The WooThemes Blog

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!

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: 

Continue Reading »

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:

Continue Reading »

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!

First off, we’d like to wish all of our users who celebrate Thanksgiving, a very happy & blessed Thanksgiving.

And with that, we’d like to make this time of the year even better, with our Black Friday Weekend promotion. We’ve got a range of coupon codes for various discounts on various products / subscriptions in what we’re billing as the “Loads of Discounted Awesomeness” promotion. Here’s all the details… 

Continue Reading »

Andy Rutledge

The internet has become our primary source for all of our news on any topic, on any given day. It’s safe to say that the internet-age has revolutionized the way we consume & interact with the news, yet news publishers have still not fully embraced these new trends, instead preferring to stick to their tried-and-tested, print-based best practices.

In August, Andy Rutledge, published an article (which is unfortunately not available anymore, but you can read a few of the reactions on this article here) on how he felt digital news was broken. Using The New York Times as a case study for his article, he included a proposed redesign of their website, which garnered a lot of attention from the design community; especially due to Andy’s bold, innovative – but well-thought-out – suggestions.

This design came to our attention at that time and we subsequently swooped and purchased the rights to release it here on WooThemes. Today then marks the release date of the fantastically-designed, Currents.

Continue Reading »

Phew. That title was a mouthful.

It is exactly a month since we launched WooCommerce V1.0 and a lot has happened in that month:

• WooCommerce has continued to gain a lot of traction within the WooCommunity (and great WordPress community), which has seen the plugin been downloaded almost 14 000 times already.
• We’ve released 4 parent themes and 6 child themes for WooCommerce already. The stunning – and free – Wootique has already amassed almost 6000 downloads by itself.
• In addition to the themes, we’ve released 20 extensions to WooCommerce, which further builds on the functionality in the plugin. We now support multiple payment gateways too, which supports our vision of democratizing WooCommerce as much as possible.

With all of that in mind, we’re kicking off the next 30 days with a new version of WooCommerce and a couple of other goodies. Here we go with the details… 

Continue Reading »

We’re incredibly proud to announce that WooCommerce has just hit 10 000 downloads in less than 3 weeks. Insane, right?

To thank all of our users that have downloaded WooCommerce, used it and reported some bugs or suggested some features, we’d like to run a little celebration promotion for the next 48 hours.

For Existing Club Subscribers

We love you for all your loyal support, so you’re getting a proper bonus in this promotion. Use the coupon code “WCSUB” (which is also available via your user dashboard) to purchase any WooCommerce extensions, themes or child themes and we’ll give you a whopping 50% discount.

For Everyone Else

We weren’t gonna leave you out of this fun… You can use the coupon code “WC10K” to purchase any WooCommerce extensions, themes or child themes and we’ll give you a a very neat 30% discount.

“Logic” also dictates that you might just want to upgrade to one of our Club Subscriptions and then just use the “WCSUB” coupon to get a bigger discount on WooCommerce extensions.

Keep the downloads coming!

We launched WooCommerce yesterday and with many new products suddenly flooding into the WooThemes infrastructure, we had to accommodate them in some way (especially in terms of the WooThemes Club and our subscribers on those plans). Having interacted with many of our subscribers in the last 24 hours, we have decided to change the terms of our club subscriptions to be both fair to subscribers, but also viable to us – as a company – in the longer term. 

Continue Reading »

We launched the “new” WooThemes about 2 weeks ago and included in this launch was a complete overhaul of our backend and your user dashboard. We’ve included some of the details of this in our launch post, but since we have now stabilized (after some minor niggles), we’d like to take you through a proper tour of all the new stuff.

The Dashboard

The Central Hub of your WooThemes Activity

The new user dashboard is basically the culmination of this overhaul and is now the central hub of everything that happens in & around WooThemes and that relates to your account.

You can now do all of this directly from your dashboard (the links are for preview images specifically for non-WooThemes user who can’t log in & play with this awesomeness):

• Your Account Status. We wanted to use the dashboard to give you a full overview of what’s happening on your account & the status thereof. To this extend, we show all of your purchases here & the status of your subscription (if you have one). In addition to this, we have a proper account statement available, which gives you an in-depth and complete look at all of the transactions you’ve made.
• Theme Downloads. If you’ve purchased individual themes only, you can download your themes straight from your dashboard. And then we have a dedicated downloads page available if you have an active subscription, which includes information on the release date of the theme, the current version and when it was last updated.
• Subscription Management & Upgrades. In the past, we had to manually manage your subscription and process any upgrades (from a Standard to a Developer Package or a Standard to a Developer Club Subscription). With the new dashboard, it is now possible to pause & reactivate your subscription automagically whenever. It’s also possible to upgrade a Standard Package (to Developer) by simply paying the difference between the accounts and having the upgrade available immediately.
• Bonus Theme Management. Both our Standard & Developer Packages come with bonus themes. In the past, you either had to select your bonus themes on checkout or we needed to manually add these for you afterwards. Now you have those credits available on your account and you can redeem them in return for some new themes any time you need to or when you just feel the urge. The bonus themes available to you are the portfolio of themes available at the time of purchase, not themes released after that date.
• Account Balances & Credits. So this is something new which we’ve decided to introduce with the new dashboard. In the past, when you earned an affiliate commission, that balance would’ve needed to accumulate to exceed $50 before it meets our minimum release level. We have however decided to make it easier for you to spend that money with us again (since many of our users never reach the $50 release level), by either applying it towards another purchase or by being social and sending it to a friend.
• Activity Stream. We’re incredibly curious about how you’re using WooThemes, because we want to create a better user experience for you. For this, we created a brand new activity stream so that we can track your interactions and improve that. Apart from helping us improve Woo in this way, we think this is a pretty nifty feature to have…

Continue Reading »

This is the backstory… We pride ourselves on being transparent, honest and proactive when we talk to our customers. We’ve never avoided a challenging discussion and we’ll also be first in saying sorry when we have screwed up. The reality is that it doesn’t matter how awesome we are 99,9% of the time, we will have slip-ups, we will frustrate some users sometimes, and that’s why we are quick to apologize and quick to react & rectify a bad situation.

Back to the current day…

A couple of weeks ago, we were made aware of serious security flaws & vulnerabilities in the TimThumb script (by a 3rd-party developer), which we use to dynamically resize user images in our themes. We reacted immediately by updating & securing all of our themes and making these new versions available to our users. In our mind, we had taken due action, and based on the minimal bad reports we had from our users, this didn’t seem to be a widespread problem.

Things went relatively quiet for the few days after the blog post and we were helping out a small handful of our users that had been adversely affected by the security flaws. But then we started noticing that more & more users were complaining of an issue and two weeks after the initial blog post, we released further updates to our themes (to make it easy to spot & fix the vulnerabilities easily), as well as sending out an e-mail newsletter to all of our users, advising them that the issues were indeed critical and that it required urgent & decisive action on their part to resolve this.

Unfortunately this was too late for some of our users, who had already had their sites compromised as a result of the vulnerabilities. This is what we’ve learnt from this experience:

Continue Reading »

Since announcing the upcoming release of WooCommerce, things are heating up considerably for the launch, on all fronts… Don’t worry though, we are focussing our attention on what’s important – making it the best it can be.

We’d like to know which payment gateways you’re using at the moment, or which you would consider using along with WooCommerce. Support for as many payment gateways as possible is something which we’ve decided is an integral part of WooCommerce and your usage thereof. We know all too well that online payment processing generally sucks, so we’re hoping to give you as many options as possible and not impose limitations.

We’ll be prioritizing what gateways to add based on their popularity you help us determine. For this, we’ve created a new section on WooIdeas, where you can submit your gateway requests and vote for others.

Most of these won’t make the V1 release of WooCommerce in a couple of weeks’ time, but thereafter we hope to add support for 1 or 2 gateways a week. If your preferred gateway is top of the list, it’ll be added first. So get voting now!

This is going to be a massive post, stocked with so many exciting announcements.

Heck, this is one of the most epic and exciting announcement posts we have written in our 3+ years of existence. We know that you’ve been waiting for such announcements for a very long while now (thank you for your patience in that regard), but we also know that not even if you had psychic abilities would you have been able to see some of this coming.

Hold tight, here we go…

The WooTeam grows

Skwizz on over to our Meet the Team page and you’ll see that the WooTeam has grown to a whopping 15 members. So let’s welcome our new team members:

You should all know Jay & Mike by now. We’ve been collaborating with them on our application themes and they’ve already delivered the beauties which we call FaultPress & SupportPress. Previously, they were only working with us on a part-time basis and our application theme collaboration was more an explorative side-project. They however join us full-time as of 1 September to head up a brand new division within WooThemes that we’re calling WooLabs (more on that later).

As you should also know, we’ve been on a big drive to improve our support & customer service in the last year. So we’re also happy to welcome Scott to the team, as our latest Ninja. Scott has been trolling the support forum over the last week, where he’s been helping to deliver happiness to WooUsers. If you spot him around, say “Hi!”.  

Continue Reading »

We rolled out our biggest project ever on Monday: a brand new user dashboard. Suffice to say, the launch has not been without its own set of (unique) issues. But that’s pretty much expected, right?

We’d be lying if we said that we thought it would be possible for us to rewrite the whole core of WooThemes.com and not have one bug after launch. Doing that would’ve required super-human powers and an enormous amount of good luck. It is however always our aim to deliver a superior experience to the WooCommunity.

So as things stand, there are quite a few bugs (80% of them are minor) present at this stage. We’re working incredibly hard to address these in the most efficient and speedy way possible. In the meantime, we’re very sorry about the issues that are awaiting resolution and very sorry about the frustration & below-par experience you’ve had in some parts of the dashboard.

Feel free to get in touch with us via e-mail if you’re experiencing any niggles on your account. We’ll try to temporarily sort something out for you, whilst we wait for the bugs to be fixed.

18 months of blood, sweet & tears, thousands of lines of new code, Basecamp threads & to-do lists that stretch miles, that coupled with a considerable amount of patience and we’re finally ready to introduce you to the next iteration of WooThemes. Phew…We’ve revised WooThemes from the ground up, which means you now have a brand new user dashboard, new profile page, new support forum / help desk, new checkout pages… Basically just loads of new things… The whole core of WooThemes has been re-written and re-designed to create a much better user experience in & around WooThemes.

The New User Dashboard

Continue Reading »