After a long weekend of data imports, and beta testing we can finally present to you the brand new WooThemes.
Now powered by WooCommerce
We’ve completely moved away from our notorious, custom built management system “WooMember” to our own freely available WordPress plugin – WooCommerce.
WooMember was built prior to WooCommerce and geared towards dealing with single product checkout. Since the arrival of WooCommerce to our product offering it has become evident that we need to cater for multiple product checkout. Instead of investing further time into our dated infrastructure, we made the decision it was time to put WooCommerce to the ultimate test.
Putting our money where our mouth was
We’ve long boasted, and marketed the benefits of WooCommerce, and how scalable it is. Our implementation with 300,000 users, over 100,000 transaction records, and 200 products demonstrates it can handle a pretty huge database!
Whilst the decision, made perfect sense the actual migration required a lot of work, and unfortunately meant for some lengthly downtime as we imported all our user data into WooCommerce.
A new lick of paint
A huge project in itself we took this opportunity to re-design our own custom WordPress theme, with WooCommerce custom styling. Tag teamed by Cobus and Jay we’ve revised many existing pages, and added some new landing pages. Noteworthy pages include:
- Our homepage
- The plugins landing page
- The themes landing page
- An individual theme listing
- An individual extension listing
We’ve also re-engineered the flow of content and navigation menus hopefully getting you to what you are looking for quicker and allowing for an easier checkout.
You’ll discover lots of nice UI easter eggs dotted around the site, like our browser frame sliders on the homepage.
Various pages still need some UI revisions, e.g. the user dashboard, which will be modified over the coming weeks, as well as various A/B tests that we hope to run to better understand our user’s movement around our site and make the site even better.
Your theme and extension access
Some of you might be logging into the new WooThemes and unable to view your transactions/downloads. That is because the data migration is still happening behind the scenes. We are very close to completing and you should have full access within the next 8 hours.
Tiered licensing and support packages
Since 2008 we’ve barely touched our pricing structures, yet our product catalog has grown and diversified immensely since then, as has our support scaled exponentially. You’ll therefore notice some price changes and new licensing structures. Adii has dedicated a blog post to explaining the reasoning.
Get clicking
There’s a huge amount of content to digest so we encourage you to browse our new site. Expect some minor teething issues, & broken links, as we settle into our new home.
About
New site looks Amazing! Well done ninjas! 🙂
Thanks for the kind words, Estella 🙂
I’ll be the first to say I’m not a WooThemes Customer, however I am an avid reader and follower, but the new site is looking superb I must say. I find it much more smoother on the eyes, and everything just appears to blend together. And now using WooCommerce, well, that’s just icing on the cake, and a great way to showcase what can be done! 😀
very nice done… i love the new look
Thanks Razvan 🙂
Well done WooThemes.
Been hitting the refresh button all day 🙂
Well done WooThemes.
Site looks great.. but wow… some of the new pricing is absolutely INSANE.. especially for things like the table rate shipping extension, $299 for unlimited sites for functionality that really should have been a part of the core plugin anyhow…. I’m glad I already bought it long ago…
I totally agree. Table rating is a core function of any webshop system. Except for woocommerce, obviously. I think it is a total customer ripoff. Already thought the former pricing was insane.. but this is.. incredible. 🙁
Without table rating ability a webshop if not functional. At least not in a professional way.
Nice new website though. Good job on that end^^
Hugs
Sas
Great new website! Well done. For the table rate shipping I agree, way to expensive and should but build in standard if you to be taken seriously as a ecommerce platform … And accepting Paypal wouldn’t hurt either …
Warm regards,
Sakshin
Been using WooThemes for a couple of years. Enjoy working with the themes and everything is spot on usually.
Liking most of this new design. Just a couple of things I wonder about.
Why the blue color for the navigation and header area? Isn´t it a bit distracting to basically hide the navigation like that? The Logo and “My account” are fully visible. But the white navigation kinda goes away in favor of the Title of the current page. Blog, Themes and so on. Just my two cents anyway.
Otherwise I´m enjoying everything I see. Good work with just about everything. I might snatch some ideas for a personal website :p But fear not everything will be coded by myself. Just the style idea that I found very interesting.
Very nice.
I’ve been waiting to see more WooCommerce features integrated within your own shopping experience!
Love it!
Awesome new layout! Now, bring this functionality and “look and feel” into the canvas theme!
Congratulations on the new design. It looks great!
Glad to see you eating your own dog food with WooCommerce for purchases now because buying a bunch of plugins before was a huge pain. And thanks for adding the much needed search feature to the WooCommerce extensions page.
Site looks great guys. Just a quick question here, when will all the content migrate across completely, right now I have about 1/3 of my purchased extensions in my account area?Anything previous to september I cannot seem to download anywhere – maybe this is coming so sorry if this is premature. Cheers
Hi.
Your new site looks great:-)
Im quite new to Woo Commerce and the other day I downloaded theme Artificer and Woo Commerce to help a relative with her shop. Now its seems like Artificer is no longer in your site. Is it gone forever or will you let it come back among the other themes? I have already installed it but it is good/bad to have a theme that no longer exists in the developers site?
As I said, Im new to this, thats why I have to ask;-)
Thanks for all you work!
Hi Mia,
Glad you like the new site! Artificer is still available from us – it’s one of our free themes and we are busy working on importing the data for our free themes into the new system. They will all be available again real soon 🙂
Ok. Thank you for a quick answer!
All the best to all of you:-)
/Mia
Yea I was looking for Artificer as well, glad to see this. It seems that the search functionality on the new themes page isn’t working so well also….might want to check that.
Good luck!
love the new design…it’s sleek, clean and easy to navigate.
Support Forum link doesnt work
Ah! What happened to the support forum – I use that so much – how could they get rid of it?
Yeah, it’s a shame that’s gone – and been replaced by a much slower, less immediate ticketing system (four days to get a reply to my latest query!)
Also, I still have one bonus theme to download from my package and wanted to grab one for a customer just now – but I can’t find anywhere on the site to do so – anyone know where to look?
Feels very much like a site launched too early at the moment. Hope this isn’t a sign of Woothemes going for style over content, while hiking up prices and cutting on support. That’d be very disappointing.
I feel the same. Launched way to early if we can’t access our downloads. It’s been well over 8hrs and I still can’t access downloads, one for which I need now. Why launch something that prevents customer from accessing existing data. Doesn’t make sense to me.
Same troubles: all my themes and plugins are not in my account.
I miss the previous forum very much!
Looks great. Love the new woocommerce integration, no better endorsement of a product than basing your site on it 😉
Hopefully the few remaining niggles won’t be too hard to fix.
The subnav is impossible to read. Even to my 30 y.o. eyes
I now have no idea how to get to the Knowledge base as it is not in the top menu or the footer menu. I also can’t get access to the old support forums either. The My Account section used to be well organized and useful…now it’s a mess. Not sure what is going on at Woo these days. Did you do any usability testing on the new design with actual customers? If not, shame on you. These issues could have been avoided.
Yesterday I left a positive comment on the redesign here but the comments were broken so it didn’t take. I’m glad because I’m none too happy with the redesign’s functionality and usability. I hope you address it.
It’s under Support->Contact Support. The old support forums are not available any more. The account layout will be optimized over time, bare with us, and we did do beta testing with customers last week.
Hmmm. When I click from the main menu drop down Support > Contact Support it takes me back to the homepage. Why not put the Knowledgebase in the drop down. It’s certainly more useful than WooCodex which is in the drop down.
We’re looking into solving this issue, as it should point to the knowledgebase over at http://support.woothemes.com
Yah…I’d say things weren’t quite ready for prime time yet. I get the homepage when trying to access the knowledge base also. I still can’t even download themes I’ve paid for. There’s a message asking me to be patient. Two days after going live I shouldn’t need to be patient. I need the updated version of my theme and can’t get. AND, not being able to go back and review support threads I initiated is horrible. I need that information to refer back to. I can’t even post a support ticket since all I can get is the homepage when I client anything to do with support. That’s why I’m ranting here instead of asking for the help I need. Bah humbug! I hope this all gets sorted soon. I’m sure e site LOOKS lovely and perhaps will eventually be worth all this aggravation. But you know how it is, we focus on our own pain and needs and can’t appreciate the rest until it’s addressed. Fingers crossed.
whats with the woo extension licenses now? What if you had these already?
More info on that here: https://woocommerce.com/2012/10/inside-woohq-tiered-licensing-support-packages/
I’ve purchased the WooCommerce Branding module on 25th Sept – but cannot download.
I’ve purcahsed the Table Rate Shipping module on 3th July – cannot download, too.
And please, don’t shut down the best support forum – in read-only mode why can’t we access?
I have a LOT of bookmarked Q&A here! Please, don’t be a bonehead! It’s not the right directions for your members…
We’re still doing imports on older purchases, and hope to have these done today. Please contact us directly for assistance beyond this.
I’m afraid the old forums are not available any more. Please contact tech support if you need help with anything.
Not a very helpful reply at all there re the old support fora. Like it or lump it, basically.
Tech support is slow…
I agree re: the old forum.
It was frustrating enough when it was ‘deactivated’ but at least with access in read-only mode we could look up old posts/solutions. Like @zOrg, I had a lot of posts bookmarked and regularly referenced the forum to find solutions (usually very quickly) WITHOUT needing to then contact support – i.e. it lowered WooThemes’s support costs relative to my account.
Now I am left with a very limited self-serve alternative (the current Knowledgebase) or emailing your support directly (which, in my experience can be a method that takes much longer than perusing the old forums and hampers my workflow). Also, as mentioned in the past, one of the great bonuses of the forum was the community (one of the main strengths of WooThemes) that I could benefit from and participate in.
I have kept up-to-date on all of your posts re: reasons for the changes over the past few months and, while I understand and accept most of them, in this case, IMHO, this is one change that has very negatively affected my WooThemes experience and should be re-evaluated (again).
I fully agree. Bring the Forums Back! Please.
ME TOO! Pretty PLEASE!
We notified about the removal of the forums here: https://woocommerce.com/2012/08/inside-woohq-support-workflow/
Please comment on that post if you have anything new to add to the discussion.
Guys,
I’ve been unable to access my account since the relaunch. First, the system told me I had too many login attempts and couldn’t try again until 21 *hours* and when trying again this morning, it tells me my p/w is no good. So I click the reset link which sends an email saying visit the following address to reset but no link is provided.
And since I can’t login, I can’t submit a ticket I really need to download a copy of the post woo-commerce merge Whitelight. Please help.
Drew
Hi Drew, sorry about the inconvenience. Please send us an email with your username and we’ll get you into your account asap.
Many thanks and done.
Has anyone received the email yet?
Still no reply, can you guys by chance just send the Whitelight file via email? I *really* need to start working.
I’m in there now and will get you your theme ASAP!
We have had problems to login since the relaunch. Sent e-mails to your support address. Was told that it should work, but No…
E-mailed again….But, after one workday without contact it still is NOT working.
You could at least keep us – the paying members – updated via your webpage.
I need to access some themes and buy four extensions before this weekend…
Still no contact, I desperately need to get into my account and get that theme file. At this point, I’ve lost a full days worth of work for this client site. Please help!
Looks like Magnus got to you, we really appreciate the patience!
I really, really wish my comments on your blog posts could be more positive but the frustrations are really outweighing the positives it seems these days.
Why oh who oh WHY have you removed the old support forums?
I had started getting my head around that fact that it wasn’t going to contain any new entries as of August(ish) due to the new support system but having it in read-only format was still a MASSIVE help to me…every day! You don’t seems to appreciate or listen to the fact that many found this resource extremely helpful; if not vital to decent daily productivity. Nope, just like that, ‘click’ and thousands questions with answers gone!
Now my days will consist of much more hassle, guess work, ticket submissions and waiting.
Sigh…
The notorious support forums topic.
Your concerns are definitely not falling on deaf ears. Next on our agenda is community forums and we are looking into ways of mining the old forum data.
Notorious indeed Mark.
It’s great to hear that you’re looking into ways of mining the data from the old forum.
But…
“…looking into ways of mining”, does not generate much confidence and there is the rather large elephant in the room of what are we supposed to do in the meantime?
Please don’t say submit a ticket. That will make me think uncharitable thoughts. It’s not that the support team aren’t fantastic; they are. It’s just there is no comparison using the old forums 2, 3, 4 + times a day to get answers and submitting a ticket which can take 1-2 days to get an answer, assuming the problem has been correctly explained/understood in the first place.
Just out of curiosity, did you guys actually poll your customers regarding their use of the old support forum before binning it? I can’t see how this would have become such a notorious issue if you had. I’m not for one minute suggesting that you let customer dictate every aspect of your business model. It just kind of makes sense to understand the expectations of your customers before such a major overhaul.
Dear Woothemes Staff!
You have a very light modded bbPress forum (the “good, ol’ support forum”). Why don’t you leave as-is: a read-only, SEARCHABLE knowledgebase with thousands of solved problems (until the end of December, 2012)? The new KB never been as good as the old ones – which lowered YOUR support costs…
Yepp, I totally agree with jchown2012:
“…this is one change that has very negatively affected my WooThemes experience and should be re-evaluated (again).”
What I don’t understand is why Woo would make a decision that has effectively dis-empowered its community (one of its most valuable assets). The new support configuration forces us to rely more heavily on your staff itself.
With the forum, we could help each other and get answers quickly when needed (please don’t discount the speed with which solutions need to be found when in the middle of a project and in a productive ‘zone’) without taxing the WooNinjas, nor relying on their schedules/work loads from a response time perspective.
NOTE: This is not a criticism of the WooNinjas themselves. They have always been very helpful and provided excellent support. This is a comment on configuration/procedure.
Also, the forum, if configured specifically, could have enabled us, your clients, to solve at least some of our own problems (and made us feel less ‘stranded’) during the recent downtime (during the recent launch, etc) without our needing to involve the WooNinjas thus reducing some client-side frustrations and freeing up more of the ninjas’ time to work on the Woo-innards instead of fielding repetitive Q&A via Twitter.
I can’t help feeling that this new model is a step backwards from a scalability/availability perspective as it relies so heavily on Woo’s internal resources.
Life is short. My time, as yours, is valuable (yes, I realize the irony given the length of this post 🙂 and put simply, the new support configuration wastes too much of my time.
“Many hands make light work” – there were many hands in the forum, fewer hands (and less information) in the new support structure. To me, a good part of this is a simple mathematical equation. You are fortunate to have such a large, enthusiastic, intelligent and cooperative community – leverage these strengths, don’t stifle them.
Agreed. We’ve lost valuable resources. Why?
I am not benefiting from it.
Please read this post for more detail on the support workflow and careful though that went the re-engineer – http://woocommerce.com/2012/08/inside-woohq-support-workflow/
Hi Mark,
Out of respect for everyone at Woo and the known difficulty that comes with change, I have been very actively keeping up-to-date and reading everything Woo has posted to make sure I am as informed as possible. Therefore, I have already read that document (twice, actually).
Per one of my earlier comments:
“I have kept up-to-date on all of your posts re: reasons for the changes over the past few months and, while I understand and accept most of them, in this case, IMHO, this is one change that has very negatively affected my WooThemes experience and should be re-evaluated (again).”
Your above response does nothing but make me feel that my comments re: the forum are in fact “falling on deaf ears.”
The LEAST that could have been done was to inform your loyal clients that you would be taking down even the read-only version of the forum as part of last weekend’s update. I, for one, would have pulled down a copy of everything on it for my offline viewing/reference needs (as I thankfully did with the WooCommerce and Canvas docs – to name a few – after the extended downtime due to the hack.)
Further to my comment…
To quote a paragraph from that Woo support workflow post:
“The Support Forum as-is has a wealth of knowledge, but this is mostly uncurated and for it to be valuable to the vast majority of the WooCommunity, it needs to be carefully curated and crafted into Knowledgebase articles (something which we’re working on daily).”
This, to me, would indicate the logical course of action be to leave the forum up in read-only mode until the pre-existing ‘wealth of knowledge’ has all been successfully curated/transferred to your new Knowledgebase. I would be more than happy with that solution.
Instead, we are left with a Knowledgebase that is sorely lacking while Woo ‘[works] on [it] daily’ and we are left with support tickets as our time-consuming option for questions whose answers were readily available within that wealth of knowledge.
Thanks, the old forum is very much appreciated. I still prefer the searchable forum.
Reminds me of Drupal.org.
Much better than the old site though, that’s for sure!
I like the redesign a lot. Some font areas are way too small, though, on a desktop like in the sidebar tabs widget and the tags/trackbacks area.
Why is this site not responsive to browser resize?
Based on our stats, barely anybody used mobile devices to access our site, but we’ve made it responsive-ready so it will be easier to make it responsive in the future, but it wasn’t a priority for launch.
I was surprised when I noticed it wasn’t responsive, so that makes sense. I don’t just enjoy responsive websites on mobile; I tend to drag them to the side so that it only occupies half the window and becomes completely distraction free (no sidebar).
give me a dump of the forums and ill do something with it 🙂
It would have been great, if you woothemes at the very least gave us users a months heads up so we could have copied, archived, some posts we had favorited.
Instead, I as a user have to open up another ticket to solve a problem, again, which was previously solved.
And to boot, I am now experiencing over 24hr wait time on the new and improved ticketing system.
I 2nd that offer.
I am very disappointed with the lack of before information about the input and change the rules. Everything looks cute but disappeared in a few places to help creditors functionality such as: sorting tables and preview the template … What about customers who have previously purchased the plug – WooSlider and version WOOCOMMERCE Slider – when you will be able to download the plugin. When the page will work 100% correctly.
This is all explained in this post: https://woocommerce.com/2012/10/inside-woohq-tiered-licensing-support-packages/
Everybody who purchased before 1st Oct are grandfathered in: http://woocommerce.com/frequently-asked-questions/#tieredlicensing
You should be able to download the plugin now, so contact us if you can’t.
Good job guys…. money where your mouth is…i like it!
Fantastic re-design, i just love it.
Hey, where is the forum? I am newer to Woo Themes and one of the main reasons I made my investment here was because of the forum. How am I suppose to get the answers that I need that do NOT show up in the knowledge base or video section?
Support forum is one of the best draws, and to get rid of it is just crazy.
Please read this post for more information on the support systems – http://woocommerce.com/2012/08/inside-woohq-support-workflow/
Still think that getting rid of the forum was a horrible idea. Completely takes away a huge part of being a member.
“If you do not have access to your product downloads on this page, they should be available soon.”
Where, and when, will they be available? I tried clicking all the links on my account page but none direct me to the downloads, so I assume I don’t have them yet. Will there be a big section called Downloads?
This post says 8 hours, but it’s been longer than 8 hours.
Initially it was 8 hours, but due to unforeseen problems it took longer. They should all be done now, so contact us directly if you still haven’t got access.
Since you didn’t answer my question, and I still don’t know *what the new downloads section looks like to know if I do have access or not,* I filed a support ticket.
I also have no idea how to get to the downloads section, but having spent 10 minutes exhausting every possible link and avenue across the entire site I’d say that my downloads simply aren’t available yet. At least you managed to submit a support ticket, I wasn’t able to do that.
The downloads should show in your account page. If they don’t please contact us.
Should they all be done for everyone? (I’ve emailed and commented below too 😉
Yes they should all be done and should show in your account page. If they don’t please contact us.
They aren’t showing, and I’ve emailed the info@woothemes address (as that’s all I had on file) as the link to raise a ticket just re-directs to the home page (woocommerce.com)
I’ve double checked to make sure the downloads list isn’t hidden away somewhere. Clicking on my developer package in my accounts section brings up a page with no-content (where it looks like there perhaps should be something listed other than the header, footer and title page)
I contacted you guys at least a day ago about seeing no way to edit my subscription status or get new downloads, say of a theme I had never used before, updates to the ones I have now, etc. and have not gotten an answer.
All I see in my account is links to WC extensions, no way to cancel/reactivate the club subscription. I think I had the subscription set to auto renew but this is what now like a week I haven’t been able to access anything…
I really hope that if you are going to charge more for extensions that you make sure that they are better documented (ex. no idea how to pass data in variables with Gravity Form Product Add-ons although it is a feature), that they work together (ex. GFPA dumps all the options into a single column of product meta which looks horrible in checkout and yields useless data with Product/Order CSV export), and that they actually do what they say in their advertisement (CSV export is supposed to export with “each product on one line” but instead exports each product type along with “3x” and all of the gibberish from GFPA, when it should be 3 lines).
I subscribed to comments for this post. Now i want to unsubscribe. When i click on “Manage your subscriptions” and try to unsubscribe i get this error message – “You may not access this page without a valid key.”
Thanks for this, we’ll make sure that gets fixed.
Looking sharp! I really like the new home page. Any plans to make this possible in your themes (Canvas would be ideal), or to write a tutorial on how we could do something like this with your themes?
Thanks!
Laura
I’m relatively new as a customer and based my choice for some of your themes on your pricing model and support structure, mainly the forum: I too like to find out most things myself. I choose the Canvas theme and to me it was quite clear you can not survive as a company with your business model and a theme and license conditions as for Canvas. Sympathy from my side for both the new business model and the new site based on your own Woocommerce.
In some of your recent blog posts it was clear you were looking for changes to be made and also created a sphere of sharing your thoughts and being open to your customers. Very pity to find out that involving your customers turns out to be empty words. Because, when it comes to it you shut down your site for days without giving your ‘appreciated’ customers a single notice and possibility to prepare. Furthermore without any warning/pre-info you come back with a different pricing model and an erased forum and you also seem to have erased the valuable bookmarks that your most loyal and professional customers put a lot of time and effort in to collect them. From a customer point of view I think you quite screwed up in the same arrogant style big companies sometimes afford themselves.
For some time I follow the soap around Thesis 2.0. There people are warned for a new pricing structure when 2.0 releases already for 4 years (or something close) and it simply never happens. You do the complete opposite, namely changing everything without any notice. My personal idea is that the “truth” is somewhere in the middle.
Anyway, I’m not affected that much and wish you all a successful outcome of your changes.
Regards, Sjef
Guys,
I’m disappointed. Plug-ins are gone. Links do not work. Forum doesnt work. Customers are only costs. What happened to you? I really could not work out everything on a separate test server? Why is experimenting on living organism? How much time will you entertain at our expense?
Do not stay like a politician. Because you do not have ideas – Do not reach for our money. Chcesie simplify your life and reduce costs?
I suggest you to create new templates to use Canvas.
When the templates will have the same structure – it will be easier to update and it will generate fewer questions.
Awesome job! Love the new layout! I would also love that floating Social Share icon widget you have here on the left of the posts. Is that a wootheme product now or how could I get that for my Canvas theme?
It’s a little custom coded part of the theme. 😉
You could of course add something like this to the single.php post template. Some CSS to make it look good and follow you around the page. 😉
Sorry to see that the forums (where I had all my hacks and fixes bookmarked) gone without a heads up.
Now I am feel anxious about having to wait a day and a half for the Woo Ninjas (who are very good, I might add) to get back to me with my support questions in the future.
It’s hard to understand why Woo would not listen to their community who havesupported them all these many years. Sad 😉
Sad indeed. I completely understand the reasons for overhauling the support ticket system. The forum wasn’t a scalable way to handle every support request. That’s been established by Woo and I have no reason not to believe them. But their assertion in comments on previous posts that “most user were not searching the forum to solve problems” seems just plain wrong. If it’s not, let’s see some analytics data to back it up.
The Woocommerce extensions layout is bloody awful.
Care to elaborate?
Seriously guys, this is the most ridiculous decision you could have made.
Haven’t you heard that old say, “if it aint broke dont fix it” ?
So, you took the site down (service interruption) without notice on the basis that all of us are cool and understanding of one another….. Then you put back up and nothings works (service continues to be interrupted)….. and then on top of that you come up with this slightly greedy new pricing structure claiming that is a decision made so that we can get a better service, yet I still can’t download a theme.
Sounds like a conflict to me. Perhaps you should debug and redesign your thinking process.
With all your respect, cause I do respect you and admire you, we are cool but business is business. A new era begins for woo, unfortunately I foresee it to be a sad one.
We posted a week ahead of time about our maintenance that would be happening over the weekend, plus the launch of the new site on October 1st.
We also announced, in the same post I believe, the new licensing structure and a WooCommerce sale across our whole site.
Email us and we can get your theme access sorted out ASAP! – support[at]woocommerce.com
I don’t see it in the blog. Must be where the forum is.
Love the new look!
Magnus can you kindly look into my account as to why I don’t have access to download my bonus theme with my purchase of premium theme.
Thank You,
Armando