tax than when a seller sells within Amazon; it’s complicated 🙂 ].

        Anyway, because of Woo Themes and Woo Commerce, the project is finally gaining ground. There is a definite market for bookstore commerce. Most of the brick and mortar stores now have an online presence. Usually not a very good one, or one using a VERY poor bookstore e-commerce system [not wordpress powered]. It’s so poor, i am not even going to link to it. One of my goals with this project is that once I am able to ‘eat my own dogfood’ [eg: use it on my own bookstore], I want to package it up in a re-usable fashion for other booksellers. This winter I am doing quite a bit of work on this project [when woo commerce debuted, it was during the very busy season for the business, so i was not able to dedicate much time to it, plus i run a software business and a photography business, so time is always short with me!].

        Ok, this was waaaay too long a comment. Drank too much Starbucks this evening! 🙂

      • Martin from WaldWort digital publishing
        February 13, 2012 at 5:24 pm #

        nope, we are not dead, we are just changing… 😉

        There are a lot of small, independant “hybrid publishing platforms” like ours: we sell physical books (usually via Amazon, but sometimes also directly), eBooks (via on-site download, but also via partner stores like Kindle and iBooks), and we help people get their own books published (design/typo/prepress services).

        So when re-designing our website, I first fell for a nice-looking theme specifically made for Publishers (Templatic “Publisher”), but then discovered it was an untested bugged mess – and ended up with WooCommerce as the store backend.

        Now I try to mold a “made for WooCommerce”-theme (Abundance from Kriesi.at) into what I need….

        What I would love to see in a book/publishing-related theme:

        – easy ways to integrate (and display) the relevant product attributes like author, publisher, ISBN, etc. – works now via product attributes, but is a bit cumbersome, e.g. having the author name in a “more information” tab on the product page…

        – hybrid products. Right now it is not possible to have ONE product with the following variants: ebook (onsite sale, download), physical book (affiliate link), ebook other format (affiliate link), etc. This would be a much needed functionality, not only for book stores, but for many other niche stores that sell stuff through different channels…

        cheers and keep up the great work!
        Martin

  9. nichs
    January 6, 2012 at 2:57 pm #

    clean, fresh, and responsive, great stuff

  10. Basilakis
    January 6, 2012 at 4:23 pm #

    So, 2012 will also bring Affiliates Plugin for WooCommerce?

    • il vangelo di pinocchio
      January 7, 2012 at 11:31 am #

      when i will suppot an affiliate system i will be happy to use it.

  11. Ronny
    January 6, 2012 at 5:35 pm #

    WooCommerce one theme we already had long ceased. I hope that’s it now firstonce WooCommerce with the themes?

  12. David
    January 7, 2012 at 1:32 am #

    Great looking theme. Very clean.

  13. Thomas
    January 9, 2012 at 4:41 pm #

    WooCommerce Multilingual: Will this go into the WooCommerce official code?
    http://wpml.org/2011/12/woocommerce-multilingual-in-beta/

  14. Marcus
    January 9, 2012 at 6:24 pm #

    Need to standup a new Woocommerce site. I am very familiar with the Canvas theme. Question: should I go with a theme like Shelflife or….. stick with Canvas and purchase it’s e-commerce child theme?

  15. Garrett
    January 10, 2012 at 5:05 pm #

    This is the best ecommerce theme yet. I’d expect your responsive designs to outsell non-responsive ones.

    Keep it up guys! Looking forward to next Thursday.

  16. Maya
    January 10, 2012 at 7:53 pm #

    Wonderful stuff @Cobus and the WooTeam!

  17. Tutspress
    January 13, 2012 at 9:44 pm #

    Very professional ecommerce theme. Thanks for this theme and coupon code.

  18. jay
    January 16, 2012 at 6:12 pm #

    Wonder this theme or woocommerce can do these

    Can i set the product display from 4 column to 3 column ? (/shop)
    Can i set the default sorting as “Most Recent” instead of “Alphabetically” ?

  19. Jack Sternfeld
    January 18, 2012 at 4:27 am #

    I just signed up as an affiliate. I think you’ve got a lot of cool Premium eCommerce WordPress themes that the WordPress community will love – ShelfLife is one of them. Great job @Cobus and the WooTeam!

  20. Jay
    March 1, 2012 at 8:28 pm #

    I need a new theme for some new sites I plan to roll out and I am seriously considering the one featured here. It looks really nice….

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. WordPress Community Roundup for the Week Ending January 7 - Charleston WordPress User Group