The WooThemes Blog

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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As we mentioned on Monday, we wanted to kick this year off with an immediate new theme release to get the development momentum and WooJuices flowing again. The theme to kick things off is a brand-new business theme aptly named Biznizz.

We already hear some of you groaning, half-expecting us to announce a massive new release (like a WP theme that is a 100% clone of Facebook or something to do with e-commerce), but that was unfortunately never gonna happen straight after the holidays. Heck, we’re still getting the sand / snow out of our hair (some of us spent the holiday in sunny South Africa, whilst others were in less sunny Europe)…

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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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At the WooHQ, we’re obviously all about theming… So we recently created this WooVille comic, which formed part of a little promo package that we sent to some cool online guys & girls, which we respect & love. The idea of the comic, is just to explain WooThemes (and obviously the theming-bit of what we do) in a tongue-in-cheek way.

Kids: Don’t do drugs & say no to Defaulto.

Things never slow down at the WooHQ, and to add some more fire to our bellies, we’d like to announce a new joint venture that is coming to WooThemes… We’ve been working behind the scenes to negotiate a collaboration that would see us working with the incredible guys over at WPBundle, which means that you can expect some amazing themes (all bundled) coming your way in the next month or two.

After we heard that WPBundle’s Kickstarter project failed to reach its goals, we contacted Liam (lead designer & co-founder at WPBundle, who we had worked with a couple of times already) about helping out with the project and making sure that it actually launches. The end-result of a few hefty discussions is that WPBundle will now officially be “powered by WooThemes” and we’ll be working side-by-side with their team to bring you even more awesomeness!

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After seeing the discussion on our latest theme release (Sealight) explode, we decided that it would be a good idea to engage with our users, and potential future users, about what you would like to see from us going forward.

For those that didn’t follow the conversation, we’ll quickly provide a bit of a recap:

• Opinions on the latest theme release range from it being great, to it being not so great (this is specifically being leveled at the design of the theme and not as much the functionality which most consider to be awesome);
• The criticism seems to be that we aren’t being innovative enough with our themes – particularly our business themes – and that other theme providers are doing this much better than us;
• Our strategy is to release themes that meet the requirements of as many of our users as possible, and as a result we try to avoid going overly niche when designing new themes;
• Furthermore, we always need to find the balance of the features that should be included in a theme out-of-the-box versus what should be left for custom development should single users require very specific / unique functionality.

That’s been the discussion up until now (you may want to read through it yourself to catch all the little bits). So what now?

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We know we should’ve done this a long, long time ago, but when things are moving so quickly (and you’re releasing 3 / 4 awesome new themes every month), the smaller things tend to fall from the radar. But better late than never, right?

The Playground is a WPMU setup, which allows you to test-drive our themes and experiment with the backend features (which has been impossible on our demo’s). So if you’ve been contemplating buying one of our themes, you should seriously consider playing with it first and making sure that it’s the right fit for you.

A few weeks ago, the whole WooTeam combined for a massive hustle in localizing all of our 40-odd themes (at that stage). This meant re-doing large chunks of the static text that we had included, to enable us to use GNU’s “gettext” functions. This means that all of our themes now includes one file (.po) which is used for easy translation of our themes, without the need to edit the core template files.

So… We’d like to launch a new initiative, whereby our themes will be translated into as many languages as possible. There’s obviously a lot of value in this for us and we’d like to reward everyone that actually contributes some translations to the project. How cool would it be to have every WooTheme available in 20-odd languages?

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We know that we’ve been bombarding you with a lot of new theme concepts of late; and that amidst us not even releasing some themes that we’ve showed you quite a while back. Well there’s method in our madness…

First up, we’ve tried to create a new space for you to keep track of all the different teasers / previews that we’ve posted on the blog. This “Themes in Progress” page is also accessible from the navigation menu’s in our footer and you should check there regularly if you want to drool…

Secondly, we’re getting through us much work as possible in the next 2 months, so that we can have a bit of a rest in December & early January. So whilst we’ll be blogging, releasing new themes and providing support during that time, we won’t be working overly hard on new stuff. Everybody needs a break ya’know…

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24 hours has passed since we posted yesterday’s “Guess our Bestsellers” competition and it’s about time that we get to announce the winners of some of those Developer themes…

First up, nobody could come up with the right guess for our best-selling themes in the last month, so nobody thus got both correct and the free 6 month subscription on offer has thus gone to waste… There are however 6 people who guessed our all-time bestselling themes correctly and we have decided to give each of these people a Developer copy to any of our themes. But before we announce the winners, we need to tell you what the winning combo’s would’ve been…

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We do love our competitions here at WooThemes and we’re definitely of the opinion that things would just get a little dull over here at times, if we didn’t spice things up with whacky, new contests & promo’s. The funny thing about these competitions is, that we never really spend a lot of time conceptualizing it; instead we just act impulsively based upon a creative spark. So excuse us if our ideas aren’t overly complicated, but we believe the freebies definitely makes up for the lack of “substance”…

So this time around, we were curious to see whether you could actually guess which of our themes were indeed the bestsellers in terms of their popularity & sales. This is especially intriguing, since with every recent release we’ve had negative comments about the theme, even though we obviously have the past sales data to back up our decisions. Here’s how this is gonna work…

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We’ve been releasing quite a steady flow of themes in the last couple of months (18 since the beginning of this year) and since this is (almost) the middle of 2009, we figured we’d take a little bit of a backseat and just consider our next move.

Whilst it’s our job to make decisions about what kind of themes to release next (and judging by the growth of WooThemes, we’re pretty good at that), we thought it’d be good to put this out there to all our fanboys and -girls and get your opinion / feeling on this… So just as a matter of recapping things, here’s all the “types” of themes we’re releasing at the moment:

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