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.
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 »
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 »
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 »
Join Our Playground
08. Feb, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
We know we should’ve done this a long, long time ago, but when things are moving so quickly (and you’re releasing 3 / 4 awesome new themes every month), the smaller things tend to fall from the radar. But better late than never, right?
The Playground is a WPMU setup, which allows you to test-drive our themes and experiment with the backend features (which has been impossible on our demo’s). So if you’ve been contemplating buying one of our themes, you should seriously consider playing with it first and making sure that it’s the right fit for you.
The Awesome Custom Woo Navigation
27. Jan, 2010 by Magnus in Blog, WooThemes News
One of the most commonly asked questions by Woo users is how to modify the navigation in the theme, by excluding items, adding external links etc. We recently added Jeff to our team, and started him off with a project we had been planning for a while; A new custom navigation admin page, where you would be able to really build your own navigation without touching any code.
It didn’t take long for him to come up with the wireframe, and then Cobus added some nice styling to the UI, and we can now proudly present it to you! We’ll start off slow by adding it to our newest themes first, and we hope to get feedback and squish any possible bugs that should appear before rolling it out to all our themes.
Woo Custom Navigation admin panel
Continue Reading »
WooFramework’ed V2
18. Jan, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
We’re glad to announce that all of our themes (yep, every single one of them) have now been updated to the latest version of our WooFramework. Version 2 of the WooFramework (which we first previewed last month), includes a complete re-design of the theme option’s panel, as well as the inclusion of a new basis for us to deploy more features in the next couple of weeks.
In the last couple of weeks, WF2 had been available in a handful of our themes and we are extremely happy about the feedback that we had gotten from both our beta testers and the users of those themes. All of the major bugs have been squashed properly and at the time of writing this post, we aren’t aware of any other bugs that have not been treated. So you can upgrade with some peace of mind! 
Continue Reading »
Welcome to WeeThemes
14. Jan, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes, WooThemes News
This definitely took us a while longer than we expected, but one of the biggest and most ambitious days in our history is finally here – we’re proud to announce the addition of ExpressionEngine themes to our collection. With that we hopefully welcome a whole lot of first time visitors to our site, and ExpressionEngine evangelists.
If you have been following us, you’d see that this is the first of the “bigger” things that we’re announcing this year and hence why we’re so excited & slightly nervous at the same time. ExpressionEngine is obviously a relative unknown to us, but for months now we’ve earmarked our expansion to this platform as a top priority. Today, months of hard work and extreme patience (whilst we waited for EE to roll out version 2.0) comes to fruition at last.
So to kickstart things, we’re releasing two paid EE themes – Coffee Break (our fastest selling theme in 2009) & Fresh News (our best-selling theme ever) – and one free theme in Bueno, which is fast becoming one of our most popular free releases.
To produce these themes, we teamed up with one of our friends & EE developer extraordinaire – Bjørn Børresen – who will be responsible for all the development & technical support work associated with our EE themes. And for those concerned: this means that our WordPress work and the capacity to release themes & new stuff for WP, won’t diminish, as we have added Bjørn to the WooTeam for added capacity.
Continue Reading »
Our Way Forward: The Big & Small Things
11. Jan, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
As we start finding our feet in the new year, we – as a company – are making plans not only about growing the business, but also about improving what we have and adding further value (as we have already demonstrated with the increase in our permanent X-for-1 offer). So whilst this may seem like a pretty standard exercise for most companies, we’ve tried to really delve deep into our ethos and ambitions in formulating our strategies for the year ahead (with a sneak peek of what’s to come in early 2010 here).
The “Small” Stuff
One of the things that has become more & more evident as we’ve grown & learned more about our customers (and how they use our products), is the fact that the seemingly minor improvements are generally those most appreciated. We’ve found that you don’t necessarily want us to release 10 new themes a month, but that you’d be happy for us to balance new releases with fixes & improvements to older versions too.
To put that into a little context for you… We will continue to develop, evolve and add new functionality to our WooFramework. Having announced a new version of the WooFramework in mid-December, one of our biggest priorities in January is to deploy this to all of our themes. We’ve also already started working on some pretty extensive & unique new functionality so watch this space.
Continue Reading »
Giving You More in 2010
05. Jan, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
We’d like to start this year off with a bang, and a quite a loud one at that.
Since… forever, we’ve been known for our Permanent 2-for-1 special (which evolved to 3-for-1 on our developer theme packages) and we’ve seen many others emulating our offer to some extent. We’ve always felt that this offer, along with our huge range of themes, made WooThemes rather unique, and it is indicative of our wish to add as much value to your purchase as possible.
So as of today, we will be increasing our Permanent 2-for-1 to a Permanent 3-for-1 (on Standard Packages) and 4-for-1 (on Developer Packages). That means you can now grab 3 Standard Package themes for only $70 and a whopping 4 Developer Package themes for $150. We think this is a nice way to combat the supposed inflation that economists always tell us about…
Go on then: no excuse not to indulge right now.
For existing users… If you purchased any Standard or Developer package themes from us since 1 January 2010, we will happily add another theme to your account. Just drop us a mail with your username & desired theme and we’ll add it for you.
Welcome to the New Year
01. Jan, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
Welcome to the first day of 2010!**
After an amazing 2009, we’re extremely excited about the journey that lies ahead this year. We’ve been working behind the scenes, to get our ducks in a row and figure out what our goals & dreams are for 2010. So whilst all of these will be made public in the next couple of months, you can rest assured that we’ll be cooking up some ambitious ideas this year.
We’d also like to pass on our best wishes to every single customer & fan of WooThemes: may you too achieve all of your goals this year and have a great time whilst doing so! We hope – as always – that you’ll join us for the ride, as without you guys & girls, that road just isn’t as awesome.
May this year be even better than the last…
** For those a little bit tired after your celebrations until the early hours of the morning, we’ll extend the welcome to the second day of 2010 as well!
Looking Back at 2009
28. Dec, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
When we – as a company, young(ish) startup & team – reflect on the past year, I’m sure we’d all agree that 2009 has been extremely hard work, but that we’ve been greatly blessed at the same time (which means all those late nights answering support queries has paid off). So as we close out the year now, we thought that it would be great to actually reflect on the past year via the blog, as then we could recap on all of the highlights with those that matter most: all of you guys & girls!
But where to start? Since we pride ourselves on being a close-knit team (and have as a result developed real friendships, which result in late night discussions and sharing a few beers), I think we’ll start by looking at the things that influenced our team the most…
Continue Reading »
Merry Christmas
25. Dec, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
Merry Christmas everyone! We hope that you have an extremely blessed day that you spend with family & friends. Hopefully none of you are working today or trolling our support forum (as we’re definitely not there).
And then as a little “gift” from us on Christmas Day, we’re extending our WooFestive Season 5-for-1 & 20% off Promotion until the end of the year (i.e. 31 December 2009). So get in on that action now.
WordPress 2.9 is out!
19. Dec, 2009 by Magnus in WooThemes News
As most of you probably already know, WordPress released version 2.9 last night, with some nice new features added. None of the new features affect any of our themes, and we have updated all our demos to 2.9 and they are working without any problems.
We recommend everybody to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. If you believe that you have found a bug or compatibility issue with 2.9, then please make a post in our forum, so we can quickly determine if it is caused by the new version.
The Rockstar Foundation: Giving Back
09. Dec, 2009 by Mark Forrester in WooThemes News
A few months ago, Adii started talking about a new charitable organization that he wanted to create that would benefit amazingly talented, yet underprivileged young girls (through educational opportunities, love & great support structures) in South Africa. Last week, the dream took another step closer to formalizing when Adii & his team launched The Rockstar Foundation.
In October, we managed to raise more than $5k for breast cancer awareness. But going forward, we’ve decided we’d like to be more involved in helping worthy causes. So we’re teaming up with The Rockstar Foundation, where we will be sponsoring all of their general overheads & day-to-day expenditure on a monthly basis.
Continue Reading »
Introducing the WooThemes Mastercard
03. Dec, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
We love being first at introducing new things to our users.
Way back in the days of Premium News, we were the first guys to release WP themes with theme options (and we’ve continued to build on this success). We were also the first company to introduce proper club subscriptions (ala “Software as a Service”) & an amazing themes club. And at this stage, I’d bet that if all goes well, we’ll be the first to a few more things moving forward.
Today however, we have something new to introduce and if we had asked anyone to guess beforehand, I’m sure no one would’ve gotten it right. In conjunction with the guys over at Payoneer, we’re releasing a brand-new WooThemes Mastercard for our affiliates & members.
Continue Reading »
