The WooThemes Blog

In our continuous effort to improve the way we work, we’ve recently implemented two new concepts in our workflow: hackathons & teams.

Before I share the details of these concepts, I need to provide some context. Basically when we started WooThemes 3+ years ago, Mark, Magnus & I did so without any type of “best practice” programming background, which meant that we were simply doing whatever us novice programmers thought yielded the best result. As we’ve grown up, those initial days and workflows have become part of our core processes and routines, which made us a very well-oiled machine.

As time has gone on though, and as the team has grown, we’ve realized that whilst our existing workflow obviously isn’t broken, it could definitely do with some improvements. Improvements in turn means increased efficiency & value for the WooCommunity.

So with that in mind, we’d like to share the two things that we’ve recently implemented that has already made a huge difference to how we work. Neither is groundbreaking or unique in its own right, but the benefits we’ve experienced already at least justifies a blog post.

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In Getting Real, the development industry’s manifesto by 37Signals, introduces a concept of “releasing when ready”. This basically implies that date-based milestones / deadlines aren’t that important and that if you’re developing a new product, or aiming to release an updated version of your product, you should release it when it’s ready (and not give succumb to the community pressure of releasing some rushed, half-assed version).

So quite a while back, we decided to implement this into our workflow in the WooHQ, as we were continually finding ourselves rushing to meet the deadlines that we set ourselves, which just caused a working environment that wasn’t much fun, due to that stress associated with meeting those deadlines. For quite some time, this has served us really well, since it most definitely eliminated the stress of those deadline rush days.

But recently we started noticing that this mentality also caused a few negatives to creep into our workflow…

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Last week we explained that we were in the process of streamlining & improving a couple of things in & around WooThemes. This is the second part to that initial post and we suggest that you read that post first, since it provides some much-needed context.

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

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

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We have a team of 10 hard workers dotted around the world, and whilst we’re absolute ninja’s at most the things that we do, we still have one constraint: time.

We realize that most of you reading this will sit there and think “Sheesh, I wish I had 10 team members to help me out” and that’s a valid point, but we obviously have a growing, hungry user base to support. Consider that there’s 45 000-odd of you in the WooCommunity, which means each member of the WooTeam is roughly responsible for 4500 users (or “clients”), quite a daunting thought…

The problem isn’t necessarily insuring a memorable, and positive experience for every single WooThemes user, we have a constantly evolving membership system for that (more on that soon), but it’s finding the balance and time to spend on developing and releasing new products. If you consider that we’re hitting our goal of 2 themes a month relatively easily (along with the fact that we’re continuously releasing improvements on the WooFramework / old themes and the themes we’re developing are becoming more complex), we’re not doing a bad job of managing our time.

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Developer Tools, the “batbelt” of developers everywhere, generally stirs up conversations telling you about what you should and shouldn’t use. However, I’ve always had a different take on it, I change my toolset based on the work that I’m doing. When I was a .NET developer I worked on Windows and in Visual Studio. With WordPress and PHP development, I’m not going to use those tools as I don’t have to.

So having said all that, I’m going to tell you what works for me and in general I try to use the bare minimum to get stuff done here at WooThemes. With so much code to write, I don’t want a million apps and settings to go by – I just want to login, write code, and deploy.

So here’s my setup…

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We’ve blogged about how important & valuable design is for any business before, but we’ve not yet explained how we believe that it’s even possible to design our code.

Looking around the web, you’ll see that all of the most prominent platforms (i.e. the one’s with thousands / millions of users like Google, Facebook, Flickr etc.) understand one thing: to service that amount of users, you need to be designing & developing a product that is usable in the hands of their community. This means that things like a superior UI becomes paramount in their ability to influence both the emotions & experiences of the users whilst they are interacting with your product(s).

Since they are however hosted platforms, the users never touch the code behind the UI, which means the UI itself is purely a question of how well the designers & front-end developers have executed their jobs. Sure, we all know that there’s obviously thousands of lines of code that are making that awesome UI do its job, but the users themselves never comes into contact with that code. Which simplifies the whole situation greatly…

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Comparing the CV’s and previous work experience of the WooTeam members, you will find we all have one thing in common: we have all worked on client projects, either by means of freelancing or working at an agency. The second truth in this regard is that, that is one of the main reasons why we love our jobs at WooThemes so much.

We bet that most of you will share common testimonials of bad experiences that you have had with clients: demanding clients, crappy jobs with very limited budgets, clients who believe they’re the better designer, etc. In all of these cases there seems to be a recurring theme of feeling limited as the designer or developer on the project. Sound about right?

Well, this is something that we’ve attempted to change at WooThemes.

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2010 has been an amazing year for us and whilst it has totally flew past us, we’d like to recap on both our proudest and most challenging moments. Expect quite a few links to internal blog posts about the things that we did this year and know that we would not have linked these up if they weren’t really significant in terms of the journey that we undertook in 2010.

As a bonus for sharing this trip down memory lane with us, we’ll include a few teasers of the stuff you can expect from us in 2011. So here goes…

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In most situations in life, it’s easy to skim over the finer details as most of us don’t have to time to look much deeper than the service. And this is probably the case when you – as an outsider – have a look at our progress & respective releases; it just doesn’t look *that* impressive, right?

If you consider that when we released Continuum last week, it became our 79th theme, making is by far the single, largest (in terms of theme collection at least) WordPress theme developer** around. Now if you’re not a theme / plugin developer yourself, you may not realize how much time it actually takes to maintain & support a theme collection of that size…

Yet regardless of the effort involved, here’s a few updates & things we worked on (in October only) that we didn’t blog about and you probably didn’t see (as they’re supposedly minor compared to the big stuff: new themes, iPhone apps, new platforms & collaborations etc.):

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This week marks another first for WooThemes (this may not be the only first for us this week btw), with the introduction of a new concept called The WooWeek.

Earlier this month, we realized that due to a “routine” development process of design / developing new themes and fixing bugs in old themes, we don’t necessarily always have the opportunity to spend time working on the non-critical stuff. So with the WooWeek, we’re hoping to take a couple of days and spend it on some non-critical stuff that we hope to improve in & around WooThemes.

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This morning I was randomly playing around with Google Lab’s News Timeline when I stumbled on two interesting, mainstream articles referencing WooThemes. The article entitled “How to Launch a Professional-Looking Blog on a Shoestring” basically went on to explain in great detail how a WordPress + WooThemes combination saved the author a lot of time & money in setting up a new website.

The second article about two mainstream news websites in Iowa who have also adopted the WordPress + premium themes approach, just drives the point home: premium / commercial WordPress themes save you both money & time.

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If you’re an outsider, our development cycle – and especially our release schedule – may seem completely random at the best of times. This is probably compounded by us showing you teasers of upcoming themes and then releasing other themes before those we have showed (which frustrates you, since you want those awesome concepts to be released like yesterday, right?).

In actuality though, our development cycle and release schedule is far from being random; it’s just very, very agile & flexible. So whilst we always have an idea about which themes we’ll be releasing next, we’re more than happy to chop-change that according to the “outside” demands. So here’s a little run-through of our development process…

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