We launched our ExpressionEngine themes in January last year, in an attempt to diversify and expand our business. The EE launch was also eventually followed by the introduction of Tumblr, Drupal & Magento themes, which re-inforced our strategy and allowed us to really gauge the demand and viability in these markets / communities.

After more than a year of working hard on this strategy, we came to the difficult decision to transition these platforms out of WooThemes as we re-focus our attention on the one CMS which our core team loves: WordPress.

What happened? Why change the strategy now?

The decision to move into these platforms & communities was based on a whole bunch of business considerations, but they probably didn’t speak as much to either our own passions or skills. This resulted in a few things:

• We have no knowledge of these platforms, which meant we had to partner with collaborative developers to help us expand onto these other CMS’s. We luckily found brilliant partners passionate and committed to their niche CMS strengths. Collaborations have their own little intricacies and our experience with these platforms & development processes was just never the same, as it was with WP.
• We realized that we had no knowledge of these communities, which meant that it was hard for ourselves to get a firm foothold there. Our roots are firmly in the WP community and as a result we always tried to replicate our WP ideas in these other communities, but we eventually realized that we had to tailor our approaches accordingly. The decision to focus our attention on WP instead is simply due to team capacity, budgets & priorities.
• In our hearts, and without trying to step on anyone’s feet, we could never get as excited about a new Drupal or EE theme in the same way we do before every WP release. Passion is always important.

All-in-all, this decision is not as much about the other platforms that we were pushing before, but instead our renewed focus on the core of our business. Our motivation behind this decision is therefore a simple re-alignment to our greatest passion and to further re-inforce our roots.

What happens with your Drupal / EE / Magento / Tumblr themes & customers?

The good thing about our situation is that due to the way our collaborative arrangements with our developers were set up, it allows them to further pursue, sell & support these themes. So if you’re a customer using any of these themes, you can rest assured that we won’t just drop you into the deep-end and we’ll continue to support you as promised.

Here’s an overview of what will be happening to these themes:

Theme Sales

As of today, the EE & Magento themes will be available on ThemeForest and will be sold & supported by their respective developers (i.e. we’re not directly involved at all anymore). The Drupal themes are being recoded and optimized for Drupal 7, so when they’re ready, they’ll be made available on a new profile on ThemeForest as well. Lastly, we’ve discontinued our Tumblr themes completely and hope to release most of them / some of them on WP (powered by WooTumblog) in the near future.

Support

For the time being nothing changes… Existing customers will still be able to access theme documentation and the support forum on WooThemes until the end of April. At that point in time, existing customers would be migrated to the support structures of the independent providers (who will each have their own support structures & policies).

We’ll be communicating these details to existing users as soon as possible.

For new customers purchasing Drupal / EE / Magento themes, you can simply follow the instructions from the independent providers about their own support structures.

Got questions?

If you’re an existing WooThemes user and have purchased any of our non-WP themes, we’d love to answer any questions you may have about this transitioning phase. So give us a shout if you’re unsure about what we’re saying.

This has been something that we’ve been working on for quite some time now, but had to wait for WordPress 3.1 to finally be released (as Tumblr2WP supports post formats, which was not available pre-WP 3.1). In the last 6 months, we’ve been putting many of our assets in place to allow us to replicate the popularity of Tumblr’s functionality on WordPress and our new migration tool is one of the final pieces of this jigsaw puzzle.

If you haven’t been following our progress in this space for long, here’s a recap:

• We now have 8 tumblog themes available for WordPress, which gives you a Tumblr-like blog hosted on WordPress.
• For those that don’t want to use our own tumblog themes and prefer to create their own, we have the free WooTumblog plugin (downloaded almost 5000 times already) to replicate Tumblr-like publishing functionality on *any* WP installation.
• We have our very own iPhone app – Express.app – which enables you to publish to your WooTumblog-powered blog from your iPhone. Hot. Over 1000 downloads already.
• And now we have a migration tool for those of you who have been wanting to move to WordPress and copy all your existing Tumblr posts across.

That’s the complete package right there.

The Benefits of WordPress

We’ve always proudly had our eggs in the WordPress basket, because WP is our passion and we believe that this is the most flexible publishing platform around. It is exactly this passion & belief that has driven us to take the awesome publishing experience that Tumblr created, and we’ve personally used and developed on, and replicate that on WordPress.

If you are considering switching from Tumblr to WordPress, here’s a few reasons that help justify it:

• You get to own your data. Never mind data portability, or any of those fancy things; putting your data on your own server is probably the best thing you can do.
• Templating made easy. WordPress has massive roots in theming / templating, and as a result the amount of themes and resources available in this regard are immense. You can’t go wrong here.
• No more Tumbeasts. Tumblr’s scaling issues have been widely publicized, and unfortunately they’ve suffered considerable downtime of late (we’re sure they’ll eventually figure this out though). Run this on your own server and avoid being dependent on another platform.

The unspoken benefit here is obviously that – once you have migrated – you can tap into the awesomeness that is WooThemes too.

If you’re on Tumblr, have a look at our Tumblr2WP Exporter and toy with the idea of making the move to WordPress.

All of our tumblog themes have also been updated to support Post Formats, which is also what the Tumblr2WP exporter uses. Win. To make use of the exporter, just make sure that you’re running WP 3.1 and have updated the core Importer plugin.

We contacted James McDonald and asked if he wanted to design a Tumblr theme for us a while back, and he produced the stunning and detailed Auld for us. With the popularity of WooTumblog, we decided to release it on WordPress instead of Tumblr. The theme was a perfect fit to use with the jQuery Masonry plugin, which allows the post blocks to align perfectly on the homepage in a two column fashion. Check out his Dribbble page for some more great visual design by this up and coming designer.

Auld Tumblog theme by James McDonald

Most of the WooCrew will now take a long sought after Christmas break, and we’ll be back in the new year with more awesome goodies for you! From all of us at WooThemes, have a merry Christmas and a happy Woo Year!

Our strategy has been pretty simple: we’re making a *big* push to enable Tumblr -> WordPress migrations, and make WP a viable option for micro-blogging. We’re doing this for two reasons:

1. On WordPress you get to own and manage your data completely, which is always beneficial; and
2. WordPress is open-source and as a result it will always be more flexible than Tumblr.

Before we could however set off on this journey, we kinda needed a beacon to know from where we needed to start. So I was the one tasked to be the lab rat / crash test dummy for migrating my own blog from Tumblr to WordPress.

Current Migration Status

I used an exporter which enabled me to port all of my Tumblr content to WP. Whilst this did an admirable job, it unfortunately only completed about 75% of the job automatically and I had to handle two tasks manually:

1. Our tumblog themes obviously uses custom taxonomies for the different post types, so I had to re-assign the posts from Tumblr to these taxonomies. Luckily though this was only a 10 minute job, since it was possible to re-assign their taxonomies in bulk.
2. With the second task I was however not so lucky… the exporter currently exports all post content from Tumblr into the main content field on WP, but our tumblog themes uses custom fields for the image & video embeds, the quotes, it’s source and the links (for example). So I was left to manually go through 200-odd posts to copy+paste and re-assign these. Not such a fun job. (Which took about 4 hours of my time…)

All-in-all though I managed to conquer the job and I’m back on WordPress without having had to compromise on any data loss (because let’s face it, content creation takes a lot of hard work and none of us would want to lose 200+ posts).

But because this isn’t ideal, we’ve set out to do things better…

Next Steps

As mentioned, we’re keen to make a big push in this regard in the next couple of months, especially since we’ve worked hard to do the initial, hard yards already this year. Here’s a couple of updates you can expect from us:

• We’re working with core WP developer, Pete Mall, to develop a brand-new Tumblr -> WooTumblog exporter which will automatically take care of all the manual stuff that I had to accomplish when migrating my own blog. Once this is ready, it’ll be as easy as installing WP, installing either the WooTumblog plugin or a tumblog theme from us and exporting your content. Voila and you’re back on WP!
• As soon as WP 3.1 hits official release with support for post formats, we’ll be updating WooTumblog and all of our themes to support those.
• Express.app is due for a V1.1 & shortly thereafter a V1.2 release that should see us adding two popular feature requests: landscape mode and multiple accounts.
• More tumblog themes from us. You’ll also find more and more WooTumblog/Express App compatible themes popping up on ThemeForest and proving quite popular!

If you’re already using our WooTumblog stuff, then we’d love to hear what you think about these upcoming releases and planned enhancements. And if you’re not yet convinced by our work in this regard, prepare to be won over sooner rather than later.

Chris Rowe – who also designed Spectrum this year – is back with another absolute beauty in Elefolio, which is designed to be both a blog and a portfolio. In the past though, our portfolio themes would’ve just included your traditional blog, but since we’ve been making such a splash on microblogging of late, Elefolio has been enhanced to function like that instead.

Elefolio thus adds a bit of uniqueness to our portfolio themes collection, which is perfectly suited to the designer that wants to showcase his / her content & portfolio in the most trendiest of ways.

A Thing of Beauty

What’s Different?

We mentioned it above, but it’s important to mention it again… Elefolio has built-in integration of our WooTumblog plugin, which means it supports a whole bunch of related goodies: publishing of different post / media types, publishing from our awesome Dashboard widget and finally publishing on the go with our iPhone app, Express.

In addition to this, we’ve also included a few other things that makes Elefolio a pretty awesome theme:

• The homepage’s welcome area (in the header) is totally customizable and will allow you to add any of those social icons which you can see on our demo;
• Portfolio items are all custom post types and can be intermixed with your Dribbble shots (via this cool plugin which Elefolio supports out-of-box); and
• And for those of you that love to play with the typography of your designs, we’ve included a whole bunch of typography options to tweak.

Sounds pretty awesome, right? Well, the demo is even more awesome and we bet that once you buy the theme and modify it to your needs, it’ll be an even greater Microblogging Portfolio.

After recently – and without any real announcement – adding two more Tumblr themes to our collection (Decadence & TumFolio), we felt that we needed to give our Tumblr themes a proper place within the WooThemes.com ecosystem. This also signals our intent with regards to creating more Tumblr themes going forward and we’re especially excited to explore with niche-focused themes (such TumFolio).

In the next few weeks, we’ll be working on a few more Tumblr themes (don’t worry, we’ve got some secret – yet incredibly awesome – WordPress stuff on the way as well), but instead of pushing the same old, same old at you, we want to explore new territory with those Tumblr themes.

So we don’t do this often (as it generally leads to an free-for-all), but please tell us what kind of features you want us to include in our future Tumblr themes. Also feel free to suggest any specific designs that you want us to consider or new niche ways of using Tumblr. Simply put: shoot with those ideas! (And we’ll try make them a reality!)

The Snippet Home Page

The Snippet home page serves as a showcase of all your latest Tumblr posts, neatly arranged and categorized thanks to clean iconography and a very flexible JS Masonry powered grid layout (that we’ve previously used on a WordPress theme – Mortar). You’ll notice some Generate theme influences we’ve included, based on its recent track record.

You might notice that the icons we have used throughout this theme are from the Pictos icon set that we released with Drew Wilson earlier this week.

The Snippet Permalink page, with support for Disqus commenting. Easily add a logo, or a text-based title in your header.

Sometimes when designing a theme I find it’s best to take the approach of designing exactly what it is that I want from a Tumblr theme, rather than trying to think what our large user base want. That’s the approach I took when designing this theme: I personally wanted something clean and spacious, all the while presenting as many snippets of content I’ve found on the interwebs that I find interesting. I hope other Tumblr users feel the same way and enjoy this theme…

If you are a Tumblr user head on over to the theme page to purchase this theme. I’ve already got it running on my personal site, and I might add the Tumblr checkout process is fine piece of user interface work. Purchase the theme if for that reason only…

The result is a free, vector icon set which contains 21 icons that are perfectly suited for your Tumblr & tumblog needs. Considering that we have released three tumblog themes on WP and another four on Tumblr, we thought that icons in this niche would be a nice little added bonus for all of our users. So this is what that awesomeness looks like:

Click to see a full preview of Pictos

You like? Download Pictos

NOTE: Please read the licensing information for the free Pictos icon set over here.

Within the WooHQ, we’ve been discussing tumblogs extensively, and the conversation that we have had with you guys & girls here on the blog is minimal compared to the extended internal discussions on the matter. The only evidence that these discussions have resulted in anything more than talk is the release of Cinch & Slanted (both powered by WordPress) and teasers about an upcoming iPhone app to work with those tumblogs running on WordPress.

Nothing new there just yet… But we finally have an answer to the question so many of you have asked us in recent weeks: Are you making themes for Tumblr?

Now on Tumblr

Our internal discussions has been interlinked with an ongoing conversation that we’ve been having with the big wigs over at the ever-awesome Tumblr, and we’re happy to announce that we’re part of their roll-out of premium Tumblr themes (which has already been covered by TechCrunch, even though the premium stuff has only been soft launched).

We have thus already completed 3 awesome, new designs that are all available exclusively on Tumblr. In that list, you’ll see Generate (by Magnus – demo here), Postcards (an adaptation of Postcard by Mark – demo here) and Rockstar (which is a modification of my blog design, originally by Tim van Damme – demo here).**

More Soon

By tomorrow, our 4th Tumblr theme – Lost & Found (designed by Cobus) – will also be available for purchase. Here’s a little preview so long…

Tumbl’d

So there’s the answer to your question… We’re very happy with the outcome of these themes and we feel privileged to be working with the Tumblr crew on something as exciting as this.

Now however, it’s time to hand the microphone over to you… What do you think of all this hoopla?

Tumblogging Powered by WordPress

Microblogging has seen it’s popularity rise considerably in the last couple of months; probably as a result of information overload and the fact that most people struggle to keep full-on blogs updated regularly. In addition, platforms such as Tumblr & Posterous have made massive strides in making micro-blogging (also tumblogging) more accessible to a more mainstream audience.

So it’s with this in mind that we set out to replicate the extremely easy-to-use functionality of Tumblr & Posterous, and incorporate it into a WordPress-powered theme. Now you can have the benefits of easy & efficient micro-blogging, right on your own server & WordPress installation, with the benefit being that you own & control your own data (i.e. you don’t need to share that on some cloud platform somewhere else).

QuickPress’ing

QuickPress Widget

The most important thing for micro-blogging, is that the process of adding new content needs to be “micro” to save you time (and increase efficiency) when adding new content.

To accomplish this, we have developed a new QuickPress widget (that sits on your WordPress dashboard as you log-in), which is exclusive to WooThemes and our microblogging themes. The AJAX-powered interface allows you to quickly add a variety of different content (videos, audio, images, notes, links & quotes) without having to leave the dashboard or go the default publishing route (Posts > Add New). Also, there is no need to worry about custom fields when using the QuickPress widget, as everything is handled for you. It’s a Cinch to use!

More Exclusive Goodies

In addition to the awesome QuickPress functionality, both Cinch & Slanted include the following features:

• The themes supports a variety of text & multimedia content. At the moment the following post types are supported: Notes / Articles, Images, Videos, Audio Clips, Links & Quotes. These are all handled uniquely & automatically once you have setup the theme & categorization of the posts accordingly.
• We’ve included a bunch of unique jQuery wizardry to allow for cool scrolling / navigation between posts, as well as including hot-keys for frequently-used navigation (Home, Search & navigation), which allows you to use keyboard strokes, instead of the mouse.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Go Micro!

We know you want to; it’s the trendy thing to do!

Have a look at the demo’s of Cinch and Slanted to truly get a feel of how amazing that front-end & jQuery wizardry feels when you use it. And if you want to experiment with QuickPress & the rest of the backend, jump over to our Playground and play with the micro-blogging themes there.

When we teased you with these previews a week ago, we mentioned that the themes would include some jQuery wizardry, as well as progressive usage of CSS3. To give you an idea of what we’re talking about, you can view Cobus’ new design which he launched over the weekend.

We’d like to think that considering that Cobus designed both Cinch & Slanted and that since he’s responsible for the front-end coding, you can expect some similar awesomeness from our tumblog themes. So click around his new site and start anticipating the awesome that we will be releasing soon.

So this is the first preview of our first two tumblog themes – Cinch & Slanted. Both were designed by Cobus and will feature amazing jQuery wizardry and some CSS3 advancements (for those cool kids that know all about using superior browsers). In the backend we’re also planning a few surprises that we hope to get as close to a proper Tumblr-style tumblog experience as possible.

Both themes should be ready later this month, but for now these teasers will have to keep you satisfied…

The good news is however that tumblog themes have not dropped off the radar and the future (which includes a very early, very sneaky preview of an upcoming tumblog design) is looking very good indeed (there are even rumours of an iPhone app to support our themes).

I’ve personally goofed around with some potential functionality for our first tumblog theme, whilst working away on my own site. So I intend on getting a little technical now, but here are some of my thoughts on functionality…

Media Types

The essence of a tumblog is its ability to support different media types (we will support: text, images, video, audio, links, quotes & dialogues / chats)  and format the content according to those media types. For this to be effective, the WordPress theme needs to determine in some way what “type” of post you are adding. In my mind, we have the following options:

• Using categories or tags, which you can specify in the backend. This would mean that if a post has been published with a specific category or tag i.e. “Images”, the display format will be for an image as specified by the theme’s design;
• Adding an optional drop-down on post-level to (manually) select which type of post it is you’re publishing; or
• Developing the theme in an intelligent way i.e. if you’re embedding a video via our custom field, it will automatically be rendered as a video post by the theme.

Now it’s probably possible to use a combination of the above, but I’d think that the use of categories & tags makes the most sense. Using categories & tags would mean that you could access the archives for all “quotes” posts or all “video” posts, as they are linked to a specific category or tag (which you have specified in the theme options). This makes even more sense when you have a look at most tumblog designs, which are normally quite visually labelled with their media type to make navigation easier.

If we go that route, I’d also think that we should include a fallback in the case that the appropriate category or tag isn’t present. In this case, I think the drop-down select on post-level probably makes the most sense!?

QuickPress

This is something which we’re totally borrowing from Tumblr, but it is a must-have if we’re gonna be serious about our tumblog themes.

WordPress already includes QuickPress functionality, but we’d like to take those ideas a little further and develop a WooThemes Tumblog widget for your WP dashboard, to allow you to quickly post any type of content to your tumblog theme. With a little jQuery & AJAX magic, I’m sure we’ll be able to integrate something superbly usable & user-friendly; plus it maintains the spirit & principles of tumblogs in general.

Feedback

This is still early days yet for WooThemes tumblog themes, but we have quite a few ideas (as you’ve seen above) on how we’re going to pull this off. We would love however to hear what you think at this stage…

Are we missing some crucial functionality? In your ideal world, what would you like to see in our tumblog themes? Or is there any aspect of Tumblr themes that we can improve when we release our WP-equivalents? Fire away!

So… Recently I’ve been very impressed with Tumblr and have been surprised by their popularity and adoption rates. Looking at myself however (and the difficulty in posting on my own (full-on) blog, I can understand why micro-blogging is becoming the publishing medium of choice (Twitter probably being the ultimate proof in the pudding). With that in mind then, I’m definitely keen to develop a framework (and subsequently a set of tumblelog themes) for WordPress, but I’m also intrigued by the prospect of possibly porting these designs over to Tumblr.

What do you think? Would you prefer to use Tumblr or WordPress? And would you actually pay for such themes? The whole idea is still very new and undiscussed (even amongst the WooTeam) – so just give us your 2 cents…