Over the past few months we’ve been settling into our new head office here in Cape Town South Africa, where 7 of us work from. Only three doors down from our old one that we outgrew in August last year… It has certainly taken a good amount of time to design, decorate and renovate the office, but we are finally happy with the end result.

A couple weeks ago a good friend of mine, the multi-talented Mr Andrew Schär offered his film skills to showcase our new offices and our day-to-day activities. He’s done a stellar job of documenting WooHQ in an epic cinematic style. We really appreciate his time and effort in trying to make us look good, and really recommend his services.

Best viewed fullscreen and in HD.

Andy has written a blog post on his new site detailing the process and technical details of his SLR videography experiment.

Our next challenge – documenting all 17 team members spanning the world!

Version 1.4 is perhaps not a massively exciting release for the end-user, but for developers it’s a biggy. We’ve re-written large chunks of code, made all round refinements to the plugin for our plans going forward, and optimised performance levels. Of course we’ve added some more bells and whistles too, but a lot of the changes are under the hood.

New Functionality

• Support for multiple and stacked (compound) taxes
• Multiple taxes shown in order total tables

Compound taxes can now be added and are worked out on the fly on checkout.

• Option to re-order shipping methods
• Category widget improvements – ‘order by option’ and an option to show current children only
• Added local pickup and local delivery shipping methods (thanks Patrick Garman)
• International shipping method (based on flat rate)
• Locale options for country address formatting and checkout fields
• Random products widget, thanks to Geert De Deckere

Front-end + Theming Optimizations

For designers and developers using WooCommerce you’ll find 1.4 specifically useful for a number of reasons:

• Improved default theme
• Moved many shortcodes (contents) to template files for easier customisation
• Added a simple, basic method of adding woocommerce support to themes using a woocommerce.php file based on page.php containing woocommerce_content()
• Coupon entry form on checkout (optional)
• If there is limited stock, quantity input plus button won’t go higher
• ‘Chosen’ selects for country/state select inputs (optional) – a great script for improving usability

UI improvements with select boxes.

Backend + Integration

• Admin interface improvements

The product data has had a clean up and is now presented in neat tabs.

• Piwik tracking – requires http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-piwik/
• Option to ‘Delete all variations’
• Tweaked visibility settings and made them more clear
• Added address meta to users panel
• Added address data to edit users screen
• Enabled product custom fields panel

Geek stuff

If you choose to not read any of the below, read this – we’ve made many minor fixes and improvements.

More payment gateway extensions

Last, but certainly not least we have 2 more payment gateway extensions available as of today, with some big extensions in the pipeline nearly ready.

MercadoPago

The MercadoPago gateway plugin allows to offer your clients any payment method supported by MercadoPago, including credit card, Pago Fácil / Rapipago and much more. MercadoPago is the payment gateway behind MercadoLibre, the largest e-commerce provider in Latin America.

Moneris Gateway

Moneris processes more than 3 billion credit and debit card transactions a year, for over 350,000 merchant locations across North America.

Moneris is primarily used by Canadian merchants looking to accept Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and AMEX through a wide variety of options.

An all new user guide

Along with the release of WooCommerce 1.4 today also see’s the release of our new plugin documentation and user guide, efficiently housed in a Wikeasi theme installation. It’s a work in progress that we plan to constantly update, but already it’s a huge improvement over our existing user guide and codex pages.

The Wikeasi powered WooCommerce docs.

A WooCommerce public forum

After careful deliberation we have also decided to open a forum available to all WooCommerce users who freely register on the WooCommerce page to download the plugin. This forum will be supporting the growing community BY the community. We cannot guarantee any support to be provided by our ninjas, however we will be closely monitoring the threads for bugs, feature requests and general recommendations. We have a lot of active, passionate, and helpful WooCommerce users who would love to interact with likeminded individuals. Perhaps you’ll even meet someone in the forums to work on a WooCommerce extension or a client project together? You never know.

The reason for the price increase, apart from the obvious being inflation after keeping our prices constant since 2007, is that we now support a portfolio of 123 themes, the mothership that is WooCommerce, and have a team of staff of 18.

Existing active club members monthly subscription costs will not be increased

After much deliberation and number crunching the good news for active club members is that we are grandfathering you into the new pricing, meaning you will not be experiencing any prices hikes and will remain on the same monthly charge as you have been previously. Your monthly membership fees will remain the same until you cancel your membership.

The new club membership pricing.

Disclaimer: This is a long post, but we guarantee you it’s worth the read. This is a big theme release!

Today sees the release of a theme that us at WooHQ are hugely excited about – partly because we have a few musicians within the team who are passionate about creating something they’d personally want to use, and partly because of the innovative modules and thinking that has gone into it’s development. We present to you “Unsigned”.

Unsigned was initially designed by our friend Ryan Downie, given the brief to design a modern version of one of our older, popular themes Backstage, all the while keeping it hugely versatile in it’s usage, for individual artists/musicians, as well as bands – spanning all genres of music. A rather difficult brief, but one that we feel Ryan mastered.

Matt was tasked with it’s development, whilst Mike given the design to slice, dice and convert into a WooFramework powered theme. As a musician and former band manager and promoter, Matt approached Unsigned from that angle- what would a musician, band manager or promoter want out of the theme?

The Unsigned homepage, as customized on our demo. And boy can you customize it, thanks to complete widget and theme option control!

One of the major advantages of Unsigned is that the artist has full control over the technical nature of their exposure. Whether aware of it or not. The functionality has been developed to anticipate the needs of the artist without them needing to add any extra code. This same approach is working hand in hand with our modular coding approach, making the code both smooth for the customer and swiftly maintained by us. The Unsigned homepage is almost completely controlled by widgets and a comfortable amount of theme options, making it hugely flexible (something a couple users expressed interest for yesterday).

A run down of the various Unsigned modules

Let’s jump straight into the various theme modules as there is a lot to cover.

Custom post types power Unsigned, and the Events module has a particularly clever one.

Events Module

Woo – Events caters for the management and listing of events (gigs, festivals, etc). Events can be grouped into categories (club, concert, gig, festival, etc) and tours. These are both custom taxonomies.

An event’s status (upcoming, right now, past) is determined by it’s start and end date/time. It’s also possible to select one of these types for display in the Woo – Events admin, making it easier to view snapshots of your events calendar.

The events module and the widget that controls it. Simple.

Woo – Events comprises 3 widgets as well as a custom “Tours” page template. The widgets are for listing events, tours and tour dates for a specific tour. The events widget has options to display all events, upcoming events, past events, events happening right now, events happening this weekend and events taking place in the current week. The “Tours” page template serves as an archive for listing tours listed on the website. These link to tour detail pages where the events for that tour are listed.

Venue listing, as well as links to online ticket sales and an optional price display are available per event.

Discography Module

Woo – Discography is where the artist manages their album releases. Albums can be sorted into categories and comprise a cover image, unique catalog ID and a release date.

Each album has an audio player facility, which uses tracks that are uploaded directly when adding or editing an album. The tracks can be re-ordered and managed using native WordPress lightbox windows.

The album widget placed on the homepage, and it's controls.

If WooCommerce is installed, each album displays an option to link the album to a product. If there is a link made, an “Add to cart” button for that product will be displayed alongside the album on it’s detail screen, as well as in the Woo – Albums widget. View the shop page here.

An album page with WooCommerce enabled allowing you to sell your albums.

Woo – Discography contains two widgets: the Woo – Albums widget, to list either all albums or albums in a specific category, and the Woo – Album Player widget, to list and play tracks from a specific album using an HTML5 audio player.

Photos Module

Woo – Photos is where the artist manages their photo galleries. Galleries can be sorted into categories and comprise a cover image and photo management section.

The photo management section is a clear and easy to use box in the admin that allows for the quick uploading, management (re-ordering, etc) and inclusion of images in the gallery. This is then applied on both the gallery detail screen and the Woo – Photos widget.

Woo – Photos comprises two widgets: Woo – Photos and Woo – Galleries. Woo – Photos displays either all photos with a limit count, or X number of photos from a specific gallery. Woo – Galleries displays a list of the photo galleries available, either in a specific category or across all categories.

Videos Module

Woo – Videos is where the artist manages their embedded videos from YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Videos can be sorted into categories and comprise an optional posterframe and an embed code field.

Woo – Videos consists of a single Woo – Embed widget which, similarly to our standard widget, displays videos from a specific video category or all videos, allowing for the quick switching between videos.

Band Module

Woo – Band Members is where the artist manages their band member profiles. This section consists of a “mugshot” image and a “role” field, for the band member’s role in the band (eg: guitarist).

Woo – Band Members also consists of a single “Band Members” page template, which lists the band members in the order they are set to display in. This can be re-arranged via the “order” field when adding/editing a band member.

Their band biography is added via the content area. View the biography page here.

Homepage slider

As has become a favourite within our themes, Unsigned includes Woo – Slides. This module displays a large background image on the homepage, as well as a slider content area above the content on the homepage. When navigating through the slider, the background image fades to the appropriate image.

These images are added using the slider image field.

Soundcloud integration

Woo – SoundCloud is a bridge between Unsigned and SoundCloud. When a username is specified, the system connects to SoundCloud and retrieves the user’s tracks and playlists.

These two content types are outputted via a Woo – SoundCloud – Playlist widget for specific playlists and a Woo – SoundCloud Tracks widget to display individual players for specific tracks.

This data is cached for a month to avoid speed issues and high load. It is possible to force-refresh this data via a “Refresh SoundCloud Data” button, made available under the “SoundCloud” tab in “Theme Options”.

Changing to a light style is as simple as flicking a switch. As is changing the logo. Transforming the look.

Adding a different background image, and using some different homepage widgets further demonstrates the theme's flexibility. All done in 5 minutes...

Spend another 5 minutes with the theme and can you imagine the possibilities? You have to view the theme listing for more information on all the functionality packed into this theme. Trust us!

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

P.S. Thanks to Captain Stu for letting us feature them and their awesome music in our demo.

Unique Features

• 
  

  Fully Responsive Design

  The design will scale to fit on all browser widths/resolutions and on all mobile devices. Go ahead and scale your browser window and see the results.

• 
  

  Custom Homepage

  The homepage is one hugely flexible layout powered by widgets and theme options  that allow you to enable/disable each and every module. You can really create whatever layout you like, highlighting only your most important information to grab your site visitors attention.

• 
  

  Events Module

  Caters for the management and listing of events (gigs, festivals, etc). Events can be grouped into categories (club, concert, gig, festival, etc) and tours. An event’s status (upcoming, right now, past) is determined by it’s start and end date/time. It’s also possible to select one of these types for display in the Woo – Events admin, making it easier to view snapshots of your events calendar.

• 
  

  Discography Module

  Discography is where the artist manages their album releases. Albums can be sorted into categories and comprise a cover image, unique catalog ID and a release date. Each album has an audio player facility, which uses tracks that are uploaded directly when adding or editing an album. The tracks can be re-ordered and managed using native WordPress lightbox windows. You can then link WooCommerce products to albums allowing you to sell your albums easily on your site!

• 
  

  Photos Galleries Module

  Photos is where the artist manages their photo galleries. Galleries can be sorted into categories and comprise a cover image and photo management section. The photo management section is a clear and easy to use box in the admin that allows for the quick uploading, management (re-ordering, etc) and inclusion of images in the gallery. This is then applied on both the gallery detail screen and the Woo – Photos widget.

• 
  

  Videos Module

  Videos is where the artist manages their embedded videos from YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Videos can be sorted into categories and comprise an optional posterframe and an embed code field.

• 
  

  Featured Slider

  As has become a favourite within our themes, Unsigned includes Woo – Slides. This module displays a large background image on the homepage, as well as a slider content area above the content on the homepage. When navigating through the slider, the background image fades to the appropriate image.

• 
  

  Soundcloud Integration

  Woo – SoundCloud is a bridge between Unsigned and SoundCloud. When a username is specified, the system connects to SoundCloud and retrieves the user’s tracks and playlists. These two content types are outputted via a Woo – SoundCloud – Playlist widget for specific playlists and a Woo – SoundCloud Tracks widget to display individual players for specific tracks.

• 
  

  WooCommerce Goodness

  Unsigned makes full use of WooCommerce allowing bands.musicians to sell their albums and other merchandise. We’ve painstakingly married the theme and plugin to provide a seamless front-end experience. Every single one of WooCommerce widgets has been lovingly styled to match the beautiful design, as has each key component of the plugin such as the product categories, product descriptions, cart, checkout and user account sections. Read all about the benefits of WooCommerce here.

• 
  

  Custom typography

  You can customize the typography in the theme to suit, and there is full support for Google Fonts in the font selector. By default it is using the Bitter font.

• 
  

  Custom widgets

  The theme has a Homepage widgetized region (on install it comes pre-populated with the default modules that you can then overwrite), 1 widgetized sidebar and up to 4 footer widgetized areas. In the demo we’ve used our powerful sidebar manager to then overwrite the default sidebar widgetized region with a unique sidebar for the homepage. This is entirely possible for you to do with any widgetized region. This theme comes with a wealth of custom Woo Widgets like an Album, Events, Galleries, Photos, Soundcloud, and videos widgets, as well as the usual custom Woo Widgets (Ad Space, Blog Author, Embed/Video, WooTabs, Subscribe & Connect, Search, Flickr and Twitter). WooCommerce also includes an array of custom widgets.

• 
  

  Styling Options

  The theme includes a default dark style, as well as light style which you can preview in the demo, it and also has styling options for the transparency of modules, background color/image and setting link and button color.

Simplify. Work out the kinks. Re-focus.

That’s our plan for 2012, discussed in meticulous detail over the past couple weeks during Magnus’s visit to Cape Town. Exactly what that entails remains top secret for now. What we hope will increase happiness levels amongst our users is our quest to make our support structures more efficient. Working out the kinks.

With 123 themes and 123 theme docs, and other support resources including a knowledgebase, FAQs, a support forum, tutorials and a video library catering for over 130,000 users it’s very much a daunting work in progress that we are tackling one resource at a time. Below details some of the work going on behind the scenes recently.

Talking 2012 strategy with our latest board member - Adii Junior.

Email

Mid last year we implemented Assistly, a customer service system, to manage our pre-sales and administration email. Previously, we simply used Google Mail and thanks to IMAP between myself, Adii and Ryan we managed to keep the mailbox under control and synchronised. We still use Google Apps to deliver our mail, but thanks to Assistly we now have a sexy, fast interface to use, we can assign mail easier, track response times and draw all sorts of interesting reports on customer interactions, resolve email threads, as well as manage our social media channels, like Twitter, without worrying about numerous staff members replying to the same tweets. There are a wealth of other facilities we are yet to tap into, but hope to explore soon.

Capacity wise we now have Ryan in the United States, Sven in China, and Adii overseeing the inbox here in South Africa – covering all time zones helping us deal with the 150+ emails we receive and keep our response times impressively fast, averaging under 3 hours.

Reports gathered thanks to Assistly.

Support Forums

With the launch of our own custom membership system late last year we re-developed our forums. In the short term that meant lots of small bugs and hassles as we took the database structure of bbPress, stripped the unnecessary code and built on top of it. In the longer term it is now meaning we have far more flexibility in terms of how our forum threads are presented, managed, answered and assigned.

The team can now assign topics

Previously we used Lighthouse to track bugs/feature requests and assign to our developers/designers, but that meant logging into another system and no direct automated correlation between a user reported issue and it’s fix. We now have the assignment of threads and conversion into bug reports automated within our forums.

We also have various admin views for quick access to support threads that need attention, and a ninja leaderboard to help encourage the team when they aren’t performing as well as the rest of the team know they are capable of, so we  can pat team members on the back and reward them when they are doing well, and keep track of their targets they have to meet each month.

Useful forum tools and stats available for the team.

We’ve also implemented strict controls on who can post on a user’s thread – only the support ninjas and the user who started the topic. This may seem impractical to some, reporting the same query again, but it helps us keep track of what is resolved, with only the original poster able to open the thread again. Having a closed forum also avoid answers that might be wrong or off topic from other members, which in return ensures that we can deliver proper support from our WooNinjas.

Only topic author can reply to a topic.

A user also needs to wait for a support ninja to reply before they can comment on a thread again. They can of course edit their post, but by limiting further replies allows the support queue to stay in order. Our ninjas try to reply to the oldest posts first and as soon as a follow up post is added to the mix it goes to the back of the queue again = unhappy customer.

After posting, members are asked to wait to avoid bumping threads.

These revisions may sound rather minor, but they’ve had significant results on support levels. We are still struggling with overwhelming numbers of support queries at the moment, but have hired a new support ninja we hope to introduce soon, as well as headhunting a more senior support manager which we have no doubt will help increase capacity and customer happiness levels even further.

Videos

Some of the WP101 titles available to all our users in the support section of the site.

Video tutorials are an important part of our support resources, a more visual learning experience. We’ve recently updated our video library with our good friend Shawn Hesketh’s latest WordPress101 series that can be used by our users to train their clients, or even themselves. The WordPress101 series is geared for WordPress 3.3 so is up-to-date and hugely helpful in getting to know the WordPress system.

And there you have it, a small glimpse into the recent behind the scenes happenings at WooHQ in trying to ensure happy customers, and the often hard graft that entails.

From the outskirts it probably seems a little quiet compared to our usual lightening pace of WooCommerce development? Never fear though, inside WooLabs things are seriously heating up with a HUGE amount of time going into version 1.4, that will be one of our most noteworthy updates in our track history. That’s still a couple weeks away, with the exact release date kept mysteriously vague for now. We do however have something to tide you over. 4 exciting new extensions.

A teaser of what to expect in 1.4

As I’ve said it’s not ready yet, but you can start getting excited about it because of a number of reasons that include:

• A new default theme
• Much better and easier to use templating system for beginners
• Local and compound taxes
• Many code optimisations to improve loading time/memory

There’s loads more to it, but we can’t give away all the secrets now can we?

New WooCommerce extensions

This week sees an sms notification system for your online shop and 3 very different, equally powerful payment gateways.

 Clickatell SMS Notifications

Examples of delivery reports for orders

The Clickatell SMS Notifications plugin for WooCommerce allows you to keep you customers updated on the progress of their orders by sending them SMS notifications when their order statuses change. This extension requires a Clickatell Central API account in order to send SMS.

You can also send custom one time SMS messages by going into an order; you have the ability to send the customer a one time SMS message with whatever text you wish.

Developed by Gerhard Potgieter.

FeeFighters Samurai Gateway

This plugin allows you to take payments utilizing FeeFighters’ Samurai Payment Gateway.

Developed by Patrick Garman.

Amazon FPS Gateway

Gain your customers trust by allowing them to securely pay using their Amazon account. Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) will allow you to accept payments via credit card, bank transfer, and even through your customers Amazon balance!

Developed by Patrick Garman.

PayPal Digital Goods Gateway

This extension offers in-context payment of digital products so buyers never leave your site to pay for an order. After a buyer has purchased once with your site, they can choose to not be required to log in to PayPal for future purchases – one-click PayPal payment, but only with the PayPal Digital Goods extension.

Developed by Brent Shepherd.

Hi, I’m Tom Dent a designer, wed developer and co-founder of Double D Creative a small Cheshire based design studio I run alongside my business partner Tom Denton… hence the name ‘Double D’. We’re not brother’s as someone once thought (very odd), but we’re good friends with a passion and eye for great design and have been creating creative, engaging and functional design for traditional and digital media since we started the company in 2006. We pride ourselves in the quality of our work and attention to detail.

I’ve been working with WooThemes’ themes for the past 3 years and am a huge fan of the functionality and ease of use that the themes allow and the freedom that they give me from a design perspective. FreshNews was my theme of choice until I dived into Canvas which opened up a new world of possibilities.

We were approached by a client who was starting up a new business called Red Hat No Knickers (nothing like that you mucky people!) which is a vintage clothing store that would sell hand picked unique items of clothing. We were briefed to create a logo, branding, marketing material and online store.

The difference with this store to many others is that RHNK would only have one of each product, so rather than having a stock inventory each time a item was sold, that was it – no more! What I needed to do was make it as quick, simple and easy for the client to be able to add new items to the store. I chose the Cart 66 e-commerce plugin (this was before WooCommerce had launched!) as I had used Cart 66 before for another client and I knew that it was an simple and easy system to update.

The client requested a minimal design so I set about creating the Photoshop artwork which was signed off so I could commence the build.

The Red Hat No Knickers homepage design.

The Red Hat No Knickers product page design.

The great thing with Canvas for me is the use of Child Themes, so I only need to work with the files that need editing, rather than having the whole theme structure to work through. Using the Hook manager also allowed me to add in code directly into the header/post etc rather than having to add it to the core file.

The Products Pages

This was setup so that the client could setup a product in Cart 66 and in the then drop in a short code to the main post with the product code number such as [add_to_cart item="1234"], this would then display the ‘Add to Cart’ button or show ‘Sold’ if the product had been sold.

The Red Hat No Knickers products page.

The main image on the page is controlled by the Canvas Custom settings and via Theme Options > Dynamic Images > Single Post – Show Thumbnail. This is selected with the alignment set to left and the dimensions set to 340px by 510px. I added in the below to to the loop-archive.php page to display the image to the correct dimensions on the archive page

woo_image( 'width=340', 'height=510', 'class="rhnk-main"');

So it looks like:

while (have_posts()) { the_post(); $count++;

		woo_image( 'width=340', 'height=510', 'class="rhnk-main"');
		woo_get_template_part( 'content', get_post_type() );

	} // End WHILE Loop

The rest of the images on the page are just a standard WP gallery, unfortunately the standard WP gallery style sheet is written into the post so it overwrites and values from the theme style sheet. I found the solution at this useful post which involved copying the gallery_shortcode to the themes (Child Theme) functions.php file. You can view the full code here. Then it was just a case of adding the following to the Canvas Child Theme’s style.css file.

.gallery{
height:90px;
margin:20px 0 0 0;
}
.gallery-icon img{
float:left;
padding:2px;
background:none;
width:60px;
height:60px;
border:1px solid #B95;
margin-right:5px;
}
.gallery-icon img:hover{
background:#B95;
}

The last thing to do was add in some social network buttons to the bottom of the page, this was easily done via the hook manager and adding the standard Facebook and Twitter buttons code to the woo_post_inside_after hook so that it would be executed at the bottom of the post and inside the Div tag.

Making it Responsive…

From reading the WooThemes case study by Kris Millsap on how he made Adii.me into a responsive theme I decided to get stuck into Less Framework.

Again using the hook manager I dropped in the following code to pick up the less framework file to the wp_head hook.

Some of the LESS Framework CSS used to get RHNK responsive.

The Red Hat No Knickers responsive design

I followed the same method as Kris, in working with Firebug and identifying the class or id that needed changing then amending the less framework file and as Kris mentions in his post it wasn’t as big a job as I’d anticipated, it still took a while to do though (around 16 hours).

Thank Woo for Canvas

I’m really happy with the results of my first development with Canvas and have already updated another site (getiton.org.uk a NHS site) with Canvas and I’m in the process of completing another, much more complex site as well.

Expect this feature rich dream theme for musicians and bands, designed by Ryan Downie later this month. You might even be able to sell your albums with it…

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.

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:

Ryan Cannon Ray

I’m going to go with Wikeasi as my favorite theme of this year. It’s a hard choice to pick over other releases like SupportPress/FaultPress and our first responsive themes, but I was tasked with this theme brief during our WooTrip. Thus the research I did into it leaves a special place in my heart for Wikeasi. It was then cool to see that turned into a beautiful and functional theme thanks to Chris Rowe and our ninjas.

Wikeasi - one of our most innovative themes of 2011, yet one of the least support intensive. We hope to apply the lessons learnt here in our theme development in 2012.

Our London WooTrip was definitely my favorite moment. I had only been with WooThemes for about 3 months and I was already jet setting to London. It was so awesome to finally meet everyone at WooThemes face to face, and of course was a great week in London.

Mike Krapf

Wow!  It’s so hard to pick a favorite theme as there were so many!  If I had to pick one, it would be Kaboodle, for the subtle texture, design and muted colors which really allows the content to shine through.

This has been an amazing year at WooThemes!!!  We finally launched the new backend, added new ninjas, released WooCommerce, etc., but my absolute favorite part was the WooTrip.  It was such a pleasure meeting the entire WooTeam and getting to know everyone.  The trip was a good combination of business and pleasure and having the opportunity to meet some of the WooThemes users was an added bonus.

The WooTeam in June in Newcastle, UK. Since then it has grown from 10 to 17 members!

Scott Webb

My fave theme from the year would end up being Emporium.  I love it’s flexibility due to designed specifically for WooCommerce. I customized my version to have a photoblog/portfolio custom post types in the back but I love it even without those changes.  I love that WooCommerce works perfectly and allows for blogs to become artisan store fronts.

My fave moment has to be the opportunity to work with WooThemes and then followed by joining the team to work as a WooThemes Ninja. Close second is launch of WooCommerce as I find it’s gone deeper into WordPress and what WooThemes is doing for it’s users.

Mike Jolley

FaultPress has to be my favourite theme because of what it started. It may not have been as popular as Supportpress because of its niche appeal, but it was the first theme I worked on for Woo, the first responsive theme, and the first to utilise LESS CSS. Certainly a milestone release.

My favourite moment was probably the end of our first month after launching WooCommerce. Seeing its popularity in terms of both downloads and sales was highly motivational, and its always nice to get the thumbs up from the bossmen!

Daniel Dudzic

Favourite theme of 2011: Canvas V4 - I’m using it in almost every project  -  saved me hours in development

Favourite moment: Joining the WooTeam. It was my kind of a small dream, to join WooThemes People have been very kind and supportive during the past 3 months. The atmosphere in the team is awesome, and I’m really exited to work with such talented devs & designers. Can’t wait to visit you all in WooHQ

The new Cape Town WooHQ office renovation which we hope to share more of next month.

Sven Hutchinson

For me obviously the highlight has been joining the absolutely awesome WooTeam! I have loved the responsive and app themes that have been produced. Also, seeing the rate at which the woocommunity have been putting together sites using WooCommerce in the blink of an eye!

My favourite theme was FaultPress, a real ground breaker!

Jeffrey Pearce

From a Woo perspective it would have to be the WooTrip and learning from the technical talks at DIBI. But from an actual hard work perspective I’d say the rate of growth that we achieved while maintaining our support level is pretty awesome, as well as rolling out the new backend and responding to bugs/feature requests for it. That was stressful but impressive as to how we responded as a company – not always pretty but we were pretty effective in my opinion.

Magnus Jepson

Favorite theme Currents because of the clean and crisp design and great use of google fonts, and also the story behind the theme. It was our first normal theme to be responsive and to use Less CSS.

Favorite moment was meeting all 10 members of the WooTeam in London, being gathered for the first time all at once, getting a chance to know the people behind the avatars we see every day online.

James Koster

My favourite theme of 2011 is SupportPress. I think we really pushed the boundaries of what is possible not only with WordPress, but (at the time) with html5 and css3 delivering a feature-rich, responsive theme which transforms WP into a kick-ass help desk app.

Hard to say what my favourite moment was! I guess overall my favourite moment was actually joining the WooTeam full time. But launching WooCommerce and meeting you guys (albeit briefly) at DIBI are up there too!

Kirstin Pauk

Favourite theme: Kaboodle. Why? Without doubt one of the best business/portfolio designs that WooThemes has released. Not only is the clean design cool but it’s jam packed with features and now with the kaboodle commerce theme it’s become one of the best all round themes.

Highlight of 2011: Launch of the new backend and forum. It’s unique, easy to use and alot less complicated than the previous backend.

Matt Cohen

I’d say, regarding my favourite themes, I’d notch it up to both the Canvas revamp, which was a particularly fun and intriguing project for me with all the additions, refinements and considerations that needed to go into it, as well as Wikeasi, which was, for me, a release that was elegant and quite avant garde, in that no-one had really attempted a theme with those features before.

Other highlights from a code perspective include the Editorial columns functionality and the unique approach to Announcement.

Highlights include the WooTrip, for certain. In particular, meeting everyone for the first time, our evening out at Picadilly Circus and DIBI. Included in that are the Shelley Point trip in January and the inclusion of another animal into the WooPen (along with the “Hoender” otherwise known as Jeff), in Mole (Warren).

The beach house we stayed at for our mini WooTrip to Shelley Point in January this year. Top left: Jeff serenading Cobus with love songs.

Tiago Noronha

My favorite theme was Teamster, the reason because it kinda shows the power of WordPress as a multi-author blog where each user has their own user profile, portfolio page, etc.

My favorite moment was definitively the WooTrip. It was was awesome to get to know everyone. The group meeting we had in the hotel conference room was great because we never get the chance to do that kind of brainstorming…

Adii Pienaar

For me the highlight of 2011 was the launch of the new backend after 16 months in development, along with growing the team from 10 to 17 members this year. And WooCommerce of course. 

My favourite release of this year was Currents, and especially acquiring the design.

The WooTeam tomfoolery in June in Newcastle, UK.

Mark Forrester

For myself one of my favourite moments must have been our WooParty in London where we invited the local UK community to join us for an evening of beers, WordPress chat and ten pin bowling. I never expected 50+ people to show up in a town foreign to most our team. It was great engaging with, and getting to know the people behind the online avatars.

My favourite theme was probably the the beautiful Announcement theme, and brainstorming it’s widgetized homepage modules and various announcement themed homepage layouts.

2012 is going to be a year filled with many more big milestones and new, innovative product launches. We are excited.

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.

The Olya homepage. Too much goodness to fit into a screenshot...

Viewable on all devices, at all sizes!

What also differentiates Olya from our other portfolio themes is it’s custom single portfolio post template. With a side menu to quickly navigate through individual portfolio items, and a tabber to get through imagery within a portfolio item.

A portfolio post. Navigate via the side menu and click through images in the portfolio tabber.

We’ve also ensured Bek’s vision of a slightly more custom contact page was developed in the theme. The contact page not only includes our standard contact form, but also the individual/company’s latest tweet, physical address and a Google Map showing the location.

The custom contact page of Olya.

Have a look at Olya’s complete feature set here or experience Olya in full on the demo before letting us know what you think.

Unique Features

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  Fully Responsive Design

  The design will scale to fit on all browser widths/resolutions and on all mobile devices. Go ahead and scale your browser window and see the results.

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  Custom homepage

  With Olya your homepage can house a wealth of information all stored as modules that can be enabled/disabled including a slider, portfolio, mini-features,blog and widgetized regions.

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  Featured slider

  A custom, optional homepage featured slider to showcase noteworthy content or even your portfolio, all powered by it’s own custom post type and the fully responsive FlexSlider, which makes it usable on mobile devices.

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  Powerful portfolio management

  The portfolio section of Olya is powered by it’s own custom post type with a summary of your portfolio viewable on the homepage and then it’s own page template to house the rest. Navigate through portfolio items with a neat navigation system on the single portfolio items and a slider to view portfolio imagery.

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  Custom contact & team pages

  Your contact page can display a Google Map location, an address, a latest tweet, as well as the usual WooThemes contact form. A team page is also available to display your WordPress authors of the site with quick links to view each author’s blog archives and their social links.

• 
  

  Custom typography

  You can customize the typography in the theme to suit, and there is full support for Google Fonts in the font selector. By default it is using Lobster, Droid Sans and Droid Serif.

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  Custom widgets

  The theme has 1 widgetized sidebar and up to 4 footer widgetized areas, and as always comes with custom Woo Widgets (Ad Space, Blog Author, Video/Embed, WooTabs, Subscribe & Connect, Search, Flickr and Twitter).

• 
  

  Alternative styles

  The theme includes a variation of alternative styles which you can preview in the demo, and also has styling options for background color/image and setting link and button color.

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.

The homepage also boasts horizontal sliders to fit in lots of products, whilst keeping the homepage relatively short and compact. The shop page however lists all your products in the typical grid format, and that layout could easily be applied to the homepage should you prefer it. Characteristics of other popular Chris Rowe’s designs can be seen, like similar blog post styling and the featured slider of Delicious Magazine.

You’ve still got access to the usual WooCommerce shortcodes to place sticky notes and flash sales banners on the homepage and widgetized regions in the footer to place more accessible information.

The Sliding homepage design. Beautiful.

Have a look at Sliding’s complete feature set here or experience Sliding in full on the demo before letting us know what you think.

WooCommerce v1.3.1

Including many minor bug fixes and improvements to the core, all of which you read about in the changelog, the most noteworthy features of today’s release are the ability to re-order payment gateways and choose a default, as is shown below.

Ordering your payment gateways and picking a default one for your customers is now easy.

As well as a new “Shipping class” taxonomy for grouping products and an enhanced flat rate shipping system to give a flat rate  to each shipping class. An example of this would be grouping products under “T-shirts” and then setting flat shipping rates for that particular product group.

Shipping classes. Screenshot best viewed at full screen.

This is currently only available for flat rates, but eventually we will be applying the same logic to table shipping making it an even more powerful extension.

New extensions

Today also see’s the release of two payment gateway extensions.

Suomen Verkkomaksut Gateway

Quite a name we know. Suomen Verkkomaksut Oy is the leading e-payment method provider in Finland. The Suomen Verkkomaksut plugin extends WooCommerce allowing you to take payments via their payment portal. You need to register yourself to Suomen Verkkomaksut portal and make a contract with them to actually use this module. You can only use EUR as the currency of your WooCommerce shop.

Stripe

With Stripe you can accept all Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, JCB, and Diners Club cards directly on your store. At the moment, you must be based in the US to receive payments; this involves both having a U.S. address, and having a significant shareholder of the company with a valid SSN.  Stripe has no setup fees, no monthly fees, no card storage fees, no hidden costs: you only get charged when you earn money. You can also setup automatic money transfers to your bank account from Stripe. Stripe will then automatically transfer the money to your bank account seven days after the payment was made.

The Beveled homepage.

The beauty of Beveled is it’s simplicity. It’s not overly designed, but well coded and perfect for people wanting to customise a theme through typography, custom background images, custom logos and widgets.

Beveled is a clean yet sophisticated portfolio theme, which can be used to show off your work, or even display your photos. It is compatible with the WooTumblog plugin, which when enabled gives you access to post formats and iPhone publishing, thanks to our Express App!

It’s minimal design allows the content lots of space to breath and showcase. With a responsive design the theme adapts to the media type it is being viewed on.

The Beveled blog page with the tumblog being used.

Thanks to the custom typography editor in the theme options you can really transform it’s look by simply changing some header, paragraph, post meta and navigation font families.

The blue alternate style with the custom typgrography theme options used to transform the look of this theme.

Have a look at Beveled’s complete feature set here or experience Beveled in full on the demo before letting us know what you think.

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.

To track sales made you just need to login to your WooThemes dashboard and navigate to the affiliates page. Find out more about our affiliate program here.

Find out more about the plugin on it’s WordPress plugin repository page.

A WooAffiliates widget placed on my personal site advertising the latest WooTheme available.

Adii's site now sporting a "Powered by" WooAffiliates badge in his sidebar, showcasing the theme his site is built on top of.

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.

The re-designed orders interface.

New Extensions

3 more payment gateways, a product converter tool, and sms notifications for WooCommerce.

SMS Notifications

Decide exactly what sms messages to send your customers.

This WooCommerce SMS extension allows you to choose what SMS messages to send, what order statuses to send them on, and what the message should say. You can customise SMS messages to include order totals, order IDs, shop name and add whatever text you like. The plugin works with Mediaburst, which means you can send SMS notifications to anyone, anywhere in the world. Developed by Simon Wheatley.

WPEC to WooCommerce

This extension makes it really easy to migrate from WordPress E-Commerce to WooCommerce keeping all your products, product attributes and variations intact. Developed by Agus MU.

Klarna

Klarna was developed by Niklas Högefjord and is a great payment alternative for merchants and customers in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Germany and the Nederlands. Klarna Gateway is a plugin that extends WooCommerce, allowing your customers to get their products first and pay by invoice to Klarna later. This plugin utilizes the Klarna Invoice service (Standard Integration type).

ePay.dk

This is the payment gateway module for the Scandinavian payment gateway ePay. ePay is the leading payment system in Scandinavia, which offers payment solutions to both small and large companies. They focus on flexible, effective and user friendly payment solutions for extreme competitive prices.

Checkout.fi

The Finnish payment gateway extension Checkout.fi extends WooCommerce allowing you to take payments via Checkout.fi payment portal. It was developed by Ilari Mäkelä.

With Checkout you can accept payments made with credit cards or let your clients pay straight from their bank account using internet banking. This plugin works by generating the payment buttons to your site and then redirecting the client to the payment method that they selected.

Enter Paul Weingartz and Jon Van Rooyen of Guntribe, two Cape Town based developers with a wealth of knowledge on BuddyPress. Over the past couple months they’ve been adding new template pages, including a widgetized homepage and new settings pages, fixing styling bugs and making the child theme is 100% compatible with 1.5.x. With 2.0 development already underway.

The Canvas BuddyPress widgetized homepage.

Club members and Canvas users who’ve had access to this child theme in the past will continue to do so, whilst going forward the child theme will now be a commercial product and not be made available to new Canvas users. They’ll need to purchase the $20 child theme. This is to ensure it’s maintenance and upgrades by our collaborative partner.

Take the new Canvas BuddyPress child theme for a spin on our demo or view the theme listing here.

Let us know what you think of Canvas BuddyPress and what you want included in it going forward, we listening.

That’s right three more WooCommerce enabled WooThemes. Specifically three more WooCommerce enabled business themes. We’ve been working down our theme leaderboard chart picking the most popular themes to cater for e-commerce facilities.

There is no WooCommerce core update to report on today unfortunately, but we don’t believe that’s a bad thing. Not everyone wants to update their e-commerce plugin every week right? Even if the update is filled with awesome sauce. It also means we can concentrate more time on further refining particular modules like the tax calculations that Mike has spent a heap of time on this week. More on this soon though.

Briefed

This popular theme was designed by Cameron Moll. With it’s minimalistic, swiss influence design, and modules allowing it to function as a portfolio or business theme, with a WooCommerce child theme a photographer can now sell his/her prints using it, or Letterpress posters if you are like Cameron…

View the theme listing | Browse the demo

Buro

Designed by our Paraguayan friend Juanma Teixido this was our first responsive business theme. Now it’s a responsive business theme with e-commerce facilities. Jay has worked hard in styling the shop pages for a consistent user experience, all the while keeping all pages responsive.

View the theme listing | Browse the demo

Empire

Ryan O’Rourke designed this beauty for us with the initial intent for it to showcase real estate for agents. We turned it into a more general business theme as we thought the layout modules were generic enough. Now with a WooCommerce powered shopfront one could potentially sell houses with it! Ok maybe you’d struggle taking such large payments, but it certainly adds further appeal to this design that has grown quickly in popularity.

View the theme listing | Browse the demo

You thought that was it? We’ve got a couple more WooCommerce goodies for you:

Australia Post Shipping Method

Calculate shipping costs based on Australian post rates. Australia Post can check availability and calculate costs of the following options: Standard, Insured, Registered, Express, International (by sea), International (by air).

Canada Post Shipping Method

Similarly, the Canada Post Shipping Module is a great way to extend your customers shopping experience to include a very sophisticated shipping service. This shipping extension uses the product’s weight and dimensions to calculate the most accurate rates possible using Canada Post’s Sell-Online (http://sellonline.canadapost.ca).

Each order is automatically divided into packages of 30kg or less. It will calculate how many packages need to be sent, calculate the cost of shipping each package and display the total cost to the customer. Let your customers choose the speed and cost of delivery when they order items from your online store. This Shipping module works for both domestic and international shipments.