Do the Woo / Open Channels FM 2025 Pathway

Hey, welcome to Open Channels fm. BobWP here. Well, you know what time of year it is. It’s when everyone starts putting out reviews. And I thought someone had asked me something. And instead of a review, I’d like to call this our pathway of 2025, which is kind of another way of saying review. But I want to focus on something specific. The reason, as I said, were a few people or off and on people over the last few months, they’ve missed a part somewhere along the line of what we’ve done, or they’re kind of saying, hey, you know, weren’t you do the woo and you moved to Open Channels? I’m a little confused, so I think I can really clarify this.

So I’m going to give you a map of that journey that included our rebranding and changes in the structure, which will make a lot more sense. Now, as far as what’s ahead. Usually a review will close with some thoughts on what 2026 is looking like. Well, that’s going to be another episode, or actually the next episode, because we will be pushing out version 7.0 of Open Channels FM in January, and that will explain a bit more of some of the detailed changes and things we’ve done in this year. But most importantly, kind of what we’re looking at in 2026 now.

Next month, January, now 2025, first four months and leading up to the rebrand, I had something on my mind even before then, probably late 2024, started looking at our site, the structure, the content. And over time we have expanded, not only talking more about WordPress, which kind of is a given, WooCommerce and WordPress. And we started talking about other things, the open web, more around open source, some of the emerging tech that’s coming out. And we added just a bit more and more along the way. Also, there was this. Well, something kind of stuck in my mind that, yeah, at the beginning, hey, you know, go to do the woo. Woo commerce. Well, with all that expansion, I started to feel like maybe people didn’t know what we do beyond just WooCommerce.

And since we were moving more and more into other areas, I thought, well, you know, did people really understand do the woo? I mean, if I’m trying to attract people for WooCommerce that use WooCommerce, yeah, do the woo makes sense. But for anybody else, they may just wonder. So I made the decision with some feedback from a few close friends and colleagues. I chatted about this with and our hosts and I started work on it in oh, I’d say end of April, mid to end of April. And we were going to shoot for an official release of the rebranding and version 6.0 on June 6, the first day of WordCamp Europe in Basel, Switzerland.

At that time, this is what happened. Just to give you an idea, we obviously changed the site name. We changed it from do the Woo to Open Channels FM at that time. When we launched that version in June, we decided to go with five channels. And this was all part of the rebrand. We were going to have do the Woo, WP Voices, Content Sparks, Open web Conversations and Open Source Reach. Now, under each one of those, okay, hang with me or I don’t want to lose you. Under each one of those, we had three to five shows and I’m not going to go through that whole list because they’re not there anymore or the new structure doesn’t reflect those, so why put you through that? But we thought that was a great structure.

At Word Camp Europe, we had a lot of feedback. People loved it, loved the idea of what we were doing and where we were going. Now this whole rebrand thing that took place over about a month and a half was major stuff. I had to do a lot of changing of images, episode images, podcast images, blog post images to reflect the new brand. Cause I didn’t want anybody to even get more confused, you know, go in, see old archives that do the Woo and stuff. So spent a lot of time, day in and day out to get it ready. And then when we launched, as I mentioned afterwards, I continued to work on the site because there were still things I wanted to do in there and take care of a few things with the structure and bits and pieces and some of the other stuff I might tell you about in the next episode.

But what I realized, and this is something I’ve talked about on the podcast before, pre rebranding is nothing like what you can expect with post rebranding. All the things that really come to you because you really think all this stuff through. And I’d thought it through for quite a long time and I felt I had it spot on. Well, as I started to work on this structures of the site, the five channels and then the several, several shows underneath, it wasn’t clicking as well. I thought, oh my. And I was getting lost in a way, trying to be the person that would land on the site and things weren’t fitting nice and tidy. And so guess what, started rethinking what we had done up to June and how could we make this site even better.

Well, I’ve talked about this a little bit off and on. I’m not going to get into every detail because I could be here quite some time, but I realized that these shows underneath the channels were too much. Trying to find something and not really being able to wrap your brain around it. Bit of a rabbit hole, I will admit. So with that, I thought, hmm, I think I need to post rebrand. Rebrand. I don’t even know if that’s a word. But essentially I knew I needed to do something different. So I talked with some more people. We kind of laid out some ideas, had some really good friends in the WordPress space that helped me think this through. And I realized that, you know, I’ve always been for simple, and I wanted to do that with this site.

So here we are, Open Channels fm, the new rebrand change from do the Woo. We’re going to keep it Open Channels fm. But in the end, without going through all the thoughts I had, I decided I’m going to have two channels. I’m going to have Open Web Conversations and Open Makers. And everything would fall underneath those two. There would be several different hosts doing things. Some of the shows have since, over these past 12 months, disappeared. Some of our hosts who have been with us for a while, just needed to step back. So we had to think about all this restructuring.

And that seemed to be it because, hey, you know, you go to Open Channels fm, you got Open Web Conversations is more the conversations around the Open web, general conversations about things. Open Makers. Is that about the makers? What they’re making, what they’re thinking of making, what they’re thinking, what others are making, what I’m not making. I don’t know. You get the sense. So those two seem to fit really well. So that ended up being another total rebrand, to make it simpler, because I’d found that sweet spot. And we’ve been looking at how we can sustain Open Channels fm. Been looking at a lot of things behind the scenes, and that’s what’s leading up to 7.0 in January.

Now, one other little thing kind of popped in here along the way. You know, you have this site called do the Woo. Do the Woo is always going to be part of it, but not as a name. I mean, we have this archive of I wish I would have looked before I recorded this of over 200, maybe closer to 300. I’m not sure. WooCommerce specific episodes. And we have been hanging on to the WooCommerce specific episodes with Katie, Keith and James Kemp, they were doing Woo product chat. Well, Katie came to me and James and they started talking a little bit about, hey, you know, what do you think about us reviving do the Woo as a podcast?

Now I’m somebody that doesn’t sit there and have to think about things a lot, or I guess I’m one of those persons that also has a gut feeling that a good amount of the time it’s always been good to go with my gut feeling. And it was like, wow, this could be cool. So we talked about some ideas back and forth and as you’ve learned in just recent episode, that they will be relaunching or reviving do the Woo as a podcast on its own site. It will still be under our umbrella, Open Channels FM. And yeah, dothewoo.com they have a lot of ideas. I would recommend listening to their teaser show that was done on the 16th of this month, December. Kind of get a feel more of where they’re going with it. But I’m pretty excited about it and how it’ll work structurally, just in case you’re now kind of confused.

So we have Open Channels FM now we have three channels. We have Open Makers, Open Web Conversations, and Do the Woo. They will be doing, at least in the beginning, of course I’ll keep prodding them to do more, but once a month, a live show. So we’re kind of bringing back in the video live stuff and, you know, who knows where that goes? But they’re going to be doing that live show, which is really cool. So as a result, that live show will be on a new do the Woo YouTube channel. And then the audio of that will actually be pushed out through the Open Channels FM feed.

And in January on the 14th, they’re kicking it off their first official show. The one they did this month was a teaser with many of you know him, WordPress co founder Matt Mullenweg. And they’re going to be talking about the future of WooCommerce. So that ought to be a good one. Perfect way to kick it off. So you can go to dothewoo.com get the links you need, subscribe to be notified, subscribe to the podcast, all that good stuff. So that is it.

So let me do it in a nutshell. We moved into 2025 with do the Woo as we’d been doing, and over that time we changed the brown of the site to Open Channels FM to reflect more of what we’re doing and what we will be doing. We created a bunch of channels and shows, decided to simplify from there and now we are at Open Channel FM with the three channels, Open Makers, Open Web Conversations and Do the Woo. I know I said that, but tried to put that in a little bit of simpler context.

So that was the pathway of 2025. It’s been amazing. We’ve had a lot of hosts that have helped us get here. Many of them been around long time. Some came in for a series for a while. It’s been great and I appreciate them all so much. And then moving into 2026, the ones that will be carrying on in the new year, not carrying on, you know, like personally or anything, they will carry on hosting with Open Channels fm. Also, I’d like to, you know, hang around here a bit.

I’d like to thank our three current sponsors. Omnisend.com, i’ll be telling you a little bit more about what they’re doing in January, so keep an eye on this. Woocommerce.com They’ve been a supporter for quite some time and I think they’re probably maybe I’m hoping they’re as excited as the rest of us about the new do the Woo site. And GoDaddy.com, a longtime supporter of our site, appreciate what they’re doing. They’re getting into their AI with Arrow over there and it’s pretty amazing stuff. So love the people GoDaddy, love the products they put out. So do check them out. You can always find out more information, links and stuff on the website.

And that’s it. That is it for 2025. Been interesting personally and, and a lot of stuff has gone on over the Christmas. A lot of stuff continues to go on. But we appreciate everyone joining us. We do want to hear back from you on, you know, if there’s things you want to hear about in the open web space or specifically WooCommerce, WordPress. You know, there’s a lot of people out there we can talk to, a lot of stories to be told and we thank you so much for taking the time joining us when you can and as you can. So I’m sure from the hosting team they would feel the same way.

And for myself, I hope if you are celebrating the holidays, you’ve had a wonderful time. I’m hoping that you’ve had a good 2025. I’m not going to say super successful because hey, we’re all in business, we’re all trying to make a living. I just wish you the best in 2026. And, yeah, you’ll hear me again here soon in 2026. So until the next time, Happy New Year.