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.

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

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.

WP shouldn’t…

Here at WooHQ, we simply believe that WordPress should not try to do or be everything, even though almost anything is possible. We believe that the most viable approach is to use WP for the projects that it suits best, and consider other platforms / development frameworks to develop other things.

In fact, since asking you for ideas, our WooIdeas forum have been inundated with ideas for things that we simply don’t think should be built onto WP. These have ranged from replicating functionality of Basecamp in a WP theme, including an invoicing engine in portfolio themes to re-creating UserVoice itself.

So why are we saying no to these suggestions? Definitely not because we can’t develop them, or that we think it won’t be popular (perhaps), but because we don’t intend on re-inventing the wheel when there’s already amazing 3rd party web applications available. And that is specifically amplified when you’re trying to re-invent a wheel, but built on WP. We just do not think that this is wise…

Niches

As mentioned at the top of this post, we’re planning on tackling a bunch of niches in the coming months, and we’d bet you’ll be pretty impressed with what we’re planning to roll out before year-end. But whilst we’re excited to explore niches, and to increase the possibilities within our theme collection, we’ve also been very selective in terms of which niches we believe are viable on top of WP.

Directories, restaurants & online shops are all things that we believe should be built on top of WP, because it gives you – the user – a leg up in getting an professional website online featuring some great functionality; but at a fraction of the cost of custom development. That’s what is so important to us, and it’s that core strategy that WooThemes have been built on since our inception almost 3 years ago now.

So if exploring these niches means working twice as hard to release themes to enable you even further, then that’s the plan. But there’s that big “if” to consider, which will be our prerogative: we’ll build the niche *if* it’s viable on WP.

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.

Since getting our hands stuck into theme, we’ve made the following changes:

• Integration of the WooFramework
• Addition of Dynamic Image Resizing
• Inclusion of all the standard (and some TMA-specific) Woo Widgets
• Theme Localization
• Custom Headers & Background (via native WP 3.0 functionality)
• Custom Post Types for “Updates”

At this stage, Menu’s aren’t supported as the original design didn’t include a navigation by default. So this is something that we will be revisiting in the next week or two.

Why TMA?

We felt that TMA started so many things in the WordPress community and considering that we had been very successful in that community until now, we wanted to put our weight behind one of the “pillars” of that community. So that is why we have, and are dedicating our resources in maintaining The Morning After. We hope that you will find value & enjoyment within this free theme!

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.

This is what the Custom Navigation is looking like at the moment:

The New Custom Navigation in WP 3.0

Jeff & a few other leading WP contributors will now spend some time with the community in getting their feedback before further tweaks are made (you can get involved on the Trac ticket here). There are still a few obvious UI and then a few more technical things that needs attention, but overall the project is bang-on track and we’re super excited about seeing it rolled out in WP 3.0!

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.

We are excited that we can give something substantial back to the core after a somewhat hesitant decision to GPL license our themes a few months ago. This proves to us, and hopefully others, how the GPL license should be correctly utilized to benefit others.

Kudos must be given out to Jeff Pearce, who was employed late last year by WooThemes and undertook the WooNav system as his first official development project for us. Not a bad first splash in the water we must say!

What excites us even more about this relationship with the WordPress core team is what Jane said to us in her email:

This year I’m hoping to work on ways to bring the commercial WP-based companies and core closer together, as opposed to what sometimes feels like a weird rivalry, so this would be a nice beginning for that

What’s next?

Jeff has already begun working with Ryan Boren (one of WordPress’ lead developers) on porting the WooNav into “patch form”, which will then in turn be submitted to the core of WordPress. Feature freeze for WordPress 3.0 is this week and we’re hoping to have ported the WooNav to the core ASAP, so that the community may start discussing the functionality, after which we will continue to work with the WP developers and the community on improving and finalizing the functionality for WP 3.0.

“Unfortunately” this impacts our users, since these developments mean we have to delay the integration & roll-out of the WooNav to all our themes. Whilst the implementation thereof will stay 99% the same, we don’t want to potentially duplicate work for ourselves and have decided to wrap-up the porting & development of the WooNav into core WP first, before integrating it with all of our themes.

You can however rest assured that by the time WordPress 3.0 hits your web browser, we’ll have included support for this amazing functionality in all of our themes. So this new awesomeness from the two W’s is not far off and all WooThemes will soon be able to enjoy it in all of its glory.

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…

bbPress (Link)

bbPress

We use bbPress to power our support forums on WooThemes and whilst it is most definitely not the best or most mature forum / discussion board platform out there, it plugs into our WP setup beautifully. Also, along with the “Support plugin” for bbPress, the forum functions completely like a support ticketing system.

aMember (Link)

aMember

aMember is responsible for the magic that happens behind the scenes. aMember too plugs into our WP + bbPress setup and is responsible for the user management bits on WooThemes. So the user dashboard, downloading of themes, affiliate program and buying / checkout procedures are all controlled by aMember. We also use 2Checkout.com as our payment processor, which integrates into aMember to include the transactional functionality.

Feedburner (Link)

Feedburner

I have a tendency of thinking that RSS’ days are over, since it’s so much easier getting information from Twitter (then again, it’s all information overload anyway)… But we still use Feedburner religiously in tracking the amount of subscribers on our RSS feeds and up until now, there is no real alternative to Feedburner. If you’re into your stats then, Feedburner is a kinda non-negotiable element within your arsenal.

Pingdom (Link)

Pingdom

Beyond being online 24 / 7 and refreshing the WooThemes website every 30 seconds (to check whether it’s gone down), there’s not much you can do to ensure 100% uptime of a website (which is very important for us, as we’re actually selling something). So we use Pingdom to notify us via SMS & e-mail instantaneously if everything weird is up with the server. The SMS functionality is nice, as it then allows us just to send a quick mail to our web support guys; most of the time from our iPhones…

Communication & Project Management

Gmail (Link)

Gmail

Considering that we’re very much a virtual company, our whole team needs to have access to the WooThemes e-mail accounts, so that we can basically cover for each other should Magnus go fishing in Alaska for a week and a half (for example hehe). We’ve tried other mailroom applications in the past, but found that Gmail is the easiest and most efficient in terms of dealing with the bucketloads of mail we get on a daily basis.

Basecamp (Link)

Basecamp

Basecamp is probably the cornerstone on which we build all of our planning & communications. Whilst we probably don’t use Basecamp as much as we should, all of our most important decisions, to-do’s, ideas and data is on our Basecamp profile. The nice thing about Basecamp is that it’s always there, without getting in our way or forcing us to use it instead of e-mail / Skype.

Prologue 2 (Link)

P2

This is something new that we’ve been experimenting with in the last couple of weeks… We use P2 as an internal Twitter of sorts, where we get to keep each other updated on what we’re doing in a more real-time way. Since we don’t work from the same office all the day, it’s important for us to know what’s happening during the day. We’re definitely still figuring out how to get the best value from P2, but initial signs are promising in terms of increasing our productivity.

Marketing

Twitter (Link)

Twitter

We’ve slowly been building the WooThemes presence on Twitter and whilst we don’t have a set strategy in terms of how / when we use Twitter, we find the most value from using it to broadcast our news, as well as add some interaction between ourselves and those interested in interacted with us (albeit customers, users of our free themes or just any Average Joe).

CoTweet (Link)

CoTweet

In addition to Twitter, we’ve started to use CoTweet to allow the whole WooTeam to monitor our Twitter account for @replies & DM’s. And the initial thoughts on CoTweet is that it’s an extremely sexy web app that does what it promises extremely well.

Peashootapp (Link)

Peashootapp

Peashoot is another of those apps that we’ve only recently started using, but we’re really enjoying the experience whilst figuring out exactly where the benefit of using the service is. We’re currently using it to track (especially) our Twitter marketing campaigns (in terms of clicks on links and re-tweets). We’ve also added our custom domain (woourl.com) for URL shortening, which allows us to use Peashoot (along with our affiliate program) to track conversions on our paid advertising (on other sites) much more accurately. Even though we’re thus still finding our feet with Peashoot, it’s definitely worth the $25 / month!

Campaign Monitor (Link)

Campaign Monitor

We’ve been using Campaign Monitor since the Premium News Themes days and haven’t looked back once. Our monthly e-mail newsletters are sent out with Campaign Monitor and beyond the ease-of-use (in terms of managing our subscriber lists & sending out new newsletters), we absolutely love the bundled analytics that we get after each newsletter. In addition, this is the newsletter software (??) for designers, so why wouldn’t we use it?

Development

Beanstalk (Link)

Beanstalk

I’ve mentioned this on multiple posts that I’ve written before, but using SVN has completely changed the way we develop our themes. In fact, it’s changed the process so much that I’d never be able to work without SVN again. So Beanstalk is just our hosted SVN repository, where all of our themes are housed. Benefits of going hosted compared to self-hosted? I dunno… We never explored that option, but having it hosted makes the admin side of things so much easier.

Lighthouse (Link)

Lighthouse

Whilst we use bbPress for a public support forum / ticketing system, we use Lighthouse to track all of the reported bugs, which needs to be fixed in themes. Along with the bugs, we also have a separate list of potential new features which we review regularly in terms of deciding which will make it into the packaged themes. Since we’ve started using Lighthouse, I believe we’ve missed very few bugs and it’s also sped up our bug fixing / updating processes. We probably also need to integrate this into our Basecamp profile sometime…

Other

Vimeo (Link)

Vimeo

You may ask why not YouTube? Well, no other video service is as cool and fun to use as Vimeo. We don’t use Vimeo too often at the moment, but all of our promo, tutorial & support videos are housed on our Vimeo account. We’ve found Vimeo to be quite fast and it does exactly what we need it to do. So nothing special to rave about; instead it just allows us to focus on creating the content and then effortlessly publishing it online.

And that’s the list… Don’t think we’ve left anything out, but if we did, then it’s probably because it’s not *that* important to us. So ask us any questions about why / how we use these apps / services listed above and maybe also share some of the things that you’ve found useful in running your businesses / projects.ww

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.

I’m also happy to see that the the Software Freedom Law Centre has announced that the images & CSS within a theme never inherited the GPL license of WordPress. Even though we are fully GPL-compliant now, we got a lot of bad vibes in the past for wanting to (rightfully) protect our designs; so it’s good to know that we at least weren’t entirely wrong for standing our ground.

That said, we’re happily GPL now and kudo’s must go to Matt & his team for continuing to fight for the cause in this regard; as irrespective how much this argument really meant for the WP community –  I think that the WP team’s spirit (in this regard) in general has resulted in us having an amazing platform, which we get to use for so many diverse projects every day.

Hatchet = buried.