A quick look however at sales in the last 3 months (this gives you an indication) shows that there are 7 themes that feature in our Top 20 sales, of which 2 of those are almost 2 years old (Busy Bee & Fresh News). If you consider this, then you might understand why we keep maintaining these themes (and update our older stuff with new features quite often) and also releasing similar, but newer themes.

Over and above that though, it is these themes that form the foundation of what WooThemes is. When we released these themes they were arguably the best out there, and their continuous sales even now re-inforces that legendary status.

In the last year, it has become increasingly difficult to release a theme that is considered “the best”, purely because the popular niches (business themes, magazine themes, blogging themes etc.) are all hotly contested by some amazing theme designers / developers. So perhaps those days are gone, which is why we’re pushing the boundaries on a few less popular niches.

Fact of the matter however remains: we’re not about to contradict our track record and if we judge by the continuing growth of the company and the userbase, we’ll continue our existing strategy as is. We’ll continue to innovate, but we’ll be firmly focused on maintaining a balance of innovation and paying homage to the old classics (perhaps with a new lick of paint or an older brother, new theme release), that continues to be at the very heart of WooThemes.

So this is a quick note to tell you all, that all our themes are already WP 3.0 compatible and there’s no need for you to upgrade your theme. This also means that you can happily upgrade to the new version of WordPress, without any hassles from a WooThemes-side (even though we’d suggest checking plugin compatibility).

Further more – as noted here – you are now able to use the native WordPress Menus functionality instead of the WooNav, if you so wish. To start using WordPress Menu’s simply activate them from the Appearance > Menus tab, and it will replace the WooNav functionality (note: you will need to re-create your menu if you switch).**

Lastly, you can expect some new themes from us in the near future which will be using some of the other new features in WP 3.0; more specifically custom post types which we plan on using in a very unique way…

** You will need to grab the latest version of the theme from your dashboard to enable this.

So another one of these features to have (silently) made it into the WooFramework, is the ability to automatically update the WooFramework from older versions. The early version of this functionality looks like this:

Quick, easy & in the WooFramework.

This functionality is available in the latest version of our framework, so if you haven’t already got that in your theme, you need to update to the latest version manually. To activate this new feature, you need to go to “Framework Settings” and enable the option before you can use it.

Enable the update funcitonality in Framework Settings

The updating of the WooFramework currently only works with the FTP protocol, so you would need to enter your FTP details when prompted to enable this. This is however the same way in which you can install & activate plugins directly from the dashboard and we have thus kept as much of this consistent with those processes.

As you know, we contributed the code for WooNav to the upcoming release of WordPress 3.0. At this stage, there is still some doubt whether WooNav (renamed as Menu’s of course) will make it into the final release of WP 3.0, which is why we’ve made it available in all of our themes for now. When WP 3.0 is however released with support for Menu’s, the WooFramework will give you the option of toggling between the WooNav functionality, or the core Menu’s functionality.

Toggling between WooNav & WP 3.0 Menu's

So in the mean time enjoy using WooNav!

So what does this really mean?

• The core of our themes has now been standardized, which means updating (and fixing for future versions of WP) will be much easier than before.
• All themes now share more functionality in terms of options & widgets, which improves your overall experience using our themes.
• Our next step will be do start building more and more custom functionality into this framework, which will further enhance your usage of the themes. It should also theoretically mean that the themes will become more versatile and flexible in terms of how you will be able to use them (maybe including tumblelog-type functionality for example).

To say we’re excited would thus be an understatement of the plans we have for the WooFramework moving forward. It’s been quite a journey getting here, but the framework is stable now and the hardest part of the journey (implementing this in all of our older themes) is done. So now it’s just a case of onwards & upwards…

Before we go… We’d just like to clarify what we mean when we say “framework”, because we’re definitely not developing or releasing a theme framework as it is generally called. Instead, we’ve standardized some core functionality in our themes (/functions/*.* & functions.php) and created a proper interacting structure (e.g. /includes/*.*) for that core functionality. So no need for a child theme or other frilly bits; all you need to know is that WooFramework = awesomeness.

List of known bugs that still needs fixing:

• No known bugs.

This list was last updated: 16 June 2009,11 :18 GMT+2.

List of themes that has had bugs fixed:

Here’s a list of themes which has had a version update to make it compatible with WP 2.8. Only these themes were affected by WP 2.8 and if your theme isn’t listed here, you do not need to worry.

Consult the changelog.txt within the theme folder to determine the affected files. If you have an old version of the theme you will need to update every version change listed in the changelog.txt. Updating only the last fix might create more errors.

Remember to always disable all plugins before upgrading to WP 2.8 and before updating the theme.

• Flash News
• Fresh Folio
• Fresh News
• Gazette
• Geometric
• Gotham News
• Groovy Video
• Irresistible
• Live Wire
• myweblog
• Newsport
• NewsPress
• Open Air
• Original Premium News
• Papercut
• Productum
• Proudfolio
• THiCK
• Busy Bee
• Aperture
• The Journal
• The Station

This list was last updated: 16 June 2009,11 :18 GMT+2.

How to report further bugs?

Please first check that the bug you want to report is not in the list at the top of this post. If it isn’t, use the support forum to post the bug and we’ll then update this page with information on the bug. Also note, that WP 2.8-related bugs will receive priority over other bugs until all have been squashed.

But even considering this, we’ve managed to release our 3rd theme this month – BlogTheme – yesterday, whilst work on quite a few other themes is coming on very nicely. The next theme release (due in the first week of December) will be Veerle Pieters’ amazing theme called Abstract. After which we hope to release Magnus’ Busy Bee theme, along with one other theme before we take a bit of a Christmas / New Year break.

So as you can see, even though we don’t blog and we don’t tweet – it definitely doesn’t mean that we’re not working. Make sense?