The WooThemes Blog

We just wanted to give you a quick update on the integration of the WooNav into the core of WordPress 3.0 (final version to be available mid-April).

Jeff has been working really hard to get everything ready and the basic functionality for the Custom Navigation (as it is now being called) has already been included in the WP 3.0 nightly builds (after last week’s WP dev chat). The most significant amount of work centered around moving away from Woo-specific branding, uses of prefixes and coding preferences, which means Jeff had to create a patch using all of the WP core standards & defaults. It is now that patch which is available in the nightly builds.

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Two weeks ago when we launched the WooNav, we knew it was something special and would be well received by our users, together with our recent release of WooFramework V2 our theme development was certainly hotting up. Then, out of the blue, we were contacted by Jane Wells of the WordPress Core UX development team who was planning the final iterations of the menu management system’s core features for WordPress 3.0. Unbeknown to us Jane had been playing around with our WooNav functionality:

We have a developer working on it, and have gone through several rounds of community feedback and iteration, and it strikes me that what we’re probably going to end up with is a lot like what you guys have in your Custom Navigation option, so I thought I’d get in touch with you guys to talk about it

After a few emails it was pretty obvious that this made perfect sense for both us and the core team. It would save the WordPress developers hours of coding to build something that already existed and did the job well, and WooThemes would finally be acknowledged for it’s work in furthering WordPress theme development.

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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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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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