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.

This is what the Custom Navigation is looking like at the moment:

The New Custom Navigation in WP 3.0

Jeff & a few other leading WP contributors will now spend some time with the community in getting their feedback before further tweaks are made (you can get involved on the Trac ticket here). There are still a few obvious UI and then a few more technical things that needs attention, but overall the project is bang-on track and we’re super excited about seeing it rolled out in WP 3.0!

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.

We are excited that we can give something substantial back to the core after a somewhat hesitant decision to GPL license our themes a few months ago. This proves to us, and hopefully others, how the GPL license should be correctly utilized to benefit others.

Kudos must be given out to Jeff Pearce, who was employed late last year by WooThemes and undertook the WooNav system as his first official development project for us. Not a bad first splash in the water we must say!

What excites us even more about this relationship with the WordPress core team is what Jane said to us in her email:

This year I’m hoping to work on ways to bring the commercial WP-based companies and core closer together, as opposed to what sometimes feels like a weird rivalry, so this would be a nice beginning for that

What’s next?

Jeff has already begun working with Ryan Boren (one of WordPress’ lead developers) on porting the WooNav into “patch form”, which will then in turn be submitted to the core of WordPress. Feature freeze for WordPress 3.0 is this week and we’re hoping to have ported the WooNav to the core ASAP, so that the community may start discussing the functionality, after which we will continue to work with the WP developers and the community on improving and finalizing the functionality for WP 3.0.

“Unfortunately” this impacts our users, since these developments mean we have to delay the integration & roll-out of the WooNav to all our themes. Whilst the implementation thereof will stay 99% the same, we don’t want to potentially duplicate work for ourselves and have decided to wrap-up the porting & development of the WooNav into core WP first, before integrating it with all of our themes.

You can however rest assured that by the time WordPress 3.0 hits your web browser, we’ll have included support for this amazing functionality in all of our themes. So this new awesomeness from the two W’s is not far off and all WooThemes will soon be able to enjoy it in all of its glory.

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.

I’m also happy to see that the the Software Freedom Law Centre has announced that the images & CSS within a theme never inherited the GPL license of WordPress. Even though we are fully GPL-compliant now, we got a lot of bad vibes in the past for wanting to (rightfully) protect our designs; so it’s good to know that we at least weren’t entirely wrong for standing our ground.

That said, we’re happily GPL now and kudo’s must go to Matt & his team for continuing to fight for the cause in this regard; as irrespective how much this argument really meant for the WP community –  I think that the WP team’s spirit (in this regard) in general has resulted in us having an amazing platform, which we get to use for so many diverse projects every day.

Hatchet = buried.

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.

Why did we do this?

I don’t think it’s necessary to give you a long-winded list of reasons here. There’s only one reason we did this and that’s because we love WordPress, we’ve always believed that we were contributing to the project and that we wanted to move closer to the heart & soul of the project. Simple.

So what does this mean?

• The only thing that really changes, is that there’s no more restrictions on a Standard / Single and Developer License i.e. you can use these themes on unlimited domains irrespective of the package you choose (view a comparison of the different packages here).
• The themes aren’t free and you still need to buy them! (i.e. there’s no hidden download link somewhere)

Existing User?

If you previously purchased any subscription or a Developer License, then nothing changes. But if you purchased a Single License, you now get the added benefit of using those themes on as many domains as you want. So the new GPL licensing doesn’t change anything with regards to your rights or experiences with those themes.

We really hope that everyone will support us in this move and that you will get excited with us about what the future holds not only for us at WooThemes, but also the WordPress project as a whole.