You may have noticed Jay and I shouting about all the cool WooCommerce goodies we’ve been releasing at WooThemes (we now have a whopping 45 extensions and 15 themes) but what hasn’t had as much attention is all of the cool stuff the community has been releasing. Here’s a list of my favorite third-party plugins/themes currently available.
Today I’m proud to announce WooCommerce has arrived. Its been a tough week preparing it’s launch, and a busy month of development work but its all paid off. The WooThemes team, myself included, are incredibly excited by its completion and we hope it’s a hit with the WordPress community as a whole.
WooCommerce is an open source eCommerce plugin for WordPress with loads of cool features. Adding products, managing orders, setting up tax and shipping rates – WooCommerce makes it easy.
Whilst developing WooCommerce we focused on extending core WordPress functionality and keeping the UI consistant; this gives you an simple, easy to use, familiar admin interface which is a joy to use.
We made full use of WordPress custom post types, post type archives, and custom taxonomies making it both extendable and easy to theme. Theme developers will be relieved by its simplicity – after using several other eCommerce plugins in the past I know that it will be a breath of fresh air to many.
Alongside the release of the WooCommerce plugin we’ve also released three new themes (WooStore, Coquette and Wootique) as well as several child themes and extensions.
WooTique is our free WooCommerce theme
You can read more about WooCommerce on the WooThemes site. Be sure to check out WooCommerce on WordPress.org, and if your a developer (or a translator) why not say hi on Github and contribute to the project 
Its been a fantastic (and busy) month for me – september 1st I started my new job at WooThemes, arguably the most popular premium WordPress theme company in town, and I’m having a blast
At WooThemes I’ve been busy working in the new ‘WooLabs’ division alongside my pal James Koster. In the WooLabs we’re focusing on application style themes (like SupportPress), plugins (our nearly complete Mighty Menus plugin) and the highly anticipated WooCommerce plugin and themes.
So far I’m really enjoying my new role at Woo, and I’m ecstatic that they gave me the opportunity to work with them.
I’ll leave you with this teaser…looking forward to tuesday!
Good news folks. SupportPress (created by myself and James Koster) is ready to download. It’s our second application style theme built in collaboration with WooThemes and I’m really excited to say that its finally available.
The theme provides you with a completely self-hosted help desk and knowledgebase solution, all built upon the WordPress core. It functions similarly to popular SaaS offerings such as Zen Desk and Tender.
Mobile devices love SupportPress
The front-end is coded with HTML5 and CSS3 (using LESS CSS to aid development and make theming easier), and the design is responsive making it work well on both desktop and mobile devices. As with FaultPress before, this feature has been very well received by the woo community.
Notable features of the theme include:
Overall, myself and James are very pleased with how SupportPress has turned out and look forward to creating our next application theme
The demo for SupportPress can be found here, and if your thinking of buying it WooThemes are offering an 11% discount until July 11th by using the code ‘SUPPORTPRESS11′. Enjoy!
JobRoller, a premium job listing app for WordPress, is a theme I developed for premium theme store Appthemes and has been given a huge update. Given its success as a job board we decided to branch out its focus and make it even more useful to employers, rather than just job seekers, and so the main new feature we are introducing is ‘resumes’.
There are now two registration types in JobRoller; Employers and Job Seekers. Employers are essentially normal users who can submit new jobs to the system just like they always have been able to. Job Seekers however are completely new.
A resume created with JobRoller
Job Seekers have their own unique dashboard which allows them to view ‘starred’ jobs (for bookmarking purposes), job recommendations (based on their profile data), and their resumes. Resumes are added via forms letting the job seeker enter details about their location, education, skills, and experience. Resumes can be made visible to employers or kept hidden.
Other notable features in this release include:
So there you have it. Be sure to check out the theme if you haven’t done already!
p.s. Yes the links to AppThemes are my affiliate links, just so you know
…and here we are. I’ve decided to simplify my online presence and change my domain from “Blue Anvil” to something more personal. I’ve spent a lot of time designing a minimalistic, more content focused site which is easier for me to update, and easier for you to find useful information.
You may have noticed that I’ve gone for the Tumblr style of blogging; allowing for full posts but also accommodating smaller updates such as code snippets, quotes, and links. As well as that I’ll be showcasing projects I’m working on (such as the projects I’m doing in collaboration with WooThemes) and any interesting freelance work I do.
Some of your will also appreciate that I’ve spent some time improving the documentation for my plugins, rewriting bits and giving the docs a much more organised format. These will be available from the projects page and will be added over the coming weeks. Handy!
Blue Anvil will stay live for archive purposes, but I’ll be switching off comments and moving important content over here. Thanks for reading and be sure to follow me on twitter or subscribe to the RSS feed for updates.