You’ve come to know us as some crazy kids and we like doing stuff like just giving you some free themes. So as has become fashion around here, we’ve got to celebrate the launch of WOO2 with another 4-for-1 special. I’m tempted *not* to tell you how it works (because if you don’t know how we roll by now, we dunno on which interweb you’ve been living), but here’s the details:

You can basically buy any Standard or Developer Package theme (from our collection), and get any 3 themes of your choice completely free. This offer is available from 17 – 24 June 2009 and we won’t either backdate it to previous purchases or extend it past the 24th.

Enjoy the new themes!

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.

(BTW… If you’re reading this in a RSS reader, get yourself over to the site, because everything is new & shiny!)

We won’t want to keep you too long (because you should explore the website yourself and discover all of the awesomeness that way), but we figured it’s a good idea to give you a bit of a summary of the new things that WOO2 brings. Here we go…

WOO2 Feature List

The Facelift

This one you would’ve already noticed; without a doubt… WOO2 includes a brand-new and polished identity for us. We’ve tried to create something that is absolutely stunning to look at and even better to use. This new polished version of WooThemes is a perfect starting point for what we have planned for you in the next couple of months…

A new user dashboard

Even before we decided to launch a new design on WooThemes, we realized that our user dashboard (backend) needed a facelift as well, because it just wasn’t as great as the rest of our website & our themes (or that’s how we felt). So we’ve tried to re-code the whole dashboard to give existing users a much better experience all around our website.

Watch this video for a more in-depth look at the new dashboard:

Sneak Peek: New User Dashboard in WOO2 from WooThemes on Vimeo.

The new subscriptions

One of the biggest criticisms we’ve received since launching WooThemes last year, was the fact that there wasn’t much incentive for existing club subscribers to renew their subscriptions after the initial 3 / 6 months. So we’ve changed things around completely and you can now stay connected at only $15 or $20 per month. View the details here.

We hope that this will persuade more of you to get in on some WooThemes action soon!

Revised theme packages

Along with the tweaks to the subscriptions, we’ve also renamed our theme packages to Standard & Developer packages (instead of Single & Developer before). Beyond the difference in the naming, there’s only two changes to the packages i.e. both Standard & Developer packages can be used on unlimited domains and the Standard package comes with one bonus theme (2-for-1) and the Developer with two bonus themes (3-for-1). View the details here.

Focusing on improved support

A big part of this redesign has been geared towards improving everything for existing WooThemes users. So you’ll see that the forum sports not only sports a new look, but also a new structure, which we hope will improve your experience in-and-around the forum.

We’ve also given the theme documentation a much needed upgrade and we believe that it’s now more easy to use than ever. We’re also in the process of improving the content in the documentation and it will soon include new screenshots and video screencasts.

Optimized Support Policy

We have also tweaked our support policy slightly, to optimize the time of our forum ninja’s. The tweaked policy allows us to focus more on fixing bugs and helping users with technical problems, whilst customisations will be more regulated going forward. Read the full new support policy here.

Our design, development & better blogging outlet

More Content

The WooThemes blog has been completely repositioned and restructured; so from now on it will be used exclusively to publish WooThemes-related news. So you may ask where our other content is going if the blog on here is only gonna focus on WooThemes-stuff!?

We’ve created a brand-new blog in WooCamp, which we’ve dubbed as our official design, development and better blogging outlet. Whilst the blog is still young, it’ll soon become a very valuable, complimentary resource for WooThemes users (and non-users). We plan to also feature CMS-specific news & tutorials, along with a few tips & tricks in running your own startup. Definitely check out WooCamp…

What happened to the new themes on new platforms?

Unfortunately nothing in life really happens to way you plan and this kinda caught up with us during the development of WOO2. You can find more information & status updates here.

So what happens now?

Well, the only thing left for you to do is explore around. We’re not saying WOO2 is perfect and if you stumble on some bugs, then that’s due to us pulling a few long days of work to get this out there. Please don’t comment on any bugs on this post; instead please e-mail it through to us so that we can fix those up ASAP.

And then last thing… We’d love to hear what you think of the new WooThemes. As we’ve mentioned million times before: we’re really, REALLY proud of what we’ve done here and really hope that you are just as impressed with our work. So do tell us what you think of all this hype.

In particular we’d like to thank Jake, Gould, Steve Robillard, Prashant and Brad Potter, who (in our opinion) contributed the best ideas and makes it into our little shortlist.

And now we just need you to vote for your favourite suggestion below…

So this existing blog, will continue to function as our main blog, but will essentially turn into communication with existing & prospective users (which it basically is now). This means that we’ll feature company-related news here, as well as use it for marketing and some kind of development / updates type blog.

Then, the new blog (which is where I’ll need a bit of your help) will be running of a sub-domain of WooThemes.com and whilst it will contain WooThemes branding (very similar to the new WOO2 website), it will have a totally different purpose. This blog will be a content blog, where we’ll cover a variety of different topics of interest to people that would use our themes. So if I had to define the scope of this blog, I’d include the following topics:

• Design & Developement tips / tricks
• CMS-specific news & tips (WordPress, Drupal, Magento, EE)
• Better blogging
• Running an online startup
• Social Media / Marketing

So what do I need help with? We’re looking for a name for this new blog and would love to hear what you think… Also consider that as it would be running of a sub-domain of WooThemes.com, the name of the blog needs to be relevant. Lastly – the blog is not only focussed on WordPress anymore (as WooThemes is expanding to different CMS’s) and the blog’s name needs to reflect that.

And as always… We’ll throw in a free copy to any of our themes for the best suggestion!

Only problem, is that we’re gonna tell you that we simply don’t know…

BUT – that doesn’t mean we’re not working extremely hard to improve things around here. So either way we hope you’ll be happy and impressed with us! Here’s what we’re doing…

The Website

It’s funny looking at our current website, whilst trying to think back to last year April / May that Magnus, Mark & I designed the website. It’s even funnier to think that the current website is wholly built on top of our VibrantCMS theme.

So we’re in the process of completely redesigning our website and we’ve tried to focus on best practice during the design process. On the redesign, you’ll (eventually) note that we’re trying to simplify the “sales” / purchase process, whilst giving WooThemes a certain polished, professional look that we believe befits the value of our products and quality of our support / customer service.

Here’s a little teaser of where we’re going with this…

The New WooThemes Homepage

The Backend

In this redesign process, we’re not leaving one stone unturned and our user backend is due for an upgrade as well. I won’t reveal too much in this regard, but we’re adding some very specific functionality to allow WooThemes to further grow its business model. So what will seem like a superficial upgrade of how the backend looks to most, will instead be a major step forward for us as a company… You’ll however need to wait for the launch of the redesign to see all of the goodies we got planned. Here’s a teaser so long though…

The New Backend (This is the affiliates page btw)

The Themes

And yes, we are working on some new themes in between all of this… We promise… Even though we’ve adopted a “when it’s done, we’ll release it” approach for future theme releases, I can say that you can expect a new theme next week.

On the themes front though, we too have some exciting new stuff coming up… Firstly we’ve been busy completely reworking our development framework, which means that all of our themes will be even more standardized in future and we’ll be able to easily duplicate features / functions between our themes. So whilst this won’t be a complete “theme framework” that is 100% the same across every theme, it will share the bulk of its core code.

Secondly, we’re also working on getting some themes out on other platforms. We’ve mentioned Magento, Drupal & ExpressionEngine before; so this ain’t new to most of you… You will however see that our redesign already caters for themes on these platforms and this is something that we’ll release during the second half of 2009.

You excited?

So what do you think then? As always, you’ll be hard pushed to find 5 guys that get quite so excited about new stuff as we do… And we absolutely rush off of your positive feedback and involvement in all of these processes, because without all of you, things would be kinda boring. Have your say then… Liking this new direction?

Yes… We borrowed the post’s title from a song title of the same name by a band called Emery. And our image previewing techniques was inspired completely by the wefunction guys. That’s a disclaimer for you…