Offer bundle style discounts with coupons in WooCommerce

April 26, 2013 — 1 Comment

With todays tutorial and discount for the Sensei plugin and related products, we needed a quick way to offer people a discount when they purchased the whole bundle (containing Sensei, a premium theme and the Subscriptions extension for WooCommerce). Of course, we have plugins already available that do this, for example the Product Bundles extension or with a possibly minor modified version of the Dynamic Pricing extension.

WooCommerce Bundle Style Coupons

But what we were really looking for, was a lot simpler. All we wanted was a coupon, that checked if all products belonging to a bundle like set are in the cart and then apply a specific discount on it. We decided to write a small plugin for it, which turned out to be so useful for other people, that I’ve made a generic version out of it and released it for free in the plugins repository: WooCommerce Bundle Style Coupons. Continue Reading…

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Our WordSesh talk on WooCommerce video is now available

April 13, 2013 — Leave a comment

While the WordSesh 24 hour marathon event is still going, YouTube is already publishing videos that have been streamed live and have been recorded. Here’s the video of the talk Scott Basgaard and I (and a mystery guest appearance by Brian Krogsgard – thanks again Brian, it was awesome to have you in our session!) did about WooCommerce:

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Help us prepare for WordSesh

April 7, 2013 — Leave a comment

On Saturday 13th of April, the first fully online WordPress event spanning over 24 hours is taking place. WordSesh is having great speakers from all over the world to share an hour of their knowledge with the internet.

It’s going to be an awesome event, with talks on various topics, combined covering a huge part of the WordPress ecosystem.

And the best part is, you can enjoy every session, from the comfort of your own home and it costs you absolutely nothing. So go have a look at the schedule (all times are UTC!) and see what sessions you want to watch. Can’t make it to one of the sessions? No worries, all sessions will be recorded and published online after the event! Continue Reading…

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Keep your WordPress plugins easy to use and expand

March 12, 2013 — 9 Comments

Today I had the chance to explain to one of our users why a feature was not added to WooCommerce core, but released as a separate extension:

I understand that this specific feature is a heavy requirement for your projects, but you have to understand that we come from a very different angle than Magento does. In fact, we are not near Magento when it comes to the number of features. This is done on purpose and let me explain why.

Magento having a huge load of features packed in the default version of it may benefit a lot of people, but it also has a big downside. This is exactly the reason why WooCommerce has far less features in its core plugin. We provide extra features via extensions to keep the core WooCommerce plugin as lean and clean as possible. The people who do not use extra features can benefit of a faster and less code bloated plugin. When you do need the extra features, there will be extensions to add these features.

This way of spreading features between the core plugin and separate extensions makes our plugin usable for a much bigger audience. You don’t need to be an expert in eCommerce to start working with our plugin and run your first webshop.

Especially this last sentence is a very important reason to not stack all sorts of complicated features in the core plugin. WordPress and her plugins are renowned for their user experience, ease of use and low entry barrier. Let’s keep it that way, let’s keep it simple and easy to expand with new features.

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Yes, WooCommerce 2.0 is finally here!

March 4, 2013 — Leave a comment

It feels like Christmas today. We’ve released WooCommerce 2.0 today, the long awaited next generation release of our WooCommerce plugin. In the announcement post we’ve given an overview of all the new functions and improvements, but you really need to check it out yourself. There are too many tweaks and improvements to mention in a single post.

We wish you all a lot of fun and sales with WooCommerce 2.0!

IMPORTANT: Please read the entire post before updating. It is a major update and changes a lot. This stresses the importance of making backups, preparing your website and having a test environment to test new versions.

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Are you all set for WooCommerce 2.0?

February 8, 2013 — Leave a comment

January has been a busy month for team WooThemes. Specific to the WooCommerce team, we have been busy getting WooCommerce 2.0 ready to go. After a couple beta releases, we have made the first Release Candidate available just this week. With this Release Candidate now available, the official release is right around the corner.

Should you find any bugs in our code (unfortunately, we’re not perfect – yet), please report them in our GitHub repository. We have a long changelog for this release, so plenty of stuff to test. Based on the number of comments and contributions we’ve been getting lately, you all are pretty excited for this new release. So are we! We’re on the home straight, very close to release. Continue Reading…

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Dealing with the language differences on Twitter

January 20, 2013 — 4 Comments

I have always been struggling with the gap between the two languages that I’m most proficient in. My native language is Dutch, but for my work and most online communication the main language is English. Most Dutch people can read English, not many non-Dutch people understand Dutch. The solution to this for a blog is of course fairly simple, split your blog into two languages using either a translation plugin or setup two installs of WordPress. I’ve done the latter now, be it in a multisite setup. Hello shiny new Dutch blog!

But, the blogs are not the biggest issue here. What about social media, Twitter and Facebook? In the past two months I have been trying to create a perfect system where the content I posted to those networks was only to be seen by the people understanding the language the content was written in.

This involved a list in Facebook (which was pretty easy to use, no issues there) and I created a separate Dutch Twitter account for my Dutch tweets. While this works, be it with a little extra effort, this experiment failed big time for me and tonight I decided to stop tailoring the content on Twitter like that and I probably will do the same on Facebook. Continue Reading…

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Kicking off the new year, WordPress style

January 1, 2013 — 1 Comment

Today is the first day of the new year, the first day of 2013. I have been looking back at my first year at WooThemes in my post on WP Daily already, so it’s time to look at what the new year will bring now.

The risk with posts like this is that it might backfire on me when I do not achieve the goals that I’m setting, but I see that as a good thing now. Sometimes I need a push in the back to regain my focus on what is important and what I want to achieve. If this list can be that push, I’m happy with that. Continue Reading…

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WooCommerce 2.0 goes into beta

December 21, 2012 — Leave a comment

Yesterday, I  announced the first beta of WooCommerce 2.0 on the WooThemes blog. With Mike, Jay and a number of contributors, we have been working hard in the past two months to get everything ready. The past week, we have been doing some internal testing on a beta 0 version and we’ve been able to squash the most obvious bugs already. Now it is time for you to chip in, get the latest code from our GitHub repository and help us testing!

Now that WordPress 3.5 is out with a revamped Media Handler, we decided that it was a good time to drop compatibility with older versions of WordPress. So you will need WordPress 3.5 to be able to use WooCommerce. In Mike’s post about the use of the new Media Handler, you can see how we are using these new features of WordPress in our new version of WooCommerce.

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Next WooCommerce release will be version 2.0

December 4, 2012 — 1 Comment

While we have been secretly working on the next version of WooCommerce, we already knew that its next version was gonna be 2.0. On GitHub we silently tagged it as being version 1.7, but with all the big improvements and new features that we’ve been working on, it will be a worthy major new version:

The 2.0 “Daring Dassie” release will be ready as soon as possible, but not without walking through the beta and release candidate steps first. Adii announced the existence of the 2.0 plans yesterday in a blog post about our “Maintenance Mode” during December and January, so now it is official. The next WooCommerce release will be a daring big release! Continue Reading…

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