2019-2021 in Review – Check Out All the YOOtheme Highlights
And just like that, another year has passed. We want to start this year with a tradition we have neglected for quite some time – our yearly YOOtheme review! Although the last two years were really challenging, we have reached some major milestones with YOOtheme Pro and its ecosystem. Let's look back on all the highlights. And of course, we will talk about our plans for this year.
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YOOtheme Pro
In the last three years YOOtheme Pro has reached some incredible milestones. The first year we mainly worked on bringing dynamic content to YOOtheme Pro. Now you can load dynamic content into your layouts and create site-wide templates for posts, pages, categories and more with the YOOtheme Pro page builder. This fundamentally changed the scope of YOOtheme Pro. In the second year we worked on integrating ZOO and Widgetkit into the YOOtheme Pro ecosystem. And finally last year we released the long-awaited WooCommerce builder. So now you can design your entire WooCommerce shop with YOOtheme Pro. And last but not least, we added a new element library with over 280 element presets. It was a huge workload, but we think it completely changed the way you create layouts. The focus on these major features accelerated our transition from a traditional template club to a product-centered company. We have prepared some fun charts to show you the progress of YOOtheme Pro in numbers.
Releases in Numbers
Here are our theme package and feature releases of YOOtheme Pro as well as our major product updates.
In this chart you can see how the focus has shifted from only theme releases to having frequent feature releases as well. Lately we also started bundling features into fewer but larger releases. This can be seen from the total length of our feature videos which depends on the amount of features.
Now let's take a look at the overall number of releases for YOOtheme Pro and UIkit including all their patch releases.
As you can see in this chart, we put a lot of effort into maintaining YOOtheme Pro and its frontend framework UIkit. There is a patch release with fixes and smaller improvements every 4 days which shows our commitment to provide reliable software with fast and responsive support.
Layouts and Styles in Numbers
Some of main features of YOOtheme Pro are its layout and style libraries. So in addition to the YOOtheme Pro theme and feature releases, over the years we also filled these libraries with hundreds of reusable layouts and styles.
We really care about the quality of our libraries and try to have as much unique content as possible. We are also maintaining all layouts and styles and improving them with the new YOOtheme Pro features. In 2020, we created templates for the blog and post pages of all existing theme packages since 2016, as you can see in the layout peak on the chart. And last year we introduced a new library for the elements and filled it with over 280 element presets.
Demo Websites in Numbers
Last but not least, let's take a closer look at the theme package releases and the demo websites we created for Joomla, WordPress, ZOO and WooCommerce.
In this chart you can see the impact of dynamic content as well as the ZOO and WooCommerce integration on the number of demo websites we have created. Dynamic content and the use of custom fields have drastically increased the complexity of our demo websites. We now also carefully design a data model for each demo website to define the content structure and relationships. For example, the amount of content can be seen from the number of images that got 4 times higher even though there are fewer theme packages. Additionally, we reworked 5 theme packages as ZOO apps and 2 as fully-functional WooCommerce shops.
Theme Packages
Now let's take a look at all the theme packages released in the last three years.
Feature Videos
With feature releases becoming more and more important for YOOtheme Pro, we started recording screencasts in 2019 where we explain every YOOtheme Pro feature in detail. But we had such a great feedback that from 2020 we moved to presenting all our releases in person. We put a lot of effort into making these videos as helpful as possible. By the way, if you want to be the first to see the new YOOtheme Pro features, theme packages and other product updates, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.
With the rise of theme packages which use dynamic content, we also started to document their content structure in the blog post as well as produce dedicated theme videos. These videos can be found on the theme detail page which also has a new documentation section for the content structure and 3rd party extensions at the bottom.
Documentation
Since a great documentation is crucial for any product, we made it an ongoing project which we have been working on extensively. It is our goal to create the most comprehensive resource for both beginners and developers. Altogether Joomla and WordPress documentations have over 68k words which is 6x larger than our Warp documentation. Besides that we started visualizing it and already have over 300 documentation videos on YouTube with a total duration of "only" 3:30 hours for the Joomla and 4 hours for the WordPress playlists. You can either binge-watch our YouTube playlists, find the needed video in our documentation or on the videos page. And to make it even easier, we also included them as contextual help in YOOtheme Pro, so you don't even need to leave your site. But there are still a few sections left, so we will continue working on it.
Demo Server
In addition to the documentation, we also improved our demo server. There is now a showcase for all YOOtheme Pro elements that shows their power and their variations. Additionally, you can switch through all 230+ YOOtheme Pro styles. The Widgetkit showcase has the same style switcher, so you can see how the widgets look in YOOtheme Pro. Last but not least, the ZOO apps are shown on the demo server just like the YOOtheme Pro websites.
ZOO, Widgetkit and UIkit
Finally, we rebuilt ZOO and Widgetkit with UIkit 3 and brought them into the YOOtheme Pro ecosystem. All ZOO front-end views are now rendered with the YOOtheme Pro page builder. And Widgetkit uses the latest UIkit 3 JavaScript effects and perfectly adapts to all the YOOtheme Pro styles. UIkit 3 itself is well maintained and in average has 3 feature/patch releases per month.
What can be expected this year?
Now it's time to look at the crystal ball and see our future. But jokes aside, in the last years we spent all our time adding new features to YOOtheme Pro and extending its ecosystem. At this point we want to thank our developer community which kind of exploded lately. As you can see on our extension page, we already have over 70 extensions. There are form builders, content sources, builder elements, icon libraries and even e-commerce solutions for YOOtheme Pro. We are planning a dedicated blog post to cover all the new extensions and their developers soon.
Now that all the products work perfectly together, there is one last YOOtheme Pro release planned in the first quarter of 2022 bringing you the mega menus. After that we think it's time to start working on the next generation framework of YOOtheme Pro. Of course, this includes the future of UIkit 4 as well. No vaporware jokes, please. We already have some prototypes and are really thrilled to finally start working on it.
There are two more tasks we need to cross off our list first – a little update for our YOOtheme site, and finally after 1,5 years of remote work, we are moving into a new YOOtheme office! Yeah 🥳
By the way, do you know YOOtheme is hiring? Currently, we are looking for full-time web designers, front-end developers and support engineers in our office in Hamburg. So if you would like to become part of our team, send us your application.
And lastly, we would like to thank you, our community, for your support these last three years. We hope we can further provide you with the products you love and software that makes your lives easier 😉
We wish you a healthy and successful year! Your YOOtheme Team
P.S. If you want something to laugh, stick around till the end of the video 😉
