The WooThemes Blog

The third WooCommerce drop of 2012 has arrived and it’s a big ‘un! Dynamic Pricing, 6 gateways and a chance for more developers to get involved in the WooCommerce project.

There have been a few grumbles about the relentless Payment Gateway onslaught, and this week is no different with six new gateways (we know you love them really). But we’re also extremely excited to launch Dynamic Pricing, developed by Lucas Stark.

Payment integration is one of the single biggest barriers to some users choosing WooCommerce. Established companies rarely want to change banks / service providers so if we don’t have a gateway which suits a users business, they can’t choose WooCommerce – which we think is a crying shame! So while they may not be so exciting, they’re absolutely vital to the ongoing growth and development of WooCommerce as an eCommerce platform.

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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.

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Our first business theme in 2012 is a beauty! We wanted to let Chris Rowe have another chance at out-designing his previous top seller at WooThemes; Simplicity. So it goes without saying that we have high hopes that Whitelight will be our most popular business theme to date. In addition to being a very clean and great design, here are some of the reasons we think this theme will be big…

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We couldn’t wait any longer for our usual Thursday drop, especially seeing we’ve been quiet on  the WooCommerce front the last few weeks with Mike and Jay coding up an absolute storm in their bunker in the UK! With that said we are HUGELY excited about today’s release of WooCommerce 1.4!

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.

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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.

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As was mentioned a few times late last year, via the blog and in a newsletter, the plan for January 2012 was to increase club subscriptions charges by $5 per month. A standard club subscription changing from $15 to $20 per month and a developer club subscription changing from $20 to $25 per month. As of immediately these price increases are now in effect.

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?

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WordPress theme development has, over the years, become a much more involved industry than it was during years past. Themes have gotten more intelligent, more feature rich and, to sum up, far more robust in their offering. It is not uncommon today for a theme to, for example, include an advanced theme options screen for tailoring a theme without code, or a selection of custom-developed widgets to showcase content is a specific manner or of a specific type.

As with scaling in any context, expanding one’s offering is vital to maintaining the status quo and “keeping up” with industry competitors. At WooThemes, this expansion is generally handled within the WooFramework (the engine that powers all of our 120+ themes) by creating and adding features such as a shortcode generator (along with a wide collection of popular shortcodes), a collection of popular social widgets, SEO settings via WooSEO and a system to create custom sidebars via the Sidebar Manager. This expansion is also, at times, handled using our popular “Theme Options” screen, where settings specific to your WooTheme of choice are controlled.

As one can imagine, adding theme option after theme option could easily get out of hand, creating a long list of settings you’d need to run through to customise your theme. This brings us to the question we posed during a development discussion at WooHQ last year- “are theme options always the answer?”.

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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.

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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.

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Tom Dent runs a small design studio in Cheshire, UK and recently shared with us his experience working with the Canvas theme for a client site wanting to sell vintage clothing.

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.

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We’d like to think that the early success of WooLabs (and in particular that of WooCommerce) isn’t so much of a surprise to our users – the people who have been downloading it, and extending it with our themes and extensions. After all it’s your support and continued feedback that has helped make WooCommerce what it is today!

45,000 downloads, 52 premium extensions, 16 premium parent / child themes and a growing number of additional free plugins on the WordPress.org repository have helped WooCommerce grow at an incredible pace since launching last September.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

(several verses removed for brevity)

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

Merry Christmas everyone!