The WooThemes Blog

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.

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!

The nominations for the 2011 Crunchies are now open and we’ve been nominated in 3 categories. We’re hoping that the whole WooCommunity can get behind us and vote for us!

Here’s the categories we’ve been nominated in (click on the links to vote):

• Best Bootstrapped Startup
• Best International Startup
• Best Design

You can vote once per day until Tuesday, 13 December. Please click on the links above and vote for Woo!

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.

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WordCamp Cape Town took place last month at the iconic V&A Waterfront with Table Mountain as the backdrop. 6 of the WooThemes team members were representing and engaging with WordPress & WooThemes users.

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We launched WooCommerce yesterday and with many new products suddenly flooding into the WooThemes infrastructure, we had to accommodate them in some way (especially in terms of the WooThemes Club and our subscribers on those plans). Having interacted with many of our subscribers in the last 24 hours, we have decided to change the terms of our club subscriptions to be both fair to subscribers, but also viable to us – as a company – in the longer term. 

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With much excitement, pride, and anxiety after such a long journey we can finally happily announce the release of WooCommerce.

For the last month, since the announcement of WooLabs/WooCommerce, Mike and Jay have been working like men possessed tinkering with every piece of code, adding valuable new core features, coding and collaborating on payment gateway, product and shipping extensions, and of course working on some beautiful themes.

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We launched the “new” WooThemes about 2 weeks ago and included in this launch was a complete overhaul of our backend and your user dashboard. We’ve included some of the details of this in our launch post, but since we have now stabilized (after some minor niggles), we’d like to take you through a proper tour of all the new stuff.

The Dashboard

The Central Hub of your WooThemes Activity

The new user dashboard is basically the culmination of this overhaul and is now the central hub of everything that happens in & around WooThemes and that relates to your account.

You can now do all of this directly from your dashboard (the links are for preview images specifically for non-WooThemes user who can’t log in & play with this awesomeness):

• Your Account Status. We wanted to use the dashboard to give you a full overview of what’s happening on your account & the status thereof. To this extend, we show all of your purchases here & the status of your subscription (if you have one). In addition to this, we have a proper account statement available, which gives you an in-depth and complete look at all of the transactions you’ve made.
• Theme Downloads. If you’ve purchased individual themes only, you can download your themes straight from your dashboard. And then we have a dedicated downloads page available if you have an active subscription, which includes information on the release date of the theme, the current version and when it was last updated.
• Subscription Management & Upgrades. In the past, we had to manually manage your subscription and process any upgrades (from a Standard to a Developer Package or a Standard to a Developer Club Subscription). With the new dashboard, it is now possible to pause & reactivate your subscription automagically whenever. It’s also possible to upgrade a Standard Package (to Developer) by simply paying the difference between the accounts and having the upgrade available immediately.
• Bonus Theme Management. Both our Standard & Developer Packages come with bonus themes. In the past, you either had to select your bonus themes on checkout or we needed to manually add these for you afterwards. Now you have those credits available on your account and you can redeem them in return for some new themes any time you need to or when you just feel the urge. The bonus themes available to you are the portfolio of themes available at the time of purchase, not themes released after that date.
• Account Balances & Credits. So this is something new which we’ve decided to introduce with the new dashboard. In the past, when you earned an affiliate commission, that balance would’ve needed to accumulate to exceed $50 before it meets our minimum release level. We have however decided to make it easier for you to spend that money with us again (since many of our users never reach the $50 release level), by either applying it towards another purchase or by being social and sending it to a friend.
• Activity Stream. We’re incredibly curious about how you’re using WooThemes, because we want to create a better user experience for you. For this, we created a brand new activity stream so that we can track your interactions and improve that. Apart from helping us improve Woo in this way, we think this is a pretty nifty feature to have…

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This is going to be a massive post, stocked with so many exciting announcements.

Heck, this is one of the most epic and exciting announcement posts we have written in our 3+ years of existence. We know that you’ve been waiting for such announcements for a very long while now (thank you for your patience in that regard), but we also know that not even if you had psychic abilities would you have been able to see some of this coming.

Hold tight, here we go…

The WooTeam grows

Skwizz on over to our Meet the Team page and you’ll see that the WooTeam has grown to a whopping 15 members. So let’s welcome our new team members:

You should all know Jay & Mike by now. We’ve been collaborating with them on our application themes and they’ve already delivered the beauties which we call FaultPress & SupportPress. Previously, they were only working with us on a part-time basis and our application theme collaboration was more an explorative side-project. They however join us full-time as of 1 September to head up a brand new division within WooThemes that we’re calling WooLabs (more on that later).

As you should also know, we’ve been on a big drive to improve our support & customer service in the last year. So we’re also happy to welcome Scott to the team, as our latest Ninja. Scott has been trolling the support forum over the last week, where he’s been helping to deliver happiness to WooUsers. If you spot him around, say “Hi!”.  

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We rolled out our biggest project ever on Monday: a brand new user dashboard. Suffice to say, the launch has not been without its own set of (unique) issues. But that’s pretty much expected, right?

We’d be lying if we said that we thought it would be possible for us to rewrite the whole core of WooThemes.com and not have one bug after launch. Doing that would’ve required super-human powers and an enormous amount of good luck. It is however always our aim to deliver a superior experience to the WooCommunity.

So as things stand, there are quite a few bugs (80% of them are minor) present at this stage. We’re working incredibly hard to address these in the most efficient and speedy way possible. In the meantime, we’re very sorry about the issues that are awaiting resolution and very sorry about the frustration & below-par experience you’ve had in some parts of the dashboard.

Feel free to get in touch with us via e-mail if you’re experiencing any niggles on your account. We’ll try to temporarily sort something out for you, whilst we wait for the bugs to be fixed.

18 months of blood, sweet & tears, thousands of lines of new code, Basecamp threads & to-do lists that stretch miles, that coupled with a considerable amount of patience and we’re finally ready to introduce you to the next iteration of WooThemes. Phew…We’ve revised WooThemes from the ground up, which means you now have a brand new user dashboard, new profile page, new support forum / help desk, new checkout pages… Basically just loads of new things… The whole core of WooThemes has been re-written and re-designed to create a much better user experience in & around WooThemes.

The New User Dashboard

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We’ve been on a very prominent drive in the last couple of months to solidify Canvas‘ status as our flagship theme here at WooThemes. The release of Canvas V4 was followed shortly thereafter by the addition of a portfolio module, which has made Canvas a truly flexible set of incredible functionality.

The biggest challenge with any theme of this stature is the education that surrounds it. To this extent, we’ve been quietly working away at building & populating a brand-new Canvas How To section.

Canvas How To Tutorials

The Canvas How To section currently contains 24 tutorials and the guys have been hard at work trying to squeeze some more value in there (juggling support & development tasks with that of writing some extensive tutorials).

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Tomorrow marks quite a huge and significant milestone for us. Tomorrow is our 3rd birthday, and seeing tomorrow is a Saturday, and most of you will be away from your desks, we though it would be appropriate for us to give you our present today. Yes we giving you a present.

3 years ago Magnus was working a 9-5 desk job, and only fishing & playing golf on the weekends… 3 years ago Adii was not a rockstar, and concentrating on starting a boutique design agency called “Radiiate”… and 3 years ago I was living in London, freelancing from my small bedroom…

WooThemes has changed all our lives dramatically.

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In this post we cover our recent involvement with the launch of a training academy and how we put its website together using WordPress, BuddyPress and Canvas.

Over the past couple months WooThemes has been involved in a joint-venture with GivenGain, Silulo, RLabs, and Web Growth in creating an academy for school leavers to be educated in, and equipped with web & social media skills to hopefully follow with real-world internships at selected non-profit and commercial organisations that are willing to accommodate digital apprenticeships.

Last week, behind the scenes, WooTeam members Matty, Jeff and myself attended the bootcamp of the “GROW Academy” – a 5 day workshop for 20 recruits, equipping them with social media, crowdsourcing, SEO and web design and development skills. With WooThemes taking the “Design and Development” workshop day teaching the recruits about web design, open source software, content management systems, and the wonderful world of WordPress.

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Today we welcome a new team member to WooThemes Headquarters in Cape Town. Warren Holmes joins the development team to help with the heavy lifting of the WooFramework and theme building.

Warren grew up in Zimbabwe and is a keen golfer and fisherman, so we are quite sure he’ll get along with Magnus at the next Woo get-together! He’s also a recovering java developer.

Warren’s job will be bridging the gap between our support ninjas, who’s role it is to take the beautifully crafted photoshop files and magically transform them into WooFramework powered themes, and the code wizards role of applying advanced unique php/jquery/ajax features to a lot of our themes.

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