All the latest news and announcements, straight from the WooThemes HQ!
Beta Testers Needed
1
18. Mar, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
We’re once again expanding our operations and our themes collection will soon be sporting some awesome new themes built for Drupal & TextPattern.
So before we’re ready to unleash these new goodies, we need to make sure that we have covered all of our bases, and that they are indeed as top-notch as we think they are! We therefore need two new beta testing groups that could help us out and give us some valuable feedback before the launch.
If you have experience with either Drupal or TextPattern, please drop us an e-mail and tell us which CMS you are interested in, and perhaps link to some projects you’ve worked on (also include a little bit of info on yourself). Once we’ve received your mail, we’ll review your credentials and add you to the appropriate beta testing group.
Your Guide to the City
17. Mar, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes
City Guide - a directory based Wordpress theme
In recent theme releases, we’ve been exploring a few niche environments, instead of the standard business or magazine theme possibilities, in the hope that we can grow the long tail of our themes collection. Based on the success of Postcard, we’ve thus decided to give the geo-location arena another go, with the release of the smashing City Guide theme.
City Guide’s design was masterfully crafted by popular web designer, Sam Brown, who we worked with towards the end of last year (yes: quality takes time). The design itself is shiny in all the right places and Sam did a great job of delivering the Apple influences that we requested, without limiting this theme as an open canvas to morph to your own needs.
Continue Reading »
Reporting for Duty
15. Mar, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
So we’re finally back at the office after our week-long “mobile officing extreme” trip to the slopes, which was indeed an amazing time for the WooTeam. If you had been following us, you’d know that there was much fun & good times to be had…
This means that we’re all refreshed and ready to rock again. We gathered some amazing ideas via all of the discussions on the trip, fueled by much Jagermeister, and we’re looking forward to roll those out in the coming months.
But first up, you can expect the release of CityGuide, which should be going out later this week. The theme is basically ready to go, and has been thoroughly beta-tested, so it’s just a matter of wrapping up the little bits & pieces and then releasing what we expect to be another hit. Thereafter we have a few more surprises (these will definitely include these two designs which we teased last week), but I’ll leave it at that…
Continue Reading »
A Designed Startup
11. Mar, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp
Ever since we started WooThemes, we’ve been absolutely fascinated with top notch design and we’d like to believe that this focus has been evident throughout all of our activities (from our themes, to the user experience on our site, our content and also our marketing campaigns). This should also be fairly obvious when you consider the amount of amazing web designers we’ve collaborated with, plus we’re always harping on about how awesome our designs are anyway…
Whilst design is ultimately subjective, one thing that can’t be disputed is the fact that our designer focus has probably contributed significantly to our success. This seems to be confirmed by startup guru, Dave McClure, in a recent BusinessWeek article about the value of design to startups:
“Design and marketing aren’t just as important as engineering: They are way more important.”
So in a very techy industry (the interwebs), there seems to be a lot of room for the more design-orientated folk among us. In the past, you could probably get by if you had a superior & groundbreaking product, but these days your competition is much tougher and you need to fight for every person that gives you their attention (superb design tends to be successful in this regard).
Continue Reading »
The Perfect Guide
10. Mar, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in Theme Concepts
After the success of Postcard (most notably for it’s niche use and integration of Google Maps), we decided to team up with Sam Brown (another top designer joining our collaborative design team) to produce another epic, niche theme that uses Google Maps.
So below is a preview of our upcoming theme, CityGuide, which went out to beta recently. If all goes well, CityGuide should be released next week, so keep watching this space! 
Framework’d: URL Shortening
08. Mar, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in Development
We have just completed the roll-out of a nifty, new feature to the WooFramework, which now includes support for URL Shortening. The basic idea is to offer you a template tag which would output a shorter URL – currently only supports TinyURL (default) and bit.ly (with your API key) – which you can then publish as added meta on your posts.
This functionality was inspired by the implementation thereof on various Tumblr-powered sites (for example: Matthew Buchanan). The benefit of publishing a shortened URL is in minimizing the amount of time that your readers will need to link to your content (i.e. increasing their convenience). So it’s a pretty nifty feature to have we believe!
As mentioned, this functionality is available in the WooFramework now and we’ll soon be publishing a little tutorial with regards to the backwards integration thereof. Both Cinch & Slanted have been updated to include the backend functionality, as well as the publishing of “Short URL” links in the front-end.
Continue Reading »
Mobile Officing Extreme
04. Mar, 2010 by Mark Forrester in WooThemes News
Late last year I was sitting at the barber shop, getting a haircut. The barber felt obliged to ask me what I do for a living. I tried to explain to him, in a non-technical way, how I “designed websites”, and managed the business with my 2 business partners in Norway and Cape Town… who I’d only met face-to-face a handful of times.
Of course the conversation went dead then as he was obviously a little confused by this internet thing I did. I quietly kept thinking about our rather unique business, and how completely mobile we actually are. Why don’t we really take advantage of the perks of mobile officing?
Continue Reading »
WeeThemes Gears Into Business
02. Mar, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes
It’s been a couple of (very busy & hard-working) weeks since we first launched our ExpressionEngine themes and we’re now glad to finally shift WeeThemes into it’s next gear. Considering that we are vastly experienced with WordPress, we’re taking a little bit longer to get accustomed to ExpressionEngine, but both our marketing & education is growing fast.
First change we’ve made is giving ExpressionEngine it’s own home here on WooThemes. You can now get your EE fix there – we hope it now becomes clear why you can (in future) consider EE as an alternative for personal & client projects.
Then more great news is that two of our best-selling business themes – Delegate & The Station – are both now available for ExpressionEngine. This takes our total amount of ExpressionEngine themes to 5, with more coming soon.
Continue Reading »
WooThemes Finally Goes Micro
01. Mar, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes
We’ve been speaking about tumblogs for quite a while now, so it’s exciting to finally be able to release the two beautiful tumblog themes that are the fruits of our labour. Without keeping you waiting any longer, we’d like to introduce you to the awesomeness of Cinch & Slanted.
Continue Reading »
Imperfect Systems
25. Feb, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp
Everything at WooThemes is the way it is due to an evolving process.
See, when Mark, Magnus & I started WooThemes we had limited experience & knowledge in running a business, and much less in establishing new online brand. To say that we’ve had to learn on the job would thus be a gross understatement; beyond knowing how to design & code, we really don’t *know* much more.
That is why I started off by saying that what you see in front of you today, is a company & brand that has undergone continuous tweaks & changes in the last 2-odd years and the only reason we’ve managed to pull it off is because we have never been fearful of taking a few risks and investing heavily in our ideas, vision & ambitions. Had we however allowed that “fear” to consume us, things may have been a little different… Let me explain…
As an example, I’d like to point to our existing backend system: when we first launched WooThemes, we realized that it had some glaringly obvious limitations and whilst the launch of WOO2 last year went a long way in addressing some of those limitations, we still don’t have a perfect system. Consider the odd login & billing imperfections / glitches in our system and it is clear that we’re a long way off from offering our users a perfect environment. But that’s not the point…
Continue Reading »
Update: Custom Navigation in WP 3.0
23. Feb, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in Development
We just wanted to give you a quick update on the integration of the WooNav into the core of WordPress 3.0 (final version to be available mid-April).
Jeff has been working really hard to get everything ready and the basic functionality for the Custom Navigation (as it is now being called) has already been included in the WP 3.0 nightly builds (after last week’s WP dev chat). The most significant amount of work centered around moving away from Woo-specific branding, uses of prefixes and coding preferences, which means Jeff had to create a patch using all of the WP core standards & defaults. It is now that patch which is available in the nightly builds.
Continue Reading »
WooLove Winner
22. Feb, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in Promotions
First off, we’d like to say thank you to everyone who participated in the Send Some WooLove campaign; we have a bunch of new users as a result, and we think it was a fun promo all round. So it’s definitely something that we will explore again in the future when we will reincarnate this awesomeness in another form.
Then we probably need to announce the winner of the shiny, new MacBook that we are giving away… Massive congratulations to Adam Pickering from ThemeCouponCodes who generated the most affiliate sales during the WooLove period. Thank you for the loyal support in promoting our products Adam; you’re MacBook is already on its way!
To those of you that participated, but didn’t win, we’d like to say thank you as well. It’s awesome being entrenched in this vibrant & ever-growing community that is WooThemes, and we really hope that in the future we’d be able to do more of these kind of promotions, where we get to interact with our amazing users & fans!
Another Tumbling Teaser
16. Feb, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in Development
Since we’re getting closer to releasing our two new tumblog themes towards the end of the month, we wanted to keep the momentum and hype going with another little teaser.
When we teased you with these previews a week ago, we mentioned that the themes would include some jQuery wizardry, as well as progressive usage of CSS3. To give you an idea of what we’re talking about, you can view Cobus’ new design which he launched over the weekend.
We’d like to think that considering that Cobus designed both Cinch & Slanted and that since he’s responsible for the front-end coding, you can expect some similar awesomeness from our tumblog themes. So click around his new site and start anticipating the awesome that we will be releasing soon.
WooNav: Integrated in WP 3.0
15. Feb, 2010 by Mark Forrester in Blog, WooThemes News
Two weeks ago when we launched the WooNav, we knew it was something special and would be well received by our users, together with our recent release of WooFramework V2 our theme development was certainly hotting up. Then, out of the blue, we were contacted by Jane Wells of the Wordpress Core UX development team who was planning the final iterations of the menu management system’s core features for Wordpress 3.0. Unbeknown to us Jane had been playing around with our WooNav functionality:
We have a developer working on it, and have gone through several rounds of community feedback and iteration, and it strikes me that what we’re probably going to end up with is a lot like what you guys have in your Custom Navigation option, so I thought I’d get in touch with you guys to talk about it
After a few emails it was pretty obvious that this made perfect sense for both us and the core team. It would save the WordPress developers hours of coding to build something that already existed and did the job well, and WooThemes would finally be acknowledged for it’s work in furthering WordPress theme development.
Continue Reading »
Send Some WooLove
12. Feb, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in Promotions
To celebrate this year’s Valentine’s Day, we’ve decided to create a unique, little promotion that is sure to attract the attention of your loved ones and friends. We’ve been known to do the occasional “X-for-1″ promotion and whilst we know you adore them, we’d like to challenge you to send the WooLove to others this time.
So here’s the deal: We’ve created a new Valentine’s Day section in your user account dashboard which will allow you to send as much WooLove to as many of your friends, family members, and business contacts as you like. This WooLove will be sent out in the form of a special Valentine’s email that will include your details, and more importantly: a unique 50% OFF discount coupon for individual theme purchases for every friend that you send it to!
Continue Reading »
Your Blank Canvas
09. Feb, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes
We’re very happy to finally introduce you to our newest creation – Canvas.
In the last couple of weeks Magnus has been spearheading a project to develop a brand-new theme that would add a few touches of uniqueness to our collection. Along with the odd contribution from the rest of the WooTeam, we managed to create a new & improved starting point for your blog.
Canvas started out as a re-write of the starter theme that we were using with WooFramework2, to develop all of our existing themes on-top off. But we seemingly got carried away a little bit and Canvas truly came into its own right, serving its own purpose and satisfying some of your more specific needs.
Continue Reading »
