Enabling more Woo customers to create online shops

Written by Mark Forrester on October 20, 2011 Product News.

This week we have three more WooCommerce child themes available for our most popular business themes. What does that mean for you if you own one of the above themes? It means you can very easily get an online shop running with the WooCommerce plugin, a child theme and possibly one or two extensions.

Business themes with shopfronts

Inspire, Kaboodle and Biznizz were all designed based on the same winning formula – pretty sliders, an area reserved for mini-features to highlight important business/website services, a portfolio module to showcase work completed, and testimonials from happy clients. All powered by custom post types, all three themes looking quite different in terms of styling and typography.With each of them you can now do all of that AND sell products on a dedicated shop page that can be included in your site navigation menu, or set as the homepage feature. All three shopfronts carrying the exact same detail in styling and layout as the rest of the site look and feel.

Jay’s spent hours matching colors, border radiuses, box shadows, font sizes and font families so the storefront that WooCommerce enables carries the same attention to detail the rest of your site does.

Check out the demos, and theme listings below to get a better idea of how the child themes look and function.

Please note: For you to use one of these child themes you must own it’s corresponding parent theme and have it installed in your WP site.

Inspire Payment Gateway *FREE*

We have a growing list of payment gateways that we’ve integrated with WooCommerce via extensions. The latest being Inspire Commerce, the very gateway we use here at WooThemes when you checkout out with our products. With our relationship with the Inspire team we’ve managed to agree to release this extension for free – to all WooCommerce users, adding further flexibility out of the box.

The entire integration of this extension is built to maximize user experience – keeping customers throughout checkout on the actual website you design. Because of this, an SSL certificate is required for security and proper functionality.

View the extension listing page for more information and to purchase it.

 

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45 Responses

  1. Sarah
    October 20, 2011 at 4:00 pm #

    Fantastic! Kaboodle here we come…

  2. Wordpress Theme
    October 20, 2011 at 5:39 pm #

    wow,3 new child themes. So great!

  3. firebubble
    October 20, 2011 at 7:30 pm #

    Very pleased to see this 🙂 I was waiting for the development to Inspire as it is one of my favorite themes.

    I am amazed at the speed of the WooCommerce developments and am very happy with my new subscription.

    • Mark Forrester
      October 21, 2011 at 9:00 am #

      And this week’s releases was with Mike, our chief WooCommerce developer, on leave. Jay created all three child themes. In other words expect even more speed! 🙂

  4. Broxter
    October 20, 2011 at 11:24 pm #

    Nice. How how about woocommerce enabled business directory child theme for Listings?

    • Mark Forrester
      October 21, 2011 at 8:56 am #

      It’s on the cards and should be coming relatively soon. Just a little more complex than other business themes.

  5. Leslie Nicole
    October 21, 2011 at 8:11 am #

    Could you describe how the child commerce themes work with the parent themes? Do you still have the features of the parent theme? My frustration with many e-commerce themes is that the blog part is rather wimpy in features. Not saying this of your themes, just what I’ve observed searching the internet. I need a shop, but I also need an attractive, full-featured blog with slider, featured work, video space, etc. My current solution has been to have a blog and a second WP installation in a subfolder for the shop. Trying to find a solution that will combine them better.

    • Mark Forrester
      October 21, 2011 at 8:58 am #

      Hi Leslie,

      Using one of our WooCommerce child themes gives you all the benefits of a beautiful shopfront, whilst having all the functionality of the parent theme. You can still have pages with a slider, mini-features, testimonials, or the portfolio. You can choose exactly what the homepage focus should be.

      • Leslie Nicole
        October 21, 2011 at 9:11 am #

        That sounds really great. Can the blogs have their own categories? I couldn’t see a menu in the demos, but perhaps it’s a widget?

        • Magnus
          October 24, 2011 at 9:53 am #

          Yes categories is a basic part of WP and all our themes can have blog categories 🙂

  6. Leslie Nicole
    October 21, 2011 at 9:19 am #

    Can we easily change design elements like the backgrounds, colors, fonts and header image as I can with Fresh News?

    • Magnus
      October 24, 2011 at 9:52 am #

      All the options of the parent theme stay intact, and the theme will function like normal. The child theme simply acts as an enabler of the WC plugin 🙂

  7. Leslie Nicole
    October 21, 2011 at 10:02 am #

    Just an FYI – my favorites of your e-commerce thees are the WooStore and Coquette, but I wish they had portfolio capabilities – more like Statua or Canvas parents. Hint, hint. Maybe a theme can birth a parent. 😉

  8. Artepick
    October 21, 2011 at 10:27 am #

    Hello. For Inspire Theme, i have a question. Now i have the parent theme instaled at my Web. I am going to buy the child theme, for a mini digital products store (music and ebooks self-published for us).

    But, a question: need we install 2 wordpress and MySQL sites, one for the current site (parent themes) and another for the new sections of the site (child theme), or installing the plugin and the child theme, in the current site, is ready our goal?

    In this case: Need we re install the (current) post and portfolios items, and the slider and other custom post at the new child theme installed?

    Sorry but we are a litle confused about this issues. Thnaks.

    • Leslie Nicole
      October 21, 2011 at 10:34 am #

      Oh, that’s a good question!

    • karan
      October 21, 2011 at 1:03 pm #

      Installing the plugin and the child theme, in the current site, and your site is ready.

      No re-install of the (current) post and portfolios items, and the slider and other custom post at the new child theme installation needed.

      On Commerce Child Theme activation – home, Shop, Cart, Checkout, Track your order, My Account – pages /menu links are added to main menu. You may need to set those as required.

      The template files are located in /themes/inspire. The stylesheet files are located in /themes/inspire-commerce. Inspire Commerce uses templates from Inspire. Changes made to the templates will affect both themes.

      Can anybody from WOO plz confirm.

      • Artepick
        October 21, 2011 at 1:37 pm #

        Thanks Karan. I think so, like you… but before strart the installation… its good ask it. Thanks!

        • karan
          October 21, 2011 at 2:01 pm #

          Always take backup before major change to avoid any hiccups. 🙂

    • Magnus
      October 24, 2011 at 9:47 am #

      Hi,

      No you don’t need to do anything different with the child theme activated, just activate it where you have your parent theme. All your current portfolio items and slider stay intact 🙂

      • Artepick
        October 24, 2011 at 9:56 pm #

        Thanks Magnus

      • Artepick
        October 24, 2011 at 10:00 pm #

        A last question: the blog in the child theme is the same that parent theme?

        Another question: the widgets related for shop may be removed in the parent themes pages (and post?) qith sidebar manager?

        🙂 Sentence: better ask before go!

        • Magnus
          October 25, 2011 at 8:23 am #

          Hi,

          Yes the blog is still in the parent theme. The child theme only handles the WC pages. You can use the sidebar manager to remove shop widgets from normal sidebars.

  9. karan
    October 21, 2011 at 1:07 pm #

    My Question :

    How do we integrate the Child Commerce Theme styling if we are already using a Child theme for the Theme (Canvas, Inspire, etc) ?

    An tutorial on it would be great.
    Thanks.

    • Sarah
      October 23, 2011 at 11:15 am #

      @Karan
      I had the same question because I use Child Themes for almost all of my sites.

      Here is the reply:
      http://woo.com/support-forum/?viewtopic=57146

      • karan
        October 25, 2011 at 7:05 am #

        Thanks

    • Magnus
      October 24, 2011 at 9:44 am #

      Hi,

      The child themes you are using will need to be moved over to the WC child theme, but this is an easy task because we store everything related to WC inside a separate folder in the new child themes, which makes them easy to update as well.

  10. NGOCQUY
    October 21, 2011 at 1:43 pm #

    Thats good news for me i like Inspire very much

  11. Robaire McCoy
    October 22, 2011 at 7:45 pm #

    Extraordinarily helpful cheers, It looks like your subscribers may possibly want considerably more items similar to this maintain the great work.

  12. Leslie Nicole
    October 22, 2011 at 10:19 pm #

    Just thought I’d let you guys know – I’ve been heavily researching e-commerce shop possibilities. There are other plug-ins / shop creation things out there that sound decent as well – but not a lot have the finesse in style of WooThemes. To a designer / artist, this is important!

    • Ryan Ray
      October 25, 2011 at 8:48 pm #

      Always great to hear Leslie!

      WooCommerce is a young plugin, and if it’s already edging out ahead of the pack I expect great things for it’s future. 🙂

  13. Cat Williams
    October 26, 2011 at 3:26 am #

    Like many others, I couldn’t wait for WooCommerce to come out so I bought someone else’s theme a few months ago, but now I’m finding out like Leslie who posted earlier that it treats the blog element like an afterthought when as an artist, I really need that to carry more weight so like she said, I’ve added a second WP installation and it’s a pain! So I’ve been using your Woo Playground to look at some of your new e-commerce themes, but I find they don’t handle product photos as well as the theme I’m currently using. Or maybe I just can’t figure it out without some documentation. I can’t tell from your pricing page if there’s any access to support/forums unless you buy a subscription plan, which is far too expensive for me when I just need one site.

    • Magnus
      October 26, 2011 at 8:16 am #

      Hi Cat,

      All the documentation for WC is available here http://woo.com/woocommerce-codex/ (including User Guide).

      • Leslie Nicole
        October 26, 2011 at 9:59 am #

        I’m also trying out the WC themes in the playground. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to activate the blog in the menu. (currently playing with coquette)

        Like Cat, I need a full-functioning blog and an e-store. Would be great if they are together. I’m not figuring out how to do this in the playground:

        Is it possible to have a custom home page that will direct people to either the blog or shop and both the blog and shop have full, unique pages, categories, and sidebars? In other words almost like they are 2 different installations – or do I need to remain with my 2 WP installation set up to get the features I want? Maybe I just need to think creatively to combine them. It would be really helpful to eventually see real fully functioning blog/stores.

        Also – if the above is possible, is it possible only with the theme/child theme set up or all the WooCommerce themes?

        I know I keep badgering you about this, but I have spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. I know you guys are busy and you’re doing a great job. I really appreciate your attention, I’m researching and testing about 5 different e-commerce solutions and I really want Woo to win.

        • Jay
          October 26, 2011 at 11:46 am #

          Hey,

          You can see on our demos that each WooCommerce theme has a dedicated blog section e.g. http://demo.woothemes.com/argentum/blog/

          Adding a blog page is fairly straightforward – just create a new page named ‘blog’, assign it the ‘Blog’ template and then add a link to it in your Menus. Or simply add one of your blog categories to your menus.

          • Leslie Nicole
            October 27, 2011 at 3:52 pm #

            Thanks, Jay. I could see the demos have a blog, but just takes a little getting used to figuring out how to set it up this way. I’ve installed the plug-in into one of my blogs to test how it interacts with the blog.

    • Magnus
      October 27, 2011 at 8:47 am #

      All our pricing packages include support forum access which should be very evident http://cl.ly/2U1v2G40243t3Q1N2j0H

  14. Xavier
    October 26, 2011 at 5:16 am #

    Guys – an ENORMOUS kudos for this.

    I use Kaboodle on one site, Biznizz on the other.

    Thanks for finally letting me scrap Shopp definitely.

    <3

    • Jay
      October 26, 2011 at 4:00 pm #

      Woo!

  15. Cat Williams
    October 27, 2011 at 1:34 am #

    Thanks, Magnus. I didn’t see much about photos in there. All it said was: “If you’d like to create a lightbox gallery of product images simply upload any further images, attach them to the product in the same way you’d upload any other image.” But I couldn’t get it to work properly. All of the demos seem to highlight things like t-shirts or downloads that you can get away with only having one photo of. When you sell 3 dimensional products like jewelry, people expect more than one photo…

    • Magnus
      October 27, 2011 at 8:45 am #

      Hi Cat,

      Just post in our forum and we’ll help you figure out the problem.

    • Leslie Nicole
      October 27, 2011 at 3:49 pm #

      Cat, just an FYI. I got it to work. I’m not sure if I did it correctly, but I chose the button in WP to insert an image, I chose all my images at once – but instead of inserting the gallery into the post, I just saved my changes. (When I inserted the gallery, they all repeated in the product info.) Like I said, I’m not sure this is what Woo recommends, but what I discovered fooling around. It worked fine. I set one of the images as the featured image.

  16. Kate
    November 11, 2011 at 6:43 pm #

    Hey,

    Do any of the themes have product sub category functionality. E.g a shoe Category page which has grid style links to each sub category e.g. trainers, wellies, flip flop e.t.c.

    Have been looking but can’t seem to find anything which shows this on the demos.

    Cheers

    • Ryan Ray
      November 11, 2011 at 8:06 pm #

      Hi Kate,

      Do you have a site we can see that does what you’re after? I’m not quite sure what you’re picturing. 🙂

  17. Kate
    November 11, 2011 at 8:25 pm #

    Hi,

    You can see here. There are top level categories and each page contains an image link to a subcategory of products.

    http://www.exelement.co.uk/water

    Thanks

  18. Emprego
    December 3, 2011 at 10:17 pm #

    Fantastic Woothemes.