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.

‘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.

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!

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.

To track sales made you just need to login to your WooThemes dashboard and navigate to the affiliates page. Find out more about our affiliate program here.

Find out more about the plugin on it’s WordPress plugin repository page.

A WooAffiliates widget placed on my personal site advertising the latest WooTheme available.

Adii's site now sporting a "Powered by" WooAffiliates badge in his sidebar, showcasing the theme his site is built on top of.

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.

Highlights

Below is a short 2 minute video of the day’s activities. WordCamp was slickly & professionally organised by Ashley Shaw of LightSpeed. Ashley also happens to be one of our most advanced Canvas theme users, check out his portfolio for some incredible mods!

Using WordPress as a development framework

Using WordPress as a development framework aims to alleviate the overhead associated with common activities performed in Web development. WordPress gives you a base set of application functionality such as user management, routing, caching, that you don’t need to build from scratch.

This session will show you how easy it is to implement a public frontend, backend, and admin area for users, as well as a basic API and other advanced functions.

The Business of WordPress: Making Money in more ways than one

WordPress has grown into a very diverse ecosystem, where its users have cultivated multiple different opportunities to create & build a business. Commercial themes have been the most obvious / mainstream success, but beyond theming there’s still so many untapped opportunities.

This session briefly explores some of the more untapped opportunities.

See more WordCamp Cape Town talks on the dedicated YouTube channel.

From left to right: Cobus Bester, Byron Rode, Adrian Myburgh, Mark Forrester, Jason Bagley, Adii Pienaar, Charl Norman, Nur Ahmad Furlong.

Before I get into the changes, I’d like to share a couple of the considerations which heavily influenced our decision-making in this regard:

• We have not increased the pricing of our club subscriptions since we first launched the existing model a couple of years ago. In the meantime though, we’ve continued to push out theme after theme. Compared to the early days we’re now offering exponentially more value for the subscriptions at exactly the same price.
• The WooCommunity has subsequently grown considerably (about 45 000 paying customers at the moment), which means there has been a massive increase in the demand on our support infrastructure. This has required us to continue growing the WooTeam (we’ll soon be announcing another two, new members) simply to keep up with the support demand due to the increased product range. We are 17 team members at the moment with salaries to pay!
• WooCommerce is obviously free and anyone can download / use it. The benefit for existing club subscribers though is that we’re offering free support for the use of the plugin itself along with our themes. The cost of this alone (and the subsequent demand on support) is significant. In our minds, this is a direct benefit & freebie we’ve made available to loyal club subscribers.
• In order for us to continue to scale the company & especially the WooTeam, we need to make sure that our revenues & support demands stay in-line. This ensures the long term success of the company, which also means we can continue the development of awesome themes & plugins.

So with this in mind, our existing Club Subscriptions (Standard & Developer) will look like this:

• Club Subscriptions will include all WooCommerce parent themes (i.e. WooStore & Coquette).
• In addition to this (and this is a change from yesterday), Club Subscriptions will also henceforth include all WooCommerce child themes (i.e. Canvas Commerce, Statua Commerce & Simplicity Commerce).
• WooCommerce Extensions will still be excluded, since we regard this as a separate product class. We plan to add a “Commerce Add-On Option” in the next couple of months, which would allow club subscribers to pay an additional fee every month and get access to all WooCommerce Extensions. In the meantime, we’ll be making a 30% discount coupon available to all active club subscribers to use with purchases of WooCommerce Extensions.
• Subscriptions will include support for the core WooCommerce plugin (and any other free plugins we release in future).
• We are also discussing further potential value additions for club subscribers. Some suggestions at this stage include SVN access to our themes library, pre-release access to new themes, exclusive access to certain themes before they’re released for individual purchase etc.
• As of 1 January 2012 (3 months from now), we will be increasing the pricing of our subscriptions to keep trend with the continuous growth in the product library and the support thereof. New monthly fees will be $20 per month for a Standard Subscription & $25 per month for a Developer Subscription. This will apply to all existing & future club subscribers. Existing club subscribers would obviously have the option of opting out of the club to avoid the increased prices.

We invite any club subscribers to get in touch with us if they have any questions or concerns.

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.

A FREE E-Commerce Plugin

This is one of our biggest release to date and it’s absolutely free. WooCommerce is an all-new plugin application and library of integrated themes for WordPress that help individuals and businesses turn their sites into professional, e-commerce stores. Our aim for WooCommerce is to be an e-commerce toolkit that allows anyone to sell anything online. View the WooCommerce page to see all the powerful features packed into the plugin.

Since forking the previous Jigoshop codebase, we’ve made these notable additions / tweaks for the release of WooCommerce V1:

• A revamped admin interface, which is more native to the WordPress dashboard & thus more familiar to the average WordPress user.
• Improved reporting, with more stats, graphs and built-in support for Google Analytics e-commerce (goal) tracking.
• New front-end features, including catalog sorting and built-in up-sells / cross-sells.
• Revised coupon system complete with coupon expiry dates and usage limits.
• Built-in HTML email templates.
• Improved order management.
• Simplified product data entry plus better product sorting / duplication within the WP dashboard.

A one-click install with a native WordPress user interface.

We also hired Mark Jaquith, WordPress core developer, who did a complete security audit of the core WooCommerce plugin, tightening up a few minor vulnerabilities in the meantime (similar to what we did for the WooFramework a while ago). This was a very important improvement for us, because we want WooCommerce users to feel safe in knowing that we’ve already addressed all of their security-related concerns with the plugin & e-commerce in general.

A FREE Store Theme

What better way to trial and test the WooCommerce plugin than with a theme built specifically for it?

Wootique is a beautifully, simple theme built to showcase your store’s products, with a user friendly, pixel perfect checkout process. Jay designed Wootique specifically for the launch of WooCommerce, as we’re big on freebies around here and we wanted to give you the most beautiful and fully-featured trial available.

A FREE WordPress theme to use with the FREE WooCommerce plugin!

We encourage you to view the theme listing for it’s full feature set and then register as a WooThemes user (it’s free!), if you aren’t already, to receive access to the theme documentation and to get on the WooCommerce product development email list. We’re building a community around WooCommerce and we want you part of this exciting new chapter in our storybook.

WooCommerce themes, WooCommerce child themes and extensions

We’ve decided to launch with 6 commercial themes and 9 commercial extensions to further extend your e-commerce store capabilities. We encourage you to view the WooCommerce themes and extensions galleries to discover all the juicy details.

Furthermore we’ve released child themes for Canvas – further adding to it’s diverse usage, and Statua – enabling photographers to sell their photos/prints.

Future plans include a lot of child theming of our theme catalog. Think of all the possibilities – Diner with a take-away ordering system, Diarise with event registration, Listings with paid listings…

Some of the many extensions already available for WooCommerce

Important information for club members

Club members get access to the new WooCommerce themes – WooStore, and Coquette, as well as of course the free theme Wootique. Our extensive, premium support is obviously included in these. Our WooCommerce child themes and extensions are not currently included with the club membership offering. We do however have plans to soon introduce a commerce add-on for a small additional monthly fee to gain access to the full catalog of commerce products. More on this soon.

Time to get excited about what the future holds for WooThemes.

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…

User Profiles

Extended User Profiles

We’ve got an ambitious plan with user profiles in the way we hope to grow the WooCommunity in the next 12 months. The user profile functionality that is currently available is only really Phase 0.1 in a long-term plan that will add fun, dynamism and further value to the WooCommunity. Here’s a couple of the new things to look out for…

• Build-a-Profile. We want to get to know you better and to this extend, we’re hoping that you will build your own profile within the WooCommunity. This includes sharing links to your external social media profiles. Our aim here is to spark interactions between different WooCommunity members and enabling those that chose to build a reputation for themselves as being avid WooThemes users or experienced WooThemes modifiers / developers. There is good money to be made modifying WooThemes!
• Customizations. This goes hand-in-hand with our hope that you will build a profile within the WooCommunity. We want you to showcase the WooThemes Customizations that you have worked on and hopefully we can stroke your ego a bit by saying “Atta boy/girl!”. This will eventually link into an automated Showcase of all user modifications.

Affiliates

Affiliates are a very big part of WooThemes and we also wanted to bring some much-needed improvements and enhancements to their experience in the dashboard and promoting WooThemes.

• Better Tracking & Reporting. The tracking of referrals and commissions are much better and more accurate now. We’re able to report to you exactly how many users have you as their registered referrer on their account, which obviously means that you’re then credited for any of their future purchases. We’re also paying a lot of attention to our reporting in this regard and whilst we’ve rolled up a much better UI with this overhaul, we’ll also be adding a few, improved reporting tools in the next couple of weeks.
• Affiliate Coupons. We recognize that our affiliates are very business-savvy and to this extend we’re hoping to further empower them in their ventures to promote WooThemes and earn affiliate commissions accordingly. One of the ways we hope to do this is by giving them affiliate coupons (for a 20% discount), which you can generate any time and make available for any 3 days per month. Since launching this, we’ve already seen loads of affiliates earning commissions by giving their audience coupon codes.
• Easier URL generation. In the past you had to choose between our pre-existing affiliate banners and links, and whilst that is still available, we’ve made the creation of the affiliate URL’s so much easier. You can now generate the affiliate URL for any page on Woo.com and if you wanted, just tweet it straight from there.

Support Forum

Quick & Beautiful Support

This is something we really wanted to get right, because support is such a huge part of our value proposition. Subsequently, we probably tried to cram too many new features in here and this is the area of the overhaul where we’ve experienced most niggles. But that said, the improvements that are working fine are absolutely fantastic and a big improvement on your user experience.

• Public Ticketing System. We’re slowly moving away from the idea that this is a “forum” and want to communicate that we operate the Support Forum as a public ticketing system. This means that whenever you create a thread, it is only you & the WooTeam that can respond & interact on that ticket, even though the knowledge & content is publicly available. We wanted to keep the tickets public, because the content thereof may help another user without the need to actually create a new ticket for an identical issue.
• Ticket Assignments & Status. We’ve always used the “Resolved / Not Resolved” on our tickets, but now we have the ability to escalate any ticket to being a bug, which means one of our lead developers jumps in there to release a fix for the theme in question. We have also included the functionality to assign tickets to specific members of the WooTeam, which means no tickets fall off our radar, which in turn means we can provide you with better support.
• Notifications. We’ve added beautiful e-mail notifications to update you (optionally) as soon as one of us has responded to your ticket. Faster support FTW.

A few more bits & bobs…

Those outline the biggest changes we’ve made and highlights the new features that we’re most excited about. But there’s also a couple more which we’d hate not to mention:

• E-mail Notifications. We want you to spend more time on WooThemes.com and one of the ways we hope to do this, is by communicating more efficiently, more often. So we had Cobus design a whole bunch of beautiful e-mail notifications to keep you updated on the various things happening on your account. A few examples: your “Welcome” e-mail, notification to let you know you have cancelled or restarted your subscription, or just a fun e-mail to inform you that you just earned some cash from an affiliate referral. We have also integrated Postmark into our email delivery system to ensure the emails get to you, and if they don’t we are informed about it. Pretty spiffy we think, right?
• Beautiful Invoices. We know it’s never nice to get an invoice, because it means you have spent or need to spend money. So we’ve tried to lighten the mood a little by sending our users great-looking invoices to gloss over the money they’ve just spent. The invoices are available via e-mail or in a more “corporate” PDF download, with your (optional) billing details included.
• Easy, One-click Checkout. Our checkout pages were in need of a much-overdue overhaul, because we really wanted to make it easier and more intuitive. So we stripped it down to the bare minimum needed (no need to select your bonus themes during checkout anymore for example) and the result is a beautiful, one-page checkout process. The real beauty however shines through when you’re logged in and are making a repeated purchase, since we can get very close to a one-click checkout process. Now there’s no more excuses for *not* purchasing that new theme every other week…

These are the additions that we’re most proud & excited about at this stage. As mentioned earlier in the post, we’re incredibly excited about the groundwork that has been done and the foundation that has been laid in terms of the additions that are still left on our roadmap.

We’re fully focused on improving your experience on WooThemes.com as much as possible, and are really making sure that from our themes to your account, you have an incredible experience whilst working with WooThemes. We’re focused on your happiness and we’re sure you’ll reward us in kind if we manage to truly deliver customer satisfaction…

What are your thoughts? Have you enjoyed the new dashboard in the last couple of weeks? Anything that you think we’ve missed?

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!”.  

What’s this WooLabs you are talking about?

WooLabs is a new place, where we’ll be experimenting a bit and hopefully innovating a lot. Our main aim is to develop products / services that will be complimentary / supplementary to our core products (themes).

Jay & Mike will head up this team and they will be contributing some of their agility in rolling out things on a more regular basis, whilst the rest of the WooTeam continues to design, develop & support new themes. They will also continue their development of some new application / niche themes and the next theme (only Pipeline for now) is already in the works.

Prior to Jay & Mike joining the WooTeam, they were working on Miniraffe, a soon to be released project that was focusing on the development of some niche plugins. We’re excited to announce that WooThemes has also acquired Miniraffe, along with the first planned plugin – Mighty Menu’s – which will be released in the next couple of months.

Mighty Menu’s will however be put onto the backburner in favour of a much bigger release…

Yes, WooCommerce is coming!

For the next couple of weeks, Jay & Mike’s exclusive focus will be on getting WooCommerce released. Finally.

In the last couple of months, Jay & Mike have been responsible for the development of Jigoshop, an exciting new commerce plugin for WordPress, as part of their previous employment gig at Jigowatt. We have decided to continue the development work on a forked version (that’s the Wikipedia link if you’re unsure what forking means) of Jigoshop, which will now be known as WooCommerce.

A Preview of the Awesomeness to come...

Jay & Mike have already shown their skills in developing Jigoshop until now and we’re very excited to welcome those skills to the WooTeam. The other benefit is that – by forking the plugin – we have a ready-made plugin that can be released sooner rather than later.

We’ll be busy rolling out some fixes & improvements to WooCommerce in the next couple of weeks, whilst also getting everything else ready at WooHQ to facilitate the launch of WooCommerce. At the moment, we’ve set the launch of WooCommerce (along with WooStore – below – and a couple of child themes + extensions) for mid-September. So the wait is almost over…

WooStore Preview

Our very first WooCommerce theme will be the beautiful WooStore, designed by Magnus. Magnus already designed this almost a year ago, but the design is simply timeless and we’re sure you’re going to love it! Here’s a bit of a teaser…

WooStore will be our first WooCommerce theme!

Excited much?

We know that was a mouthful, but if you’re anything like us, you’re giddy with excitement.

This represents a *major* move for us and we’re excited to see our long term strategy grow in this way. We’ve got a bunch of incredible ideas and we’re hoping to bring even more value to the WooCommunity.

As mentioned above, the first order of business is to get WooCommerce out there. There’s a lot of things we’re planning for WooCommerce that we’ve not mentioned above and we’re planning to roll these out steadily after our initial launch next month (for example, out-of-box WooCommerce support for Listings, and maybe some e-commerce child themes…). The great thing with this is that we now have a dedicated team in Jay & Mike (WooLabs) to power all of this awesomeness.

Over to you: what do you think?

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.

The New User Dashboard

Here’s a couple of the highlights from the new features:

• A totally new UI for the user dashboard;
• Extended & integrated user profiles;
• A new, custom support forum which acts more like a helpdesk & ticketing system;
• A new, WooThemes-specific activity stream for everything that happens in & around WooHQ (see);
• Brand-new coupons to reward loyal WooThemes customers; and
• A much-improved affiliate section, which allows you – the user – to create your own coupon codes for your readers.

Mark's profile page. Make sure to add your social profiles and theme customizations.

In addition to all of those, we’ve also switched our payment processor to a much more flexible system, which means we have massively improved the user experience related to payments & checking out. Here’s some of the things we’ve done:

• Automated upgrading between different product levels;
• Easy, automated selection of your bonus themes and the management of your bonus credits; and
• A fully-fledged account statement with transaction history and proper invoices.

The New Checkout Page... Try it!

We’ve just spent most of today rolling this out (sorry again for the downtime!), so the whole WooTeam is very tired after a very long day… We suspect there’ll be a few niggles with the new system and we’ll be fixing those in the next couple of days as they are reported. For now, get your hands dirty in the new dashboard and drop us a mail if you spot any issues with your account.

We hope that you’re just excited about these new features as we are. For us, this represents phase 1 of our short term plan, which will see many new additions to WooThemes in the next couple of weeks. This is just the launchpad for some incredibly exciting announcements happening in the next fortnight and we’re very excited about continuing this momentum and rolling out more awesomeness soon.

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).

The idea with these tutorials is to showcase the flexibility of Canvas (something which should also be present in the recent Canvas case studies which we’ve published) and to empower users to use more of the incredible functionality that is already included in Canvas. We want to help you create better websites.

We’re adding tutorials as we spot the need for specific topics in the support forum. Feel free to post any suggestions / requests for new tutorials here or in the support forum. As said above, we’re having to juggle our time between a bunch of things at the moment, but we’re spending every spare second improving our support resources (more on this soon!) & more specifically our documentation & tutorials for Canvas.

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.

Some statistics

Everyone loves statistics right?

• We’ve grown to a full-time team of 11, in 5 countries on 3 continents.
• Cater for a community of commercial theme users of almost 40,000.
• We’ve had over 750,000 downloads of our free WordPress themes (since we started tracking them!), excluding our WordPress.com themes like Bueno that has around  212,887 installations.
• Released 97 themes.
• Our demos, theme listings, sub-sites, and this blog are viewed by over 500,000 monthly unique website visitors.
• Sent over 23,159 sales and admin emails.
• Supported 46,421 forum support topics.

Phew we’ve been busy, but we’ve had a helluva lot of fun along the way.

Please understand we are not stating these statistics to inflate our egos, rather to remember the responsibility we have going forward of continuing to innovate in our product releases, impress our community of users, and grow these numbers even more.

Our birthday special offer

As we’ve done on previous birthdays we’ve got a birthday present for you… before we crack open some champagne on our side.

Over the next 3 days we have a special running offering a 5-for-1 on standard and developer theme packages. Use the “HAPPYBIRTHDAY” coupon code when checking out and you’ll also get 30% off the package price.

We’ve also discounted the start up fees on new club subscriptions by 30%. Meaning the start up fee on standard club subscription is $80, with the usual $15 per month going forward to keep it active, and the start up fee on the developer club subscription is $130, with the usual $20 per month thereafter.

We haven’t forgotten about our loyal and existing community of users, but unfortunately you’ll need to wait another month to get your present. It will be worth it. This is in line with what our new team member Warren is working on.

P.S. One more random statistic

As I said above, we’ve had a helluva lot of fun in the 3 years of WooThemes existence. We’ve been on 2 team trips – sightseeing & conferencing in England, and skiing in Austria. If my mathematical formula (Av. number of team members X Av. number of drinks X 14 days of Wootripping) is correct we’ve consumed about 448 pints of beer, and around 112 Jagerbombs. Ouch!

And that folks is why we only meet up once a year…

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.

By the end of our workshop each recruit had their own WordPress.com powered website, and a far better understanding or what web design and development involves. A few showing great interest in learning more about our niche!

Part of WooTheme’s responsibility for the venture was also the design of the Grow Academy branding and the development of it’s website.

Logo design

The final logo design.

For the logo design I wanted to create something that looked somewhat organic, yet portray militant strength, as the theme of the academy was an army bootcamp with dog tags being awarded at the end of the week.

The final result was a simple, yet definitive shape with Vitesse used for the typography with some warp effects for the organic nature of it.

Website design

In our initial meetings we discussed how we would get the recruits to engage with the website as they learnt more about the web. WordPress was the only option we put forward, naturally…

Ideally we wanted the recruits to blog at the end of each day on what they’d learnt, but given their very basic web skills we thought this might be a bit of an ask. We therefore decided a BuddyPress installation on the GROW domain might be more suitable. Allowing them to post status updates at the end of each day, friend request each other and join discussions on the workshop topics in the groups. They still had the ability to write blog posts on the site if we were to go down that route.

WordPress & BuddyPress

Adii installed WordPress and the BuddyPress plugin on www.grow.org.za (Yes folks he still gets his hand’s dirty occasionally). We enabled activity streams, bbPress forums, friends, groups, private messaging and extended profiles in the BuddyPress backend options.  We then installed our Canvas theme, with the Canvas BuddyPress child theme activated.

Activating the BuddyPress components on the website, after installing the plugin.

Within a couple hours we had a fully functional website up and running catering for all the requirements of the Grow Academy.

Canvas and it’s BuddyPress child theme

With Canvas everything was styled beautifully by default, but we also had the ability to customize the styling of the website to suite the logo design better. We kept the very clean default style, but added some black and white shading and strokes to the layout – to portray the fact the initial Bootcamp being run was very much a prototype and test run for future plans.

The Grow website homepage using the Canvas business page template.

We decided the “Business Template” was appropriate for the home page, with the slider highlighting what the Grow Academy is about and sidebar & footer widgets (highlighting the Facebook and Twitter social profiles) placed below a body of more content.

The Google Web Fonts typography theme options in Canvas.

We enabled Google Web Fonts in the Canvas theme options and used “Brawler” for navigation, post titles and widget headers, with “Droid Sans” used for the general paragraph styling.

We turned on the “Boxed” styling and set the body background color and site wrapper background color. We also added a top and bottom border to the navigation menu, and a custom image graphic to the background of the header space.

Setting up the Grow website header space in the theme option's panel.

We also used the WooTheme’s shortcodes to create collapsable accordions housing the workshop content.

The WooThemes shortcodes in action to display the various workshop content.

The Grow website usage

On Day 1 the recruits were all registered as BuddyPress users of the website, and immediately started friend requesting each other and posting status messages. Workshop leaders created groups for each of their topics and posted links and notes to course content within those groups that the recruits had joined as members.

The BuddyPress activity on the Grow website.

Recruits updated their profiles with their Twitter usernames, and links to the websites they created in our workshop.

The Google analytic reports show the site was consistently used over the 5 days of the academy and the recruits embraced the tools available.

The Academy Outcome

The Bootcamp academy and it’s website were a huge success. The recruits were equipped with new skills, internship placements are currently being arranged, and the website – that took only a few day to create AND populate (the more time consuming part of the project) – coped with the newbie internet users. WordPress, BuddyPress and Canvas enabled a training platform and social network for the recruits to interact and learn from.

A message from one of the recruits on the website.

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.

Warren will be jumping right into the deep end with his first task, and will be working on something we are hugely excited about. It’s an undercover project that’s release is long overdue, but now with the added capacity we can concentrate on the final push. Whilst it won’t be bundled with themes, it will help us get those themes to you, allow us to support them better, our affiliates to make more money advertising them, and help provide you with a more intuitive checkout process…

Lots of goodness coming to the WooThemes machine!

A Colab?

Yep, we’re taking on this challenge with a collaboration, as our plates are already filled with a bunch of awesome things we’re working on, which means we simply don’t have enough time to take on every single idea that pops up within WooHQ. A collaboration with some awesome peeps therefore helps add capacity to the WooTeam, brings in some fresh voices and definitely gives the projects we’ll be collaborating more momentum, fire & passion.

The other reason for a collaboration is simply the niche nature of the themes that we’re aiming to release. If you have a look at our best-selling themes you’ll see that our users are predominately buying Business & Magazine-like themes. So whilst we’ve always made a push to release the odd niche theme, we’ve limited these in an attempt to satisfy the greater hunger of our users for Business, Magazine & Blog themes.

This approach however definitely leaves a couple of gaps, which would be great to fill (since we’d love to be *the* theme provider of choice for every single WP user by covering all of their niche bases imaginable). Again, a collaboration basically helps us do just that… Here’s the details…

The Details You Want

We’re teaming up with two awesome individuals: Jay Koster & Mike Jolley (who was previously responsible for some of the code over at our friends, AppThemes).

A few of weeks ago, these two approached us about a new theme they had started working on and wanted to explore ways in which we could collaborate. The theme – an application-like, bug-tracking & development tool – wasn’t necessarily something that we would’ve committed internal resources to and that was one of the main reasons why we loved the idea. Jay & Mike contributed a new passion & vision and we felt that this could be of great value to the WooCommunity.

We have subsequently finalized a relationship & collaboration which will see Jay & Mike join the WooTeam as honourary members (similar to Chris Rowe who joined us on the design front). They will be working on application-like themes, which will be targeting a variety of niches (some of which have been suggested via WooIdeas: Product Comparision, Q&A & Classifieds).

And it goes without saying that all of these themes will be available right here on WooThemes, where all of the club subscribers will get immediate, free access.

The First Theme: FaultPress

As mentioned, the first theme to be released under this collaboration is a bug-tracking & development tool and will officially be called FaultPress. The theme has just gone out to some beta testers and we expect that the release will be imminent. In the meantime, here’s a little preview of what you could expect…

What is this worth to you?

Finally, we’d love some feedback on the pricing of these new themes.

Last year we introduced a new pricing level for our Enterprise Themes (currently only Estate & Listings), as we felt that these themes contained advanced, niche functionality that would enable you to setup and monetize a new business quite easily. Our gut feel is that these new application-like themes would tend to fall under the same classification due to their advanced functionality and niche purpose.

What do you think? How should we classify these themes? And what should their price be?

We launched our ExpressionEngine themes in January last year, in an attempt to diversify and expand our business. The EE launch was also eventually followed by the introduction of Tumblr, Drupal & Magento themes, which re-inforced our strategy and allowed us to really gauge the demand and viability in these markets / communities.

After more than a year of working hard on this strategy, we came to the difficult decision to transition these platforms out of WooThemes as we re-focus our attention on the one CMS which our core team loves: WordPress.

What happened? Why change the strategy now?

The decision to move into these platforms & communities was based on a whole bunch of business considerations, but they probably didn’t speak as much to either our own passions or skills. This resulted in a few things:

• We have no knowledge of these platforms, which meant we had to partner with collaborative developers to help us expand onto these other CMS’s. We luckily found brilliant partners passionate and committed to their niche CMS strengths. Collaborations have their own little intricacies and our experience with these platforms & development processes was just never the same, as it was with WP.
• We realized that we had no knowledge of these communities, which meant that it was hard for ourselves to get a firm foothold there. Our roots are firmly in the WP community and as a result we always tried to replicate our WP ideas in these other communities, but we eventually realized that we had to tailor our approaches accordingly. The decision to focus our attention on WP instead is simply due to team capacity, budgets & priorities.
• In our hearts, and without trying to step on anyone’s feet, we could never get as excited about a new Drupal or EE theme in the same way we do before every WP release. Passion is always important.

All-in-all, this decision is not as much about the other platforms that we were pushing before, but instead our renewed focus on the core of our business. Our motivation behind this decision is therefore a simple re-alignment to our greatest passion and to further re-inforce our roots.

What happens with your Drupal / EE / Magento / Tumblr themes & customers?

The good thing about our situation is that due to the way our collaborative arrangements with our developers were set up, it allows them to further pursue, sell & support these themes. So if you’re a customer using any of these themes, you can rest assured that we won’t just drop you into the deep-end and we’ll continue to support you as promised.

Here’s an overview of what will be happening to these themes:

Theme Sales

As of today, the EE & Magento themes will be available on ThemeForest and will be sold & supported by their respective developers (i.e. we’re not directly involved at all anymore). The Drupal themes are being recoded and optimized for Drupal 7, so when they’re ready, they’ll be made available on a new profile on ThemeForest as well. Lastly, we’ve discontinued our Tumblr themes completely and hope to release most of them / some of them on WP (powered by WooTumblog) in the near future.

Support

For the time being nothing changes… Existing customers will still be able to access theme documentation and the support forum on WooThemes until the end of April. At that point in time, existing customers would be migrated to the support structures of the independent providers (who will each have their own support structures & policies).

We’ll be communicating these details to existing users as soon as possible.

For new customers purchasing Drupal / EE / Magento themes, you can simply follow the instructions from the independent providers about their own support structures.

Got questions?

If you’re an existing WooThemes user and have purchased any of our non-WP themes, we’d love to answer any questions you may have about this transitioning phase. So give us a shout if you’re unsure about what we’re saying.

We had great applications from some people that we see active in the WooCommunity on a daily basis, and as a result this was a really, really hard choice. Ryan however went the extra mile in getting our attention (the video is a must-see) and we absolutely loved the individualism that he broadcast, which made him a perfect candidate in our opinion.

So as of today, we welcome Ryan to the WooTeam as the first-ever Community Manager. We’re excited to see the value that he contributes to both the WooTeam & WooCommunity.

Since all of us don’t know Ryan all that well yet, we asked him to introduce himself…

A Message from Ryan

Hi everyone,

Like the short video says, I’m Ryan. It’s an honour to be WooTheme’s new community manager. I can’t tell you how excited I am to work with you all and the WooTeam. I was literally shaking with excitement when I received the email! I’ve been a big fan of WooThemes and the work they do. I’ve been a member since they released a theme called Papercut. Seems like so long ago when I first started tinkering with their themes, and now I’m working with them. It’s hard to believe this is a reality.

None the less I’m here to help the wonderful WooCommunity. I’m going to try and make everyone’s life a little easier. I know I’ve got a lot to learn, and a lot of people to meet but I’m ready! I’ll be here to answer any questions you have regarding themes, the theme club, theme support, WooIdeas, etc… I’ll be hanging around most of the day answering emails and connecting you with the support you need, as well as making that support easier to get. It’s going to be great.

Feel free to contact me anytime. Whether you are happy sad, mad or glad, I’ll try and answer your requests the best I can and keep the great WooThemes support and customer service going. Thanks.

By the way, this video took over 26 takes.

What can you expect?

Your Community Manager

We’ve hired Ryan to fill a gap between you – the WooCommunity – and the WooTeam. We want to interact with you more, find out what’s bugging you, or on your mind, and how we can improve your experience in & around WooThemes.

You would’ve seen a recurring theme (excuse the pun) from us in the last couple of months: we’ve tried to add as much value around here as possible. The days of just releasing new themes (regardless of how incredibly awesome they are) are long gone and we’re now very focused on making sure that all of your interactions and experiences with Woo is WOW! Simple as that.

You will therefore be seeing Ryan interacting with you via e-mail, here on the blog, as well as on our social media channels. In addition to the way the WooTeam already interacts, you’ll see Ryan’s name & gravatar popping onto your radar regularly. When that does happen, don’t treat Ryan as a stranger, but regard him as your new best friend.

This has been something that we’ve been working on for quite some time now, but had to wait for WordPress 3.1 to finally be released (as Tumblr2WP supports post formats, which was not available pre-WP 3.1). In the last 6 months, we’ve been putting many of our assets in place to allow us to replicate the popularity of Tumblr’s functionality on WordPress and our new migration tool is one of the final pieces of this jigsaw puzzle.

If you haven’t been following our progress in this space for long, here’s a recap:

• We now have 8 tumblog themes available for WordPress, which gives you a Tumblr-like blog hosted on WordPress.
• For those that don’t want to use our own tumblog themes and prefer to create their own, we have the free WooTumblog plugin (downloaded almost 5000 times already) to replicate Tumblr-like publishing functionality on *any* WP installation.
• We have our very own iPhone app – Express.app – which enables you to publish to your WooTumblog-powered blog from your iPhone. Hot. Over 1000 downloads already.
• And now we have a migration tool for those of you who have been wanting to move to WordPress and copy all your existing Tumblr posts across.

That’s the complete package right there.

The Benefits of WordPress

We’ve always proudly had our eggs in the WordPress basket, because WP is our passion and we believe that this is the most flexible publishing platform around. It is exactly this passion & belief that has driven us to take the awesome publishing experience that Tumblr created, and we’ve personally used and developed on, and replicate that on WordPress.

If you are considering switching from Tumblr to WordPress, here’s a few reasons that help justify it:

• You get to own your data. Never mind data portability, or any of those fancy things; putting your data on your own server is probably the best thing you can do.
• Templating made easy. WordPress has massive roots in theming / templating, and as a result the amount of themes and resources available in this regard are immense. You can’t go wrong here.
• No more Tumbeasts. Tumblr’s scaling issues have been widely publicized, and unfortunately they’ve suffered considerable downtime of late (we’re sure they’ll eventually figure this out though). Run this on your own server and avoid being dependent on another platform.

The unspoken benefit here is obviously that – once you have migrated – you can tap into the awesomeness that is WooThemes too.

If you’re on Tumblr, have a look at our Tumblr2WP Exporter and toy with the idea of making the move to WordPress.

All of our tumblog themes have also been updated to support Post Formats, which is also what the Tumblr2WP exporter uses. Win. To make use of the exporter, just make sure that you’re running WP 3.1 and have updated the core Importer plugin.