In the last couple of weeks, we’ve been spending a lot of time working on the new WooFramework and then shortly thereafter we followed that up with the introduction of the new WooThemes Custom Navigation functionality. Now it is especially the development of the Custom Navigation that has surprised me a bit.

See, we’ve always been WooThemes (with the emphasis firmly on “themes”) and with the Custom Navigation functionality, we’ve developed something this isn’t core to the themes anymore (in the sense, that you could previously achieve a similar effect with plugins). So this is a bit of a shift away from our themes-only focused production line, whilst still staying relevant to the core business focus.

When you’re busy, it is very easy to miss small shifts in thinking & practice like this, but when you stumble on something like this, it can be really profound and value-adding. I don’t think that we’re going to start developing plugins, building our own CMS or become the next Google / Microsoft / Yahoo, but it interesting to note that a business sometimes shifts itself based on user needs & wants.

So we’re extremely excited and passionate about this “new” door that has been opened to us. Hopefully we can continue building on the platform we’ve been given here now. Follow this space with curiosity & excitement.

In the middle of January, we were approached by an extremely big multi-national corporate about possibly acquiring WooThemes. It was only a preliminary meeting for the company to guage our interest in a possible deal, but the figures and details were pretty concrete. Without mentioning any figures, I can however divulge that offer was very lucrative and it made us think twice. BUT – I believe we made the correct decision in declining the offer, based on quite a few business / personal reasons.

The main positive to come out of the meeting though, was the fact that we were obviously moving in a direction, where we have a much more mainstream appeal and audience. So to pursue this, we have decided to add 2 members to our core development team… WooThemers, please meet and say welcome to FRESH01 & Foxinni.

I have known both of these guys for quite some time now and we’ve been working together on custom design / development projects at Radiiate. As of 1 March, they will however (virtually) move over to WooThemes and our Radiiate offices in Cape Town, South Africa will become the semi-WooThemes HQ (because every Rockstar needs an HQ).

What does this mean for you?

The first thing that Fresh & Fox will be working on, is helping us get through the massive backlog of theme concepts that needs to be developed & released; so you can expect quite a few new releases during the next 2 months. In the short to medium term, you will also see us improving our member’s control panel / backend, as well as upgrading all of our support resources.

And then, from about mid-2009, you can expect WooThemes to start offering our most popular WordPress themes on some of the other great CMS platforms. We’re hoping to release some BuddyPress themes soon as well and Foxinni has already started playing with Magento. We’re also considering our options in terms of the upcoming release of ExpressionEngine (we have already started working with a new partner to start porting over the themes) & the new version of Drupal.

So these truly are exciting times. Climb on board now; you won’t be sorry.