All the latest news and announcements, straight from the WooThemes HQ!
Burying the hatchet (finally!)
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02. Jul, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
So it’s official: the longest-standing argument in the WordPress community has finally been given a bullet to the head.
For everyone of you that has been involved in arguments / discussions / heated debates over the licensing & legalities of WordPress themes in the past 18+ months, you’ll know that it was probably the hottest / trending topic in the community. So to finally see the argument laid to rest, is definitely a very welcome change in my mind.
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Introducing the Showdown
30. Jun, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in Interactive
Welcome to the madness. So this our attempt at spicing things up here a little by featuring a showdown between the absolute best of the best in a bit of a blood, sweat and tears affair…
Ever since we first started WooThemes, all of you have shown us that you love modifying our themes, ripping them apart and creating incredibly beautiful websites. You just need to spend a few minutes on our showcase to understand what we mean.
So what’s the showdown then? Basically we’ll select two of these incredible user-modified versions of our themes every week and then have them square off against each other for the title of Showdown Champion. We’ll select the contestants based on submissions on our showcase and we’ll always select two contestants who used the same theme as the basis.
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Making Money Online
30. Jun, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes
Making Money Online
I deliberately decided that the title of the post should be “Making Money Online”, purely because it’s still such a buzz-word for everyone looking to profit from an online venture. So the thing with our latest theme – Feature Pitch – is that it was designed to do just that: make you some money.
One of the things that probably frustrates me most – online & off – is that the salesperson doesn’t seem to get the recognition that he / she did in the years gone by. So whilst marketers (probably) have seriously devalued the skills and expertise of top salespeople, we still believe that selling yourself / your company / products / services is an art. With Feature Pitch we have thus tried to add a simple, yet effective tool to increase your conversions online.
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Fresh News 2.0
26. Jun, 2009 by Magnus Jepson in Development
Fresh News is the all time most popular theme here at WooThemes, so we thought it should deserve to be one of the first themes to receive the new Woo Framework update treatment (see video of new framework). What this basically means is that the theme is now easier to setup and use because of the improved functions in the framework (options panel, new widgets, easier image upload, easier to update in future etc.).
We also reworked some of the coding on the front page of the theme, so it now acts more like Busy Bee in functionality. To be more specific:
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New Affiliate Banners
25. Jun, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
We surely couldn’t launch a whole new website (and change just about everything around here), without also upgrading our affiliate banners, right? Well, if you’re a WooThemes affiliate, your wishes in terms of some spiffy, new banners have been answered…
So what did you do? Well, the previous set of affiliate banners – which have been around since we launched WooThemes for the first time in July 2008 - still had our “old” identity, instead of the slightly, polished new look. With the new banners, we’re also trying out some new tag lines / marketing messages, so we hope that those will prove worthwhile for your users (and ultimately increase your earnings from affiliate sales)!
To get an idea of what the new banners look like, have a look at these previews (the complete set includes 32 banners in 10 different sizes):
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We show you teasers (Part 1)
23. Jun, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in Theme Concepts
Okay, so we probably wouldn’t be able to call ourselves WooThemes if we didn’t continuously get you all excited about future theme releases, by releasing little teasers of upcoming themes. And even though we know we just make your wait so much more painful (because we all want those awesome designs to be delivered right-away), we know you love these posts! 
So the last time we posted some teasers, was way back in March this year (here & here) and from those lists we still have Feature Pitch & “Big Easy” (from Dan Rubin) in the backlog. Feature Pitch will be released next week and then Big Easy, along with Groovy Photo & Blog (from last year’s WooContest) have been scheduled for release next month. (Don’t hold us to that, because we’re a fickle bunch hehe…)
For this post then, we’ve got 4 amazing new theme concepts that we’re working on. You’ll see that we’re only showing you very small teasers in Part 1, but as soon as all 4 concepts are completed, we’ll be publishing more in-depth teasers of the upcoming themes. So here we go (in alphabetical order)…
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Woo Worker Interview #2 – Kirstin Pauk
22. Jun, 2009 by Mark Forrester in 5 Minutes With Woo
Our second Woo Worker Interview is with a freelancer the other side of the pond of another Woo Worker who we interviewed last week (Josh of Cubicle Ninjas).
Tell us a little about yourself, your design / development skills and how this translates to your (freelancing) business.
I’m Kirstin, a 25 year old full living on the Isle of Skye (a small island off the north west coast of Scotland). I’ve been a webdesigner specializing in wordpress for the last 4 years and I’ve been a full time freelance designer since January. Although I’ve used a number of platforms, I homed in on wordpress as it offered a lot more flexibility and control. Most of my freelance work is tweaking and coding themes, writing plugins etc although I also do a lot of work with integrating forum and gallery softwares. I’m definitely not the best graphic artist out there, so I tend to be drawn more towards the coding and tweaking jobs.
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WOO2: 4-for-1 Launch Special
17. Jun, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in Promotions
You’ve come to know us as some crazy kids and we like doing stuff like just giving you some free themes. So as has become fashion around here, we’ve got to celebrate the launch of WOO2 with another 4-for-1 special. I’m tempted *not* to tell you how it works (because if you don’t know how we roll by now, we dunno on which interweb you’ve been living), but here’s the details:
You can basically buy any Standard or Developer Package theme (from our collection), and get any 3 themes of your choice completely free. This offer is available from 17 – 24 June 2009 and we won’t either backdate it to previous purchases or extend it past the 24th.
Enjoy the new themes!
UPDATE The 4-for-1 opening special has now been closed. You can now get the permantent 2-for-1 for Standard package, and 3-for-1 for Developer Package. See our Membership and Pricing details page for more info.
WooThemes GPL’ed
17. Jun, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
Along with the launch of WOO2, we’re also proud to announce that we’ll be officially embracing the General Public License (GPL) on all of our themes going forward. How did this happen? Here’s the story…
The Story
So back in August last year, I met up with Matt Mullenweg (WordPress founder) at WordCamp South Africa and we had a good chat about what we were doing at WooThemes. At that stage, the GPL issue was still highly contentious with a lot of contradicting opinions on whether themes needs to be GPL or not. But anyway (that’s not important), I told Matt one thing and that was that Magnus, Mark & myself have always believed that we were contributing a helluva lot to the core WordPress project and that licensing our themes with the GPL was always on the horizon. That statement did however come with a provision that we’ll do it when we feel comfortable making that decision.
Fast forward to February of this year, when the whole WooTeam sat down and discussed where we’d like to go with the future of WooThemes. It was there that the whole re-design (WOO2) was conceptualized and along with that decision we decided to license our themes under the GPL. We have therefore had to keep this incredibly exciting news secret for almost 4 months now, but we’re very happy that it is finally here and that we can announce this to the world.
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WOO2: What’s new?
17. Jun, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
So after a few months of hard work, we’re finally ready to roll out the new WooThemes, which we’ve quite successfully dubbed as WOO2 over the last couple of weeks. We’ve tried to create a lot of hype surrounding WOO2 and we hope that everyone is just as excited as us to read the rest of this post…
(BTW… If you’re reading this in a RSS reader, get yourself over to the site, because everything is new & shiny!)
We won’t want to keep you too long (because you should explore the website yourself and discover all of the awesomeness that way), but we figured it’s a good idea to give you a bit of a summary of the new things that WOO2 brings. Here we go…
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Theme compatibility with WP 2.8
11. Jun, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in Development
We all know that you guys & girls want to update to the latest & greatest version of WordPress ASAP. So we’ve been testing our themes (yes, all 35) in the final release version of 2.8 all day and have found a few minor bugs.
List of known bugs that still needs fixing:
- No known bugs.
This list was last updated: 16 June 2009,11 :18 GMT+2.
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Simon North joins the WooTeam
11. Jun, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
At this stage, WooThemes is like a teenage boy that just chows through stacks of food to fuel their immense growth. This means that we needed to expand our team (yet again) to fuel the next phase of our growth.
So I’d like to take a quick few minutes to welcome Simon North to the WooTeam. Simon joins our support team (aka becomes a WooNinja), where he’ll be helping out our forum master, Tiago Noronha, with day-to-day customer support. Simon is initially joining us for 2 months and if everything runs smooth & dandy, he’ll join our team on a permanent basis.
This move allows Magnus to spend a bit more time developing themes, and at the same time should increase our resources available to improve our support offering even further. We believe that WOO2 will surely showcase a progression in our support resources and we’re sure that all of our customers will be very pleased indeed!
Suit Up!
10. Jun, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in New Themes
What about a new look?
We thought it was appropriate to title the post the same as the “famous” saying from everyone’s favourite character Barney in the sitcom How I Met Your Mother. Why? Well, because it’s time to dress up your business website with a trendy new look.
Suit & Tie is our brand-new business theme and not that anyone is counting (hehe), but it is also our 35th theme to be released on WooThemes (this is also the last one to be released, before we officially switch over to WOO2). The theme was designed by well-known designer, Bryan Veloso, and we’re very pleased to be adding a little dash of his signature style (in 13 amazing colour schemes btw) to the WooThemes Collection.
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Voting Poll: Name the new WOO2 content / news blog
08. Jun, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in Interactive
So on Friday, we asked you to help name our new content / news blog on WOO2 and we got quite a few, really cool suggestions from all of you. We’re really surprised with the creativity of your ideas and we’d like to thank all of you who threw an idea into the hat.
In particular we’d like to thank Jake, Gould, Steve Robillard, Prashant and Brad Potter, who (in our opinion) contributed the best ideas and makes it into our little shortlist.
And now we just need you to vote for your favourite suggestion below…
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Hello World! – A New WooThemes Blog
05. Jun, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in Interactive
So I need to call in some help on this one… We’ve been frantically busy building WOO2 in the past couple of weeks and one of the new things that you’ll see on the new site, is that we’ll be splitting our current blog into two niche purposes.
So this existing blog, will continue to function as our main blog, but will essentially turn into communication with existing & prospective users (which it basically is now). This means that we’ll feature company-related news here, as well as use it for marketing and some kind of development / updates type blog.
Then, the new blog (which is where I’ll need a bit of your help) will be running of a sub-domain of WooThemes.com and whilst it will contain WooThemes branding (very similar to the new WOO2 website), it will have a totally different purpose. This blog will be a content blog, where we’ll cover a variety of different topics of interest to people that would use our themes. So if I had to define the scope of this blog, I’d include the following topics:
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Woo Worker Interview #1 – Cubicle Ninjas
03. Jun, 2009 by Mark Forrester in 5 Minutes With Woo
Josh Farkas in the Cubicle Ninja's studio
Kicking off a series of Q & A interviews with our Affiliated Woo Workers we have the awesome Cubicle Ninjas first up.
Josh Farkas, the creative ninja of the Chicago based creative company spends 5 minutes with WooThemes explaining why he uses WooThemes.
Tell us a little about yourself, your design / development skills and how this translates to your business.
Howdy! My name is Josh Farkas and I’m the lead ninja here at Cubicle Ninjas. We’re a creative design firm that strikes fear into the heart of boring websites. Our experienced designers have something special – passion.
Our goal is to build websites that are: 1.) Functionally Intuitive, and 2.) Emotionally Impactful.
Our unique advantage is that we’re a one-stop shop for all logo design, print design, and illustration. This means we can help you build a brand is beautiful across all forms of media, or match your current brand in the WooTheme of your choice.
What is your favourite theme by WooThemes? And why?
We honestly fought over this question…I guess the official answer is it depends on your goal. WooThemes are amazing because whether you’re building the next YouTube, making a portfolio, creating an online newspaper, or blogging to your heart’s content, you’ll have a handful of stunning options to choose from.
So you’re an Affiliated Woo Worker, right? What does this actually mean to you and what does the “job” basically entail?
In short: making people happy.
WooThemes, and Wordpress in general, are being adopted by all shapes and sizes of people. This is no longer the domain of web geeks. So our mission is to ease first-time website owners through what can be a scary process, understand how we can be the biggest benefit, and provide speedy design and development to make their WooTheme perfect for their needs.
The Cubicle Ninja's Website - based on VibrantCMS
How has working with WooThemes influenced your business and / or earnings as a web designer / developer?
Before becoming a WooThemes worker, Cubicle Ninjas focused exclusively on larger projects. These tend to be with big companies where it can be a year until the final project sees the light of day. WooThemes has allowed us to work with real people on very small projects. It has been wonderful to see customers get so excited about our work, and has reminded us why we love waking up each morning.
Would you recommend WooThemes over other, alternative free / premium WordPress themes? If yes, why?
I would recommend WooThemes over the competition in a heartbeat. There are many reasons, but here are our top five:
- Beautifully designed and coded
- Infinitely customizable (usually through the back-end)
- Exceptionally supportive community
- Consistently Updated Themes
- WooThemes Workers (Just in case…)
What do you think about the ease-of-use and customizability of our themes?
They’re as easy as can be. A simple administration menu featuring all of the options, with links to a clear and detailed explanation if there are any questions.
And if someone has heavier customizations in mind they can expand this theme to their hearts content. All they’d need is a little web design experience or a friendly WooThemes worker.
Anything else that you’d like to add?
A big ninja thank you to all of the nice people across the world we’ve had a chance to work with. And equal thanks to WooThemes for creating websites that are so much fun to play with!
