The WooThemes Blog

One of the things that our development team has experienced this year, is that themes with more advanced, specific (and non-standard WordPress) functionality simply take more time to develop, test and maintain. We are constantly trying to push the boundaries of WordPress whilst it strives to push it’s own boundaries in becoming more of a content management system, but there’s a trade-off to achieve this: more time.

In the past year, we’ve developed a few themes that would fall into this classification:

• Estate, which was miles ahead of any other WP real estate alternative at the time and still the only theme to support IDX / MLS integration;
• Diner, with it’s advanced booking functionality, and also the only of it’s kind in the WP community;
• The WooTumblog plugin, along with all of our tumblog themes and of course the Express.app, which have been a major commitment on our side to bring a Tumblr-like experience to WP (we take pride in pioneering this);
• Listings, which is coming up and already looking likely to be another game changer;
• The existing WordPress Custom Menu’s which we developed as part of the WooFramework initially and then committed to the WP core; and
• More recently the Sidebar Manager which adds a truckload of customization value to every single WooTheme.

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As you all should now by know: WordPress 3.0 was finally released at the end of last week.

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…

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Just a very quick update to let you know that the WooNav functionality is now available with all of our themes (actually it has been for about 2 weeks already). If it doesn’t look like your theme is supporting it at the moment, just upgrade to the latest version of the theme (get help here) and you’ll be good to go.

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.

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We just wanted to give you a quick update on the integration of the WooNav into the core of WordPress 3.0 (final version to be available mid-April).

Jeff has been working really hard to get everything ready and the basic functionality for the Custom Navigation (as it is now being called) has already been included in the WP 3.0 nightly builds (after last week’s WP dev chat). The most significant amount of work centered around moving away from Woo-specific branding, uses of prefixes and coding preferences, which means Jeff had to create a patch using all of the WP core standards & defaults. It is now that patch which is available in the nightly builds.

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Two weeks ago when we launched the WooNav, we knew it was something special and would be well received by our users, together with our recent release of WooFramework V2 our theme development was certainly hotting up. Then, out of the blue, we were contacted by Jane Wells of the WordPress Core UX development team who was planning the final iterations of the menu management system’s core features for WordPress 3.0. Unbeknown to us Jane had been playing around with our WooNav functionality:

We have a developer working on it, and have gone through several rounds of community feedback and iteration, and it strikes me that what we’re probably going to end up with is a lot like what you guys have in your Custom Navigation option, so I thought I’d get in touch with you guys to talk about it

After a few emails it was pretty obvious that this made perfect sense for both us and the core team. It would save the WordPress developers hours of coding to build something that already existed and did the job well, and WooThemes would finally be acknowledged for it’s work in furthering WordPress theme development.

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One of the most commonly asked questions by Woo users is how to modify the navigation in the theme, by excluding items, adding external links etc. We recently added Jeff to our team, and started him off with a project we had been planning for a while; A new custom navigation admin page, where you would be able to really build your own navigation without touching any code.

It didn’t take long for him to come up with the wireframe, and then Cobus added some nice styling to the UI, and we can now proudly present it to you! We’ll start off slow by adding it to our newest themes first, and we hope to get feedback and squish any possible bugs that should appear before rolling it out to all our themes.

Woo Custom Navigation admin panel

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