To say thanks, we also promised to give away 4 x 16GB iPad 2′s to some lucky winners. Jeff got the the honour to pick 4 random numbers which we then matched with the respondent list. Here’s the 4 winners:

• Nick Kask
• Bob Dunn
• Frank Groet
• Phil Greenwood

Congrats to these winners and thanks to everyone else that helped us out by taking the survey. For those that weren’t so lucky to have won a shiny, new iPad, your reward will be in all the awesome stuff we release in the next couple of months.

So what do I do personally to keep my spirits high and my passion burning? Well I’ll tell you a little bit from where I’m at currently.

Inspiration In Three Forms

Unfortunately, my title as Community Manager counts me out from doing any theme development, which is for the better trust me. This doesn’t stop me from digging through our themes and tearing them apart best I can though. I’ve lately been really digging into child themes and have had a blast doing so. This provides me a good opportunity to really become familiar with our themes and possibilities provided by them. Which in turn helps me answer questions about modifying themes or if certain things are possible with WordPress. Given the open source nature of WordPress, people are always doing something incredible with it and I like to try and stay on top of what’s being done. This is definitely one spot that keeps me inspired, I try to spend some time every day doing what many of our customers are doing. Experimenting and molding our themes.

Another area that I’m very excited to try is an idea that the WooTeam recently proposed… The idea is that I take Community Management to the physical world. Meaning I get off of my butt and meet people that are part of our WooCommunity and WordPress community at large. All of us did this in the first week of June as we spent some time in London and at DIBI in Newcastle, but we’ve chatted shortly about getting all of the WooTeam to conferences as a WooThemes ambassador of sorts. My main goal will be to represent Woo, but I’d also love to be able to meet other WooThemes and WordPress fanatics. Simply taking the email and Twitter out and doing some face to face talking.

I know the guys in South Africa have already been doing this quite a bit in some interesting ways, e.g., The Grow Academy among others and it makes me jealous. Getting to meet other people that share our passions is another spot that keeps me inspired.

The Road To Inspiration

Finally, the interaction with our community each day is something I do look forward to and that inspires me. No matter if it’s difficult or not. Some customers are easy to handle. They’re genuinely very understanding and grateful for the help, while others aren’t happy no matter what you try to do for them. It’s always rewarding to help someone accomplish a goal, and it’s also a great challenge when you are trying to take a very upset person and make them a happy customer. I welcome the challenge with open arms. I believe I’ve succeeded many times so far, but do recognize times when I’ve failed too. It’s not easy to have someone give up on you, but I’ve always taken this back to the drawing board and after a quick pep talk with myself I’m ready again. Lessons learned and it makes me do better next time, at least I do hope so.

The Big Picture

For me, having a job description that is able to evolve and mature is definitely exciting and inspiring. This title is still something relatively new to both WooThemes and myself. Thus it’s been given a somewhat “grow-as-you-go” approach to what this means. I do have set out responsibilities, don’t get me wrong, but the field is open for my responsibilities to grow and take on different shapes. Which is one spot that ignites a passion in me.

For instance, I have a major love of video. It can be anything, creation, editing, watching, etc… It’s great that I can bring that passion and inspiration and weave it into WooThemes. A video is part of what got me here, and I think we’ll be pumping out videos whenever we can. E.g. – 100th theme video, screencasts, interviews, etc… could all be on the docket for us.

At first I felt a bit timid about setting my own goals and being responsible for myself with WooThemes. I think as time has gone on that I’ve begun to grow into it though.

So what keeps you going and growing each day, sound off and leave me a comment.

Blegh, too much blogging if you ask me.

Speaking of these passions, I happened to study a little video production while in university and armed with my handy 7D in London I shot some clips of our trip. This is the resulting highlight video to the soundtrack of one of London’s biggest bands. Our other song of choice, Werewolves Of London, was voted out. Hope you enjoy the video (after the jump)!

I’m the new kid in class, so to speak, with that I knew I had some harassing coming my way. Which I got in the form of initiation shots. Surprisingly, I didn’t butcher anyones name, especially with my Midwestern accent. Nor did I get lost as others did in London. This was my first trip across the pond to the UK and besides meeting all of my coworkers and seeing the beautiful UK, it was the first time the latest iteration of the WooTeam was together working from one place.

While this was a fun trip for all of us, we also did our best to tend to all of the Woo business while we hung out and got to know each other. An interesting concept if you think about it: most companies don’t take trips together and if they do they aren’t tending to any work. WooThemes runs itself a little “backwards” from most. We work apart for the majority of the time and when company fun time comes, we meet up and continue to work while doing so. I’d often work off some jetlag by staying up and answering emails. Definitely safe to say we love our jobs here.

We also had a WooThemes meetup with a fun group of our customers from London, I think it was a great time for everyone there. It was chance for us to meet with some of our users in real life. Another aspect of an online company that is different from normal, we don’t get to meet many of our users. I only wish we could travel more and have face-to-face conversations with more of our customers.

Back to the WooTeam working from one location… One day during our stay in London we took over one of the hotel’s business rooms and got down to work. When we were all handling our normal work activities, nothing was too out of the normal. That is if you don’t count Kirstin and his love for blaring Céline Dion loud enough for us all to hear through his earphones.

Once we got some mail and forum posts out of the way, we had a proper brainstorming session about all of the challenges & ideas we have for WooThemes. This was quite fun to witness. I proposed a couple ideas from my side of Woo, but then the more geeky side took over. I watched as the more technically inclined part of our team dug into what is our core product of themes, and really hashed out ways they – as a team – could become more efficient, as well as produce higher quality themes. From this discussion of the core product we branched off into several great ideas that in due time will be used to improve upon the whole Woo experience.

While this meeting might have gone a bit long, it was clear that this discussion reinvigorated everyone to spend some time and hash out these ideas. This was definitely one of the goals of the trip we talked about before. The conversation even lingered over into our early dinner and throughout the rest of the week. To keep these conversations going we’re implementing many ideas behind the scenes, but to have that chance to brainstorm face-to-face was priceless.

I’m sure we put a bit of a dent in the WooThemes credit card, but for us all to get together and operate as a “normal” company was definitely worth the price. Just as any other company that is together all of the time would say it’s good for them to get away. We’ve definitely grown tighter as co-workers and have come back rejuvenated to lead WooThemes to the next step of innovation. It’ll definitely be great to see the fruits of this trip come to life in the near future.

The thing is that since we’ve never been based in the same office and we’ve thus never physically collaborated, it is sometimes easy to miss this passion that is admittedly there. I don’t think that we could’ve built WooThemes to what it is today without any kind of passion.

But the thing that stood out to me on this recent trip is just how passionate everyone on the team are about the work they do: be it by providing amazing customer / technical support, developing themes that are more user-friendly or feature-rich, designing to delight or continuously improving our website’s copy to make things clearer. Every member of the WooTeam seemingly has a different set of things that they’re truly passionate about and the work they do is the vehicle to bring those passionate contributions to the WooCommunity.

The reason I even mention this is that we’ve admittedly never been perfect; instead we’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what we could be doing better & improving on those. And even as I type this, I know of a few projects on our radar that needs urgent attention and even more things internally which we’re tackling soon for massive improvements.

The great news though is that we’re fully committed and exceptionally passionate about all the things that we hope to achieve in the next couple of months. Beyond having to trust our skills, experience and efficiency in executing on these aims, you can be assured that we’re fueled by our passion to bring you beautifully designed (WordPress) solutions.

1. First Times

The WooTeam will be experiencing a couple of firsts on this trip. As many of you will be aware, it took us 16 months when we started the company to actually sit down and meet up in person. This means that Magnus, Mark & myself built a company for 16 months before we met in person for the very first time. Talk about trust.

So almost 4 years down the line, this will be the first time ever that we will be gathering as a complete WooTeam. In person. Yep, all 10 members of the WooTeam are spending a whole week together, which is incredible when you consider that it has taken us almost 4 years to get here. We realize that we’re a virtual company and all of us are located remotely, which obviously makes it harder to get together. But again, that just makes this trip all the more special.

In addition, before this trip we had never met Mike & Ryan, since they’re States-based which is a long way from the rest of us. Suffice to say that these two have had (and will have a few more) their initiation drinks.

2. Downtime

I mentioned in my post earlier this week that most of the time we’re solely focused on working hard and progressing as a team / company, which obviously means that there isn’t much downtime. This trip obviously changes that by allowing us to have some fun and hopefully go back to work refreshed afterwards (at least mentally, considering that we probably won’t be sleeping much).

We’ve realized recently that it is really important for the team to get more downtime and just balance the hard work out a tad. When working online, it is just so easy to get stuck in the same old, daily routines which makes it incredibly hard to break away from being connected all the time.

3. Relationships remain important

We’ve always been very picky in terms of how we’ve grown the WooTeam and who gets to join the team, specifically because we don’t believe that every individual would be well suited to our company. Talent is one thing, but having an unique personality and contributing that to the team is just as important.

As a result we all get along so well and that is incredibly important for the relationships on the team. It goes without saying that improved relationships has a direct, beneficial influence on the efficiency and quality of our internal collaborations which in turn has a massive impact on the products & service we can deliver to our users.

4. Getting to know Woo

We’re not just a company that designs & develops awesome WordPress themes. We are also the WooTeam and we’d like you to get to know us. For us – as a company, brand & team – it is important that you know who you are dealing with; we don’t just want to be a name on your screen.

We believe this is one of the things that sets us apart from other companies: by showing you who we really are, we believe we’re also fostering a relationship with our community that exceeds the default business-client relationship. In turn we hope that this relationship nurtures the trust & loyalty of our community, which empowers us to build a better, stronger WooThemes.

So as you’ll gather, we’re not just in the UK at present for the sake it; instead there is a massive benefit to the WooTeam which we aim to pass onto the WooCommunity as soon as we’re back to work proper. In the meantime, keep following all the fun we’re having.

Day-in, day-out most of the things that we do at the WooHQ are about work: e-mail, support, bug fixes and working on new themes. Yes, there’s definitely a whole lot of fun sprinkled in there, but even a game of FIFA on the Xbox over lunch is considered part of work (we need a break every now & again to be refreshed and back at full productivity).

So we’ve devised a plan whereby we won’t really be working, we’ll be having loads of fun and we’ll be showing you a whole different side to WooThemes. If all goes according to plan, you’ll also get to know all of the individuals on the WooTeam, who generally operate behind-the-scenes.

Introducing Woo in Blighty

Tomorrow all 10 ninjas of the WooTeam board various flights from South Africa, Norway, Portugal and USA, as well as a train from Scotland, to meet up in London for our second Woo adventure, after the much enjoyed Woo on the Slopes trip in 2009. 

Boardroom meetings are a little tricky at WooThemes.

5 days in London for some sightseeing, team building, brainstorming and pint drinking, not to forget the Woo party at Shoreditch House (which has sold out!) then on to Newcastle for the DIBI Conference and the parties around it.

In typical Woo fashion we’ve decided to build a fun little one-page sub-site documenting the trip via all the bragging tweets us geeks will be posting. That after our last trip managed to get some coverage on Mashable.

The sub-site has lots of JS and CSS trickery including a location based Google Map, a live Twitter feed, and our latest photos uploaded to TwitPic. Jeff has managed to use the Twitter API quite extensively, whilst Mark has had lots of fun with the design and UX, as well as creating our own “About the team” map with CSS hovers & tooltips.

Make sure you visit the “Woo in Blighty” site regularly and follow the team members on Twitter. Who knows we might run a promotion or two there.

Our first initiative is to start publishing more tutorials and we’re hoping that some of those will be submitted by WooUsers. Last week we ran a poll on our Facebook page asking for input on the things we’re supposed to be blogging about and tutorials (both WP-related and design-related) came out on top.

Since you are the guys & girls using our themes the most, we figured that you’re in a great position to share what you’re doing with our themes. This is the type of content we’re looking for…

• Have you created an awesome modification of one of our themes? Well then, we’d love for you to share your process, thoughts & experiences in a case study (similar to this one by Nick Daughtery).
• Is there a particular, popular plugin that you use on all your WP + Woo-powered websites? We’d love to read a tutorial of how you go about integrating that with the WooFramework.
• If you’re doing a lot of WooThemes modification work, then we’d love for you to share your workflow and any tips that you’ve accumulated along the way.

These are obviously just examples of the content we’re looking for, but it’ll give you a good idea of what we’re after. If we’ve piqued your interest, go on & submit your idea here.

What’s in it for me?

You may rightly be asking what is in it for you, so we’ve compiled a list of benefits…

1. We’ll be publishing a little bio (including a few relevant links) of you along with the post you submitted. Considering that WooThemes.com receives more than 2.5m pageviews a month, we believe you’ll be getting loads of inbound traffic & exposure from this.
2. In selecting the user-submitted tutorials to publish, we’ll only select the very best. So if yours does get published, you’ll earn a certain amount of kudo’s within the WooCommunity for your skills, which in turn can result in good business / project leads (considering that the readers would be your target audience for new work).
3. Writing tutorials generally means you’re also learning more, because whilst it’s easy doing something, writing it down requires you to look at things from a different angle.

So if you’re keen, we’d love to hear from you right away. Submit your idea for a tutorial / case study / blog post to us and then we’ll review (just to make sure that the topic is viable) and get back to you with the rest of the details.

At the end of last month, we mentioned the possibility of having a little London meetup on our upcoming trip to the UK. And now we can confirm that this is indeed happening…

Along with our great friends, VPS.NET, we’re co-hosting an evening of beers, WordPress, general geekery and all things Woo on Monday, 6 June 2011. The meetup is taking place at The Biscuit Pin at Shoreditch House and it promises to be loads of fun. Where there is a Woo (and beers), there is a way.

Snacks & beers (via a generous bar tab) will be provided; so you only need to bring yourself!

Capacity is limited to only 60 attendees, so if you wanted to join us, you need to act quickly and sign up here. We specifically wanted to keep the meetup small, since we wanted to give you guys & girls the opportunity to spend some quality, one-on-one time with the various WooTeam members (and vice versa). We’d absolutely love to meet our fans / customers and are really excited about sharing this evening with you.

Another bonus – if all goes well – is that we’re hoping to announce an exciting new project collaboration with VPS.NET exclusively at the meetup. Just another reason to sign up now!

Here are the ways I’ve found to make and keep WooUsers happy…

1. Be Kind

The most simple of all strategies, be kind! Sometimes back and forth communication can be tough to deal with all day. If I’ve not had the best of days it’s tough to keep being helpful. I’m sure we’ve all experienced it before, perhaps I can best equate it with trying to show your dear mom how to use Google over the phone. Or better yet, explain how to sync anything or install any app… True test of patience.

No matter what though kindness kills, and it’s a good thing. It’s not anyone’s fault that I’m in a foul mood, and often a user comes out and says they know can be a pain if they don’t understand something. I always try to give the best help I can and smile while doing it. Usually once a problem is solved we are both happy and thankful for each others patience. Using a smily face or two always helps.

2. Go The Extra Mile

When does going the extra mile ever hurt anyone? We care for our WooCommunity and often go the extra mile to leave with a satisfied customer. For example, something I often like to do is help people testing themes on our Theme Playground. Since many haven’t purchased a theme yet, they don’t have access to theme docs or support forums. When we receive emails from people struggling on the playground I will take a screenshot of the theme documentation they need and send it their way. I also try to manage every problem I can for users on the playground. Some have trouble setting up a theme, others can’t figure out a little custom css they’ve done, etc…

We’re known for great support, and the Theme Playground shows our willingness to go the extra mile and let you try our themes. I try and provide the support before they’ve even purchased a theme.

3. Be Available & Prompt

I keep our inbox, Facebook, & Twitter accounts open just about all day everyday, including during the weekends. This lets me take a quick glance and see if there is anything I can take care of while I’m doing something else Woo related. In fact I just fired off an email to Ole, while typing this. (Hi Ole!) I like to respond as quick as I can, and as we outlined in a previous post, we’re striking a balance between a quick answer and a helpful answer. I respond as quick as I can with the best answer I can. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll let you know while I find one.

The culture in the U.S. is very much centered around getting things and getting them now, I try to help alleviate the wait by being available and prompt to answer. Even if I say, “Sorry I don’t know the answer but am looking,” WooUsers seem to appreciate the honesty and transparency.

4. Be Real & Understanding

Having sympathy, empathy, or any ability that to perceive people’s emotion is something I work on every day. It’s good to be able to tell when a user is frustrated or happy. Both types of emails include a lot of caps and exclamation marks, but to tell the difference is key.

This definitely is a big deal when interacting with our WooUsers. We use tags on Twitter to show which one of us you’re talking to, we leave comments under our real names on the blog, etc… We hope this lets you get past our facade as WooThemes, even though that facade isn’t inherently bad. It’s just better to know a real person that understands is helping you with your issue or concern, and not our WooBot… I’ve found that being understanding and showing real emotion often leaves WooUsers happy, even if we couldn’t solve the problem.

5. Free Stuff

Although it’s funny, giving away free stuff always makes people happy. Sales and discounts could count under this as well. Free or discounted items are always a good way to give some thanks back to our WooUsers and make them happy. Nothing else could be said about free stuff, except people LOVE it.

I utilize these tactics everday. By themselves or combined, one of us can usually leave with a smile on our face. Hopefully though it’s both of us.

Got any idea that you think would make more of our WooUsers happy & satisfied customers? Sound off and leave a comment, I’ll consider adding it to my repertoire.

The second significant area which we’re targeting with a couple of tweaks is our development & release cycles. Our products have two main pillars, which are of course the design & development thereof, along with providing the support for those products. It thus goes without saying that we’re aiming to strengthen these two pillars drastically in the coming months.

Before we launch into our goals for the next couple of weeks, we wanted to explain why we feel it is necessary to tweak things slightly. Lately we’ve been noticing that: 1) we don’t necessarily release new stuff as quickly as we’d like; 2) we’re always being challenged to prioritize new stuff versus the maintenance & upgrading of existing stuff; and 3) it sometimes takes weeks to find a gap in our schedule to work on more advanced / niche / experimental things.

We’ve stated before that we’re not keen to simply grow the size of the WooTeam for the sake of it and instead we’re using proper budgets and priorities. Due to that, we’re also hoping that small, incremental improvements in our efficiency would allow us to address the three challenges mentioned above. This is how we hope to achieve that… 

• KISS, MVP & Roadmaps. We’ve always been fans of 37Signals’ KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) attitude, yet we sometimes overcomplicate things to our own detriment. New releases will be focused on the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) concept, which means that a V1 of a new theme might not include every single, spiffy feature imaginable. Instead we will roadmap these spiffy features for iterative V1.1, V1.2, V1,3 etc. releases to speed up the initial release and to allow us to jump between multiple projects.
• Scrumming. We are implementing a weekly scrum (Wikipedia) in our development cycle, which means that – as a WooTeam – we’ll spend more time discussing our various to do’s and finding solutions for problems or new features. We’ll be evaluating all ideas & to do’s according to their “business value” (i.e. how valuable is that to the WooCommunity) & development complexity. This should allow us to prioritize the various to do’s across multiple projects much easier, while also considering ideas from all sources (internally and from WooIdeas).
• Extracting advanced functionality, may result in plugins. We’re exploring ways in which we can make our most advanced functionality more generic and extracting it from specific themes and instead standardize it to work across multiple themes (as a plugin). We will not add out-of-box support for all plugins and all themes, but we’ll make the documentation available for you to do so.

In addition to optimizing our development cycles, we’re hoping that these tweaks will see us adding more value, more efficiently to the WooCommunity either via upgrades to existing themes, better new themes or maybe complimentary products / services that aren’t theme or plugin-related.

What do you think? Sounds promising, right?

So we were thinking about extending these fun times to the UK-based members of the WooCommunity that perhaps wanted to share an evening of beers, WordPress & Woo with all of us… The basic idea would be to organize a little venue for a get-together on one of the evenings that we are in London and then we’d open it up to anyone that wanted to hang with us, have a couple of beers and talk WP & Woo for a couple of hours.

What do you think? If you’re in London (or the rest of the UK if you’re willing to travel a little further), would you be interested in a little get-together like this?

So what we’ve done is to do internal “audits” of our various activities trying to identify any gaps or inefficiencies, along with tweaks & improvements that could result in us being a better WooThemes. From these audits and extensive internal discussions, we’ve made a wide variety of decisions which will be implemented in the next couple of weeks.

Since these decisions directly affects the WooCommunity, we wanted to be as transparent as possible with our goals & aims during this process. As a team we’d like the WooCommunity to hold us accountable and keep us on our toes, so in this 2-part post, we’re hoping to share our goals with you.

Here’s what we had in mind for support…

• Quality over quantity. Answering a question quickly is something we strive to do, but a question that is perfectly answered the first time is of more value. We’ll rather take 10% longer to respond and then take the extra time to attempt to answer your question completely the first time around.
• Collaboration. Everyone on the WooTeam has a varying development skill-level, with only Jeff & Matty being able to efficiently take care of the most advanced queries. The WooTeam will be working closer together and collaborating to tag-team the difficult tickets and get all users quality feedback as efficiently as possible.
• Accountability. We’ll be implementing some new functionality in the forum soon, whereby a WooTeam member will take responsibility for an individual query and will then be held accountable for providing the user in question with a favourable & efficient response.
• Moderation. We’re attempting to moderate all of the content & exchanges on the forum much more, which should result in the forum becoming more searchable and helpful (without the need to necessarily create a new ticket for every query).
• Help on modifications. You’ll notice that we’re becoming more strict in applying our Support Policy, especially with regards to modifications. We’d like to be as fair as possible to all users and whilst we’d love to help every user with their modifications, we simply can’t do that in a way that is unfair to another user in the WooCommunity. Every user deserves equal time & attention and as a result we’ll only be providing support on very minor modifications (we have the Affiliated Woo Workers & WooJobs to help out with advanced modifications).

Beyond this, we’re working on some initiatives to improve our passive support resources. This means you can expect tweaks to theme documentation and FAQ’s, while we’re also toying with the idea of establishing a WooWiki of sorts and adding contextual theme help to the WordPress Dashboard screens.

What do you think? Anything we’re missing?

• We have the biggest collection of themes (paid & free) available, whilst we’re also averaging 2 new theme releases per month in the last 6 months.
• Our minimum cost per theme (that’s if you are simply subscribed to the club for one month) is only $2.60 per theme. Whack to think the kind of quality you’re getting at that price…
• In straight monetary terms, an annual subscription with us is expensive, but more than justified when considering the oodles of awesomeness you’re buying into.

Now that everyone else has had their say, what do you think?

The Smashing Magazine theme club comparison.

Jeep is using Busy Bee for their official blog

In recent months, we’ve been seeing more & more big brands using our themes (like Jeep above or Ford pictured below). Obviously we’re ecstatic to have 45k+ users using our themes, but somehow knowing that our products are also becoming the choice of the elite & A-list is gratifying on a whole new level. I mean – wouldn’t that stroke your ego too?

What’s the big deal?

If we had to dig deep and thoroughly evaluate our feeling in this regard, we’d say that having big brands & companies using our themes, is significant for the following reasons:

• Retail brands such as Nike endorse big name athletes and celebrities, because that personal endorsement has massive publicity and public relations value. Jeep – as an example – is now doing the same thing for us.
• A company as big as Jeep, should have a rather attractive web budget, yet their web designers decided to use one of our very affordable themes. We can only believe that their decision is based on value for money. Extreme quality perhaps only has to cost you $70…

We are proud advocates for our own product – heck we use our own stuff, so seeing other big brands & companies using our themes solidifies our biased opinion

Ford using Canvas (!!) for their Campus Rail Jam Tour

Know of more brands running on Woo?

At the moment, we’re relying heavily on submissions to the Showcase to find out who is using our themes and how. Every now & again we randomly stumble across a site doing a Google search and are pleasantly surprised to see our theme in use and it’s creative implementation. But we want to see more…

Do you know of any prominent brands or companies using our themes? Maybe you’ve stumbled on an amazing WooThemes modification recently, don’t assume we’ve seen it, let us know.

The Salvation Army of Canada is using the Gazette theme.

John Smit - our South African rugby captain is using a modifed version of our Irresistible theme.

Here’s some ideas that are definitely on our radar and probably just needs a bit more love & voting from you before it makes it onto our various to do lists…

• WooWiki. As you know, we’re extremely passionate about giving our users the best possible experience and thus adding as much value across the board as we can. A WooWiki of sorts is something that interests us, purely because it would allow us to hit all of our aims in this regard. But what would a WooWiki include? And how would it work?
• Theme Repository / Marketplace. Another intriguing idea, which we believe has loads of potential value for the WooCommunity. Who is gonna use this? Would it just be a sharing facility or is a marketplace more ideal?
• E-learning Theme. This is obviously something that is becoming more & more popular online, which means at the very least that we need to think about this every now & again. We like the idea and would seriously consider making a move in this space, but we’d also need to see more traction behind the idea.
• Content Builder as a plugin. We know you absolutely love the Content Builder functionality in Listings, but would you want to see this released as an individual plugin? How would you use it?

Are we missing anything? These are just the ideas that seemingly rings a little bell in the WooHQ when we read them, but obviously your votes and the traction of the WooCommunity behind a specific idea greatly influences the things we’ll be working on…

Adii found this great infograph on GetSatisfaction that in my view of things does a great job of summing it up. Click here to see it full size.

This infograph takes a very broad view of what a Community Manager does, but it still makes good points in how the position applies to the WooCommunity.

Let’s take a look at a few things what they mean for us starting with Pinata, Sponge, and Gardener. My favorite description is under the Pinata, and a big part of what I aim to do with the WooCommunity.

Pinata

After being beaten with sticks, must still give out candy. Or, like a unicorn, has to fart glitter and rainbows.

As the WooThemes Pinata I want to deliver a WOW experience to everyone. Sometimes it may be something simple like being available on the weekends to answer questions,  other times it may be extreme -  as in giving away LIFETIME DEVELOPER SUBSCRIPTIONS!!! So when I receive complaints or communicate with people that are super frustrated, I’ll always try to think like Oprah (which makes me want to do things like give away our products).

Gardener/Sculptor

Our site WooIdeas is a good place where I can be a Gardener/Sculptor. I highlighted WooIdeas in a previous post, and it’s a part of the WooCommunity I take very seriously. This is a place where you tell us what you’d like to see, and being a good Gardener/Sculptor of WooIdeas I’ll water and nurture it. This also falls under being a Mediavore where I’ll be watching the forums as well.

Sponge

To be a Sponge and to Empath I’ve got some ideas that we’ll work on to help us gauge how you guys are feeling about us and our products/services. Just incase we run into a WooCommerce 2.0 situation, I want to have a place where everyone feels welcome venting frustrations and telling us if we did something right or wrong.

Like I mentioned in a previous post, email is a big part of my day so being Concierge and a Traffic Cop is something I practice everyday. Some customers email us and are lost at what to do next. It’s important that I can give them direction and get them going towards a solution to their problem. So if you want to talk to me about anything just email us and I’ll practice my Concierge skills.

Cheerleader

Finally, I think I was a good cheerleader for WooThemes before even being hired. Our whole team makes one giant cheerleader. We’re very proud of the work we do and are always ready to tell the world about it. We’re also very excited to see what others are doing with our products. One way is through our showcase, where we can show off what you’ve done with our themes.

Spam Warrior

Oh and about the Spam Warrior, I don’t think I’ll be needing to use the ban hammer very much. The WooCommunity is nice to each other and hardly has any trolls running around in it. Which I’ll say thanks in advance, I’d hate to have to be the one breaking out the ban hammer.

So that’s a Community Manager in a nutshell! Sounds like fun doesn’t? Feel free to comment or get in touch with me if you want to talk more about how I fart glitter and rainbows.

Here in lies the conversation…

As I’m sure you’ve all seen, WordPress has a neat “Updates” screen which allows for the upgrading of your themes and plugins, as well as WordPress itself, through a neat and automated interface. Through our popular WooIdeas forum, we’ve received a thread regarding theme updates and would like to delve into this further. A quick warning, folks: This may get technical.

WordPress has a built-in theme upgrader, which downloads, unzips and installs the theme into the necessary place. Great! So all the functionality’s there? Not entirely. There’s one key factor to take note of here: it overwrites all the theme files. This is where the discussion deepens. When it comes to using or upgrading a WooTheme, our ethos is to make our themes easy to customise to the liking of the user. This includes modifying any of the theme’s files to suit. Hold on, but the upgrader overwrites all my files?!

With the many different ways the WooCommunity uses our themes, creating an integrated theme upgrader that overwrites all files would be an ideal solution for some, but the completely incorrect solution for many others. WooInstaller makes use of the theme upgrader, offering two options: overwrite your theme or create a new copy of the selected theme. These options fall in line with the workings of the theme upgrader, while also allowing greater freedoms to our users in that their files are preserved for making changes, moving files around and testing out themes they’ve just purchased.

As can be seen, the topic of automatic WooTheme upgrades is one that requires much fleshing out and discussion. If you have thoughts on this, please post your comments on the thread on WooIdeas. We’re excited to hear what you have to say on this.

Lately I’ve been brainstorming ways that I can bridge between you guys, our wonderful WooThemes users, and the rest of the WooTeam. The other members of the team are working their butts off not only creating beautiful and functional themes, but they’re there when you guys happen to break the themes and need help with something. We encourage everyone to try and customize their theme and break it if you have to, but it keeps our team busy making sure the web is a beautiful and working place.

With that said, part of my job is to be able to interact with all of you on behalf of our team. Email has been a big part of that so far, and believe it or not it’s been fun interacting with everyone via email. This post and blog you’re reading right now is another part of that. I’ll be posting as much as I can on the blog. For me it’s a place where I can talk to you guys, hear your frustrations, and even gather ideas.

Speaking on ideas, gathering your thoughts might be the part of my job I’m looking forward to the most. That’s what I wanted to talk about today. I get to daydream with you guys and pick your brains on what things you’d like to see WooThemes working on. I think it’s a great aspect of WooThemes to be able to listen to our users. Ultimately if we aren’t creating what you want and need then why should you be our customer right? That’s why I wanted to highlight one place where you can tell us what to do.

We call it WooIdeas. It’s a site where you can submit ideas that you have and vote on others. If your ideas gain traction from other users voting on them, we’ll look into possibly creating something from your idea. I’ll be on WooIdeas a lot monitoring and commenting on your ideas, I encourage you to use it to your advantage. It’s a great chance to see something you want us to do become a reality.

In a sense you’re working with Woo and helping us shape where we go in the future, and we appreciate that about our community. So don’t be afraid and use WooIdeas and let us know what you think.

We’ll talk again soon.

Quite a few big ideas that were generated via WooIdeas have already been implemented (like BuddyPress Integration, a directory-type theme, more shortcodes & a theme that is perfect for restaurants) and we’re hoping that you can help guide us on what we should be working on right now.

From time-to-time, we will we highlighting some of the more prominent ideas that are submitted via WooIdeas and discuss them on the blog. We also plan to highlight some of the top, new ideas that are presented to us every month in the hope that it will put them under proper scrutiny before we can decide whether to prioritize resources for this.

Here’s a couple of current WooIdeas that we think may have legs, but we need your comments and votes to determine whether they’re viable and have enough traction:

• Mega Menu’s. These seem to be all the rage now and the suggestion is for us to develop functionality that would enable Mega Menu’s as an add-on the the native WP Menu functionality.
• Easier Theme Updates. We’re always keen to improve your user experience when working with our themes and whilst we can envision some extreme challenges with this, we’d love to know how we can possibly improve on our existing theme updates.
• A Personal / Resume-type theme. Except for Antisocial, we probably don’t have anything close to this suggestion. What would you include in such a theme? Design inspiration? Ideal features?
• New, niche application-like themes. These could include – but aren’t limited to – themes that mimic the functionality of a Q&A website or even a Product Comparison theme.

Instead of discussing these ideas in the comments here, instead click through to WooIdeas and your comments + votes there.