WooDojo Day: The Muso Edition… and more

Written by Matty Cohen on May 30, 2012 Blog, Product News.

As has become known here at WooThemes HeadQuarters, Wednesday is “Dojo Day”, where we release a bunch of exciting new features downloadable through WooDojo, or provide updates and feedback on WooDojo, upcoming features and useful tips and insights into ways WooDojo can be used to enhance your WordPress-powered website.

This week is no exception.

This week’s “Dojo Day” releases are widely spread across the spectrum, from a donations form for freelancers, non-profit organizations (or anyone, in fact) to a collection of widgets for musicians and music lovers and an extension of the bundled WooDojo Tabs widget. Without further wait, we present to you, “WooDojo Downloadables: The Muso Edition… and more”.

Muso Widgets Pack

Lets start things off with today’s largest feature, the “Muso Widgets Pack”. This collection of widgets, developed with musicians and music lovers in mind, profiles widgets to showcase your Last.fm profile, recent tracks, top artists and top albums in your website’s sidebar, as well as a bridge to SoundCloud to showcase a playlist of your band’s tracks, or a selection of specific tracks.

WooDojo SoundCloud Player, featuring "Captain Stu"

The Muso Widgets Pack comes with an easy-to-use settings screen, which can be used to tailor your experience with the widgets, adjust the colour of the SoundCloud player, connect your SoundCloud account and enable/disable the Last.fm widgets. Being a musician and music lover, myself, I can’t wait to start using these widgets on my website.

We’re looking forward to developing additional niche widget packs of this nature. If you’ve got any ideas you’d like to see, please share them with us, and the WooCommunity, over at WooIdeas.

Tab Grouping

This feature, much like Widget Preview, echoes what WooDojo is all about- small components: big impact. The Tab Grouping feature adds an interface for creating groups of tabs for the WooDojo Tabs widget. These groups can contain any of the available tabs (for example, just “Latest” and “Popular”, if you’d like) and can display the tabs in any order (the tabs are re-ordered using a drag-and-drop list).

Adding a tab grouping via WooDojo

This feature has been designed to take what is, on the surface, a relatively straight forward widget in WooDojo Tabs and transform and enhance it’s functionality, should the need arise for more granular control over which tabs and in what order they are displayed.

InspirePay Donations

This feature, consisting of a widget and shortcode, adds the option to display an InspirePay-powered donation form to your website in a page or in the sidebar via a widget. Powered by InspirePay (an account is required), this feature would be useful for freelancers, non-profit organizations or anyone looking to recieve donation payments via InspirePay.

InspirePay Donations form in a sidebar widget, using WooDojo

All transactions are handled on the InspirePay website- this feature just adds a form to enable the process directly from your website.

So… how do I get all of this?

If you haven’t yet started using WooDojo, you’d need to download and install WooDojo onto your website (it’s free). From there, the features above, as well as a bunch more, are available for direct download and activation through WooDojo itself… without ever leaving your WordPress admin area.

We look forward to seeing how you put WooDojo to work on your website, with the features you need. As always, we encourage your ideas and feedback on features, WooDojo and ideas you’d like to share with us and the community via posting on WooIdeas.

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12 Responses

  1. Adolfo Tavizón
    May 30, 2012 at 8:08 pm #

    Boys, I downloaded the zip and re installed it and I see nothing new, is this version abailable yet?

    • Ryan Ray
      May 30, 2012 at 10:21 pm #

      The added features should appear without updates. They did at least on my side.

  2. deeptitanic
    May 31, 2012 at 1:33 pm #

    Perfect bundle for digital buskers!

  3. Matt
    May 31, 2012 at 3:23 pm #

    This is all great stuff — will no doubt be helpful.

    But what I’m really enthused about are new themes. There have only been two new themes released in the last 60 days…I hope there will be an influx of releases soon.

    • Ryan Ray
      May 31, 2012 at 4:27 pm #

      Sorry to be a let down Matt!

      As you’d understand, the hack and time spent down recovering pushed back our theme development a bit. All development actually was pushed back as we got back online.

      These sort of releases don’t take as much time as themes do, plus our theme development teams are split between making sure support is handled and creating themes. With the lean being towards support first. 🙂

      With that said, we’ve got what I believe are 3 themes in development right now with a 4th being designed. I do hope these help keep you enthused about our themes, I know I’m excited for Canvas V5. That’s slated for next release. 😉

      • Anthony
        May 31, 2012 at 6:49 pm #

        Exciting!
        Any news on what to expect in Canvas V5?

        • Ryan Ray
          June 1, 2012 at 12:02 am #

          Check with us come Monday. 😉

      • Matt
        June 1, 2012 at 2:30 am #

        Absolutely understood!

        Canvas is what I mainly use — so a version upgrade will be much appreciated!

  4. Kait
    May 31, 2012 at 10:46 pm #

    I know that this has been said before, and I’m not trying to bring you down because I know there are really big and exciting things going on for WooThemes right now, and you guys just bounced back from that giant hack- but I just have to say it. I feel like you guys have lost touch with your subscribers.

    The WooDojo stuff is great, but it’s FREE, and I understand that it’s a great way to introduce WooAwesomeness to the WordPress community and get people to buy your themes and become subscribers, but it kind of rubs me the wrong way that your existing subscribers are paying you at least $240 a year on an ongoing basis after a $200 buy-in, and are the ones supporting development for such projects, yet they’re available for anyone and largely duplicate things already found in (or that could be done through) the WooFramework, which is basically proprietary for the people who SPEND MONEY ON YOU. As a subscriber, I fear that all your most awesome features are going to be channeled into WooDojo and the WooFramework will end up suffering as a result, and the WooDojo features are going to be all over the place on the internet, which makes them less valuable to your subscriber base.

    WooCommerce is kind of the same way- it’s either free, or extra money, even if you’re already a subscriber. And not everyone needs a commerce site, but that has been your dominant focus for months now.

    I LOVE WooThemes, and I want to see you guys succeed, but I beg you to pay more attention to what value you’re giving your subscribers, who are floating development for all these things, and also paying for you to support Dojo and Commerce outside of the community. There are lots of beautiful themes out there, and what really set you guys apart was your framework and proprietary goodies.

    It’s starting to feel like you’re giving the milk away for free, while the people who have signed up to pay for it are waiting in line to get theirs.

    That being said, Dojo and Commerce are both awesome. I just wish there was more that was JUST for us subscribers. And I’ll say it again, I love WooThemes, I’ve been a subscriber for years.

    • Ryan Ray
      June 1, 2012 at 12:12 am #

      We really appreciate the honest feedback here Kait, and the continued support through all of this. I think it’s something we’re very open to discussing and figuring out for you and other subscribers, as you pointed out we know others are feeling the same thing.

      At the base, the subscription’s value is that you do get access to ALL of our themes and all new themes at anytime you like while active. Getting past the startup fee, it’s a very low monthly cost to maintain that access and support. The startup fee is there to discourage people who’d come in only to grab all of our themes at once and cancel their membership, even then it’s still a good value if wanting/needing access to 100+ themes all at once.

      We have tried reaching out to our subscribers with WooCommerce. I.e. – The 30% off coupon for all subscribers, plus the free extension for selling software. But we hear you that that has no value to you since you’re not using WooCommerce.

      I’d be interested to hear more. If you have any ideas on how we can increase the value for your subscription and others, send us a quick email. – support[at]woocommerce.com

      We’ll figure out some ideas here to gather more public opinion. 🙂

      • Kait
        June 1, 2012 at 12:34 am #

        You guys are always really good at fielding constructive criticism and feedback, and that’s part of what makes you guys so awesome. Thank you for receiving that comment in the light it was intended : )

        Here are some suggestions that I know would make me really happy-

        One of the ways that you can continue to provide good value for your subscribers is to offer us things that are just for us- you know, make us feel special. We’re like your long-term spouse, and we’ve been getting restless because you’ve been eyeing other people a lot lately, seeming distant, and we feel taken for granted. Wine and dine us a bit! (Canvas v5 is a great start!)

        Don’t put all the primo features into WooDojo OR reserve some of them for your paid subscribers only, and save some good stuff for the framework! Don’t make either of the two themes you put out per month exclusively for commerce, because there are so many of those already, and they don’t benefit a lot of your base. Create more themes that are exceptional on their own, and then do commerce child themes for them.

        As I said before, Woo is great, and I for one will continue subscribing. This is just a growing pain, and it’s good that you guys are keeping a pulse on your subscribers. We appreciate it : )

  5. Onder
    June 1, 2012 at 2:38 am #

    Brilliant addons to an already great plugin.
    I reckon for the next update, yu should add an option to include a customised feature box for optins and add it be compatible with aweber and mailchimp.

    I think an addon like that would be indispensable as adding an optin form as a feature box on the homepage seems to be all the rage at the moment. and hard coding it is a pain.

    Keep up with the great work!