Hey all. I'm Michael, a Developer Advocate at WooThemes and now Automattic. I'm happy to answer any questions. As you can imagine, we're all really excited about this.
> We had talks with potential partners, including VC firms and competing companies. This led us to Automattic, who had previously shown great interest in the popularity of WooCommerce. CEO Matt Mullenweg, who is also the co-founder of WordPress, had built his company in the same distributed manner as WooThemes with a team of over 300. This was our dream partner!
Here's a question: do you have any idea of what the first initial changes might be for developer/firms and how we work with WooCommerce/WooThemes/WooMatic?
The WooCommerce eco-system relies on our third-party developers and we will continue working with them. We don't have any immediate changes that would affect developers and agencies. We do plan to introduce a new developer program (a re-imagined Affiliated Woo Workers) to help agencies and developers in the coming months but is unrelated to the acquisition and has been in the works for the last few months.
> Also, it sounds like job roles transferred over one-to-one?
Usually when a company merges like this, there's a period just after acquisition where both companies still operate independently while the higher-ups try to figure out the integration plan. That doesn't mean titles/roles won't change, but the same day as the announcement? It'd be business as usual at both companies.
Michael works with other companies to encourage better integration, like payment gateways and shipping tools. It's a new position, but a sure exciting time to be there :)
Congrulations! This is a great step forward for the community and for both parties involved.
As for WooThemes - will we start seeing proper documentation [1] when products are released? I've been bit in the past by something being released by WooThemes, and documentation taking another half year up to year to follow.
You're right. We could have done a better job at documenting the REST API. We've been slowly introducing and fixing issues with the the REST API since it's debut. We never fully announced it as it was still very much a work in progress. However in WC 2.3 I'm happy to announce we've significantly improved the REST API and documentation.
Without a doubt we're also going to have many more resources joining Automattic and their talented group.
After reading your answers, it looks like at this point, you don't have clear visibility into a lot of areas (integration with Wordpress, impact to third party developers, etc) as to what is going to happen in the future. Understandably so.
Do you have any area (like better documentation, which you wrote about) where you have a clear vision about the future? Can you tell us about that? I think that will be more useful.
