The WooThemes Blog

An all new user guide

Along with the release of WooCommerce 1.4 today also see’s the release of our new plugin documentation and user guide, efficiently housed in a Wikeasi theme installation. It’s a work in progress that we plan to constantly update, but already it’s a huge improvement over our existing user guide and codex pages.

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Simplify. Work out the kinks. Re-focus.

That’s our plan for 2012, discussed in meticulous detail over the past couple weeks during Magnus’s visit to Cape Town. Exactly what that entails remains top secret for now. What we hope will increase happiness levels amongst our users is our quest to make our support structures more efficient. Working out the kinks.

With 123 themes and 123 theme docs, and other support resources including a knowledgebase, FAQs, a support forum, tutorials and a video library catering for over 130,000 users it’s very much a daunting work in progress that we are tackling one resource at a time. Below details some of the work going on behind the scenes recently.

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I’ve been doing a bit of thinking lately about which of our themes & individual theme features are most valuable to users and I’ve come to a very simple conclusion: sometimes it is the least glamorous feature that is also one of the most valuable features.

I was specifically thinking of our “Custom Logo” function, which is included in every single theme and allows the user to quickly & easily replace the theme’s default logo with their own. No frills, no fuss. This isn’t a very glamorous feature and as far as usage goes, you’d probably find that almost all WooCommunity users have used it. The development that went into the feature is also minimal, since it’s not the most complicated function that ever needed coding. This obviously also means that support enquiries for this feature is pretty much non-existent.

Could this be the perfect feature? Maybe.

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So much goodness.

It’s been only just over a month since Jay and Mike released FaultPress – an advanced bug tracking application theme, but they didn’t just stop there, they went straight back to the drawing board, read all our community’s recommendations and suggestions and started developing a new, more general usage support theme catering for a wider range of niches. We are proud to release that theme today – introducing SupportPress.

SupportPress, our second application style theme is designed to create a clean and simple, yet powerful help desk using WordPress core functionality. Customers can submit support requests, but are encouraged to check an intuitive knowledgebase to learn if their issues have already been resolved. Agents (your staff) administrate tickets by setting priorities and delegating tasks to fellow team members.

The solution is perfect for web designers, hosting companies, app developers, training academies, to name but a few examples. It takes WordPress as a content management system and turns it into a basic customer relationship management system.

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A culmination of quite a few things that has happened in & around WooThemes in the last couple of months, has seen us trying to take a step back from all the huffing & puffing and just take stock of where we are at as a company and a team. Across all of the spheres of our business, we’ve come to one conclusion: we’ve grown much faster than expected and our internal systems hasn’t been grown at the same pace.

So what we’ve done is to do internal “audits” of our various activities trying to identify any gaps or inefficiencies, along with tweaks & improvements that could result in us being a better WooThemes. From these audits and extensive internal discussions, we’ve made a wide variety of decisions which will be implemented in the next couple of weeks.

Since these decisions directly affects the WooCommunity, we wanted to be as transparent as possible with our goals & aims during this process. As a team we’d like the WooCommunity to hold us accountable and keep us on our toes, so in this 2-part post, we’re hoping to share our goals with you.

Here’s what we had in mind for support…

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WooVille is about revealing a couple of secrets and today we’d like to reveal two: 1) the reasons for hiring Ryan as Community Manager; and 2) where Ryan got his nickname – “The Cannon” – from.

As you know, e-mail overload is a massive problem for most of us. And when you have a community of 45 000 passionate users that wants to get stuff done immediately, e-mail overload simply becomes a nightmare… This is how we solved it.

We’ve just created a brand-new support resource for all WooThemes users: say hello to WooVideos.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve been spending a lot of time with Shawn Hesketh to re-do a bunch of our tutorial videos / screencasts, whilst also expanding on our collection of videos. WooVideos is now the new home for that, after we initially only hosted these on our Vimeo channel (and scattered the rest across the WooThemes pages/posts).

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Nothing in life is ever free, right? Let’s debate that.

Since the very early days of WooThemes, we’ve always focused on releasing the odd freebie, which has normally been in the form of free themes, icon-sets and more recently our WooTumblog plugin. There’s currently 12 free themes available, from our total collection of 86 themes, which isn’t a bad ratio (one out of about 7 themes are free) we believe. And the beauty of those themes, is that they’ve been released completely free for you guys & girls. Built on the same WooFramework that powers all our themes.

But how much do those themes cost us?

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If you’ve been using our Theme Documentation of late, you would’ve been noting a few new videos which we’ve recently added to (hopefully) improve your experience with us. And if you haven’t spotted them in the docs yet, here’s two direct links for those:

An example: WP.org vs WP.com

Other screencasts by WordPress101 for WooThemes

• How to Install WordPress
• Installing a WooTheme

More to follow soon!

We have worked with Shawn from WP101 to produce these videos as improvements of our old stuff. So we hope that you’ve been finding it beneficial.

Meet Michael Krapf, WooNinja

You would’ve noticed in the last couple of months that we’ve been focusing on one recurring topic: more value for existing users. And with this latest announcement, we’re hoping to further build on that strategy in the hope that all WooUsers will find even more value & pleasant experiences within the WooCommunity.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve noticed that the forum is being pounded by more & more support requests as the WooUsers kept modifying, tweaking and breaking (!) our themes at an alarming rate. Because this is however our exact aim with our themes (they’re meant to be customized), we figured there was only one way to improve support in this regard: hire another WooNinja.

So with that, we’d like to welcome the newest addition to the WooTeam, Michael Krapf, who will be helping out Tiago, Kirstin & the rest of the WooTeam in making our support function an even better experience!

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As part of our continuing quest to add value for our users – not only via new themes, but also via the surrounding WooThemes resources – we’re proud to announce the new addition of the WooCodex to our support offering.

Since standardizing all of our themes with the implementation of a core set of functionality via the WooFramework, we’ve been finding ourselves using the WooFramework for all of our projects; not just in our themes. The reason for this is simple: The WooFramework already includes so much functionality, which makes it perfect for any kind of WordPress-powered website.

So as an added benefit, we’ve made the WooCodex available to all of our users, which will allow them to use the core WooFramework functionality to further extend their WooThemes modifications, or even use it for websites that don’t even use one of our themes. As an example, the WooCodex includes information on adding more theme options, modifying the custom write panel or bending our image / video embeds to your will. We believe that this resource now makes using these functions even easier and more accessible to the vast majority of our users.

The WooCodex is still under construction and we’ll update it as we go. Feel free to leave suggestions & feedback about the WooCodex in the forum and we’ll update it accordingly.

Otherwise, check out the WooCodex now.

By now you know that we’re a pretty open & transparent bunch when it comes to running our business. We’d like to believe that the experiences & knowledge we’ve shared has added value, that exceeds that of our products individually. So with that in mind, we’ll be doing a few “behind-the-scenes”-type posts every now and again, to give you a more in-depth look at the different aspects of WooThemes.

To kick this off, we wanted to share some thoughts on our Support processes…

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Helping our users with technical issues, along with providing them with modification advice is something we value highly at WooThemes. At the moment we have Tiago who is doing a stellar job of handling most of the support, along with Magnus, whilst the rest of the WooTeam jumps in when necessary.

But as the company has grown, we continue to need more hands on board when it comes to providing a top-notch support environment to our users. So that’s why we’re dipping into the talent pool again, in search of a support ninja to work with Tiago & Magnus to continue providing amazing help to our users.

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