The WooThemes Blog

So WordPress 3.1 is just about to go out (it should’ve been out already, but who are we to judge) and we’d just like to let you know that you’re good to upgrade.

We’ve had a play with the beta versions and Release Candidates and so far none of our themes have been broken. As soon as WP 3.1 drops, you can thus upgrade with peace-of-mind, knowing that your WooThemes will work just fine.

In this Where’s Wally? inspired version of WooVille, we thought a quirky, tongue-in-cheek representation of the WordPress theming community was in order. You’ll find all your favourite theme providers in the colorful WooVille eco-system, but your challenge is to find the WooNinja hiding somewhere…

Beware though! He’s a sneaky guy… Pow!

In the last year, WordPress has undergone a few significant changes in transforming it from a simple content management system to an extremely flexible platform for web development. We’d go as far as saying that you can probably build *any* kind of website, or web application, on WordPress with the only question being how much of the native / core functionality you use/exploit.

This means that – up until now anyway – we’ve prided ourselves in developing WP into a Tumblr-like tumblog website, real estate directory & soon we’ll be doing a theme for restaurants, a complete & customizable directory theme, and the cherry on the cake: e-commerce themes. Because WP has made all of this possible…

But we’ve found – despite a few claims to the contrary – that 99% of WP popularity stems from the type of websites that it was originally intended to help build: personal blogs, news and magazine sites, websites for small to medium sized businesses & designers’ portfolios. So regardless of any new “trends”, our user statistics emphasize that WP is still most popular and most used in those categories.

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The Morning After

A few weeks ago, we got an e-mail from Arun Kale – the mastermind behind one of the first, and most significant, magazine themes in the WP community – asking us whether we were keen to purchase the theme and take control of it’s future maintenance.

Considering the significance of this theme, we jumped at the opportunity and as of today The Morning After now has a honorary spot in our themes collection.

Arun handed over an awesome theme and as a result we didn’t want to change much in the theme (for now anyway). We also didn’t want to tinker with an obvious winning formula, considering that the last version of TMA, received over 60 000 downloads on Arun’s own site. But we couldn’t claim this to be a WooTheme, if we didn’t add a few, new awesome Woo-typical features.

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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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For the new Better Startup post, I figured that you may find value in knowing what web apps we use (and right highly) at WooThemes. These are the applications / services that completely runs WooThemes on a daily basis and I don’t think it’d be possible for us to get this much work done without it.

The Website

WordPress (Link)

WordPress

We’d be hypocrites if we didn’t use WP to power our main website, right? Basically when we set out to design & develop the WooThemes website last year, we only knew how to use WordPress, so we never really considered any alternatives. But looking back over a very successful year (and massive growth), I think that WooThemes is evidence that you can build a very efficient business (website) on WP. It’s definitely not just a publishing platform…

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So it’s official: the longest-standing argument in the WordPress community has finally been given a bullet to the head.

For everyone of you that has been involved in arguments / discussions / heated debates over the licensing & legalities of WordPress themes in the past 18+ months, you’ll know that it was probably the hottest / trending topic in the community. So to finally see the argument laid to rest, is definitely a very welcome change in my mind.

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