When Automattic acquired WooThemes in 2015, it gained employees, plugins, themes, and the company’s trademarks. These trademarks include, standard character marks, logos, and specific graphics such as the Verified WooExpert badges. One of the responsibilities of a trademark owner is to protect it from infringement. WooGPL is a service that provides customers with commercial themes,…
In this episode, Marcus Couch and I recap WordCamp Orange County 2015 held in Costa Mesa, CA. We share our favorite sessions, highlights of the weekend, and I explain why I spent day two of the conference in my hotel room. During the second half of the show, we cover the news of the week,…
Jeff Ikus of WooThemes, announced on the company’s themes development blog, that it has pushed out updates to all of its products that use the prettyPhoto library. The update fixes a DOM based cross-site scripting vulnerability discovered in 2014. prettyPhoto is a jQuery lightbox clone used in a potentially large number of WordPress products. If…
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I break down Automattic’s acquisition of WooThemes and discuss the future of WooCommerce. We discuss how the Japanese WordPress community influences WordPress development. Last but not least, we debate the merits of using an honor system for commercial plugins. Stories Discussed: Automattic Acquires WooThemes WordPress.org is…
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg announced today that the company has acquired WooCommerce, WordPress’ most popular e-commerce platform. The plugin recently passed seven million downloads and stats from BuiltWith show that WooCommerce is dominating global e-commerce platforms, powering roughly 30% of all online stores. This is Automattic’s largest acquisition to date, bringing 55 new employees into…
Devin Price, who owns and operates the WordPress commercial theme shop DevPress, announced that he is retiring his best selling theme, Zenith. I asked Price why he’s retiring his best product. “Retirement may not be the best term. It’s more like introducing the new year’s model and stopping production on the previous one. The designs…
WooThemes announced this week that it will be retiring @WooSupport, its Twitter support account, in favor of other support channels. Social media manager Marina Pape reports that support at the company is otherwise healthy. “On the contrary, our support is cooking with Customer Happiness this week averaging 90%, all support teams coming in under 24…
WooCommerce recently passed five million downloads, shortly before the Woo team kicked off the first WooConf earlier this month. The conference, devoted solely to WooCommerce, sold out with 300 attendees. The plugin had 294 contributors on its most recent 2.2 release and is currently being used on 18% of all e-commerce sites on the web.…
Earlier this week, the first conference dedicated to WooCommerce took place and from all accounts, it was a success. Held at 969 Market in San Francisco, CA, over 300 people attended WooConf to learn about WooCommerce and eCommerce in general. While I didn’t attend the event, there are several people who have published their experience…
WooThemes is continuing to investigate a handful of reports of fraudulent activity on customers’ credit card accounts. The company worked with Sucuri who conducted a code audit and discovered three modified files on their server pointing toward an attack. WooThemes has published a blog post explaining the steps they’ve taken to prevent this incident from…
WooThemes has announced they will no longer be offering subscriptions to their theme club, a concept they helped pioneer in 2008. With a monthly subscription, buyers would gain access to all available themes as well as themes released during their subscription period. The theme club has been replaced by a new package called ATP or…
The WordPress Meetup group in San Francisco recently held their first WooCommerce meetup within the new Automattic Headquarters. The meetup focused on an introduction to WooCommerce and provided time at the end for customers show and tell their WooCommerce projects. There was also an opportunity to have questions answered. As you can see from the…
Scott Basgaard will be our live guest on Friday, December 13th at 3PM Eastern time. Scott is currently employed by WooThemes and is one of the pioneers behind WordSesh. We’ll be talking to Scott about WordSesh 2 which recently took place this past weekend. We’ll also find out what he’s up to these days as…
*Updated August 5th* WooThemes has published a follow up post that explains in more detail the reasoning behind the first post. It also contains apologies and although we could argue on whether their choice to customers should have been to opt-in or opt-out, the choice is there for customers regardless, which didn’t exist before. Lots…
While WooThemes was experiencing a crisis that involved the loss of 6 months of data along with their main website going offline, they still managed to provide great customer service. During the entire ordeal, WooThemes kept customers and the public updated with what they knew and what they were doing to fix the problem via…