Today I’d like to share our long-term plans for ending updates and support for our older themes. On 31th Dec 2022 we will send some of the themes released between 2014 and 2016 into their well-deserved retirement.
Reasons for theme retirements
WordPress themes are also subject to a certain life cycle. Of course we have always kept our themes up to date with continuous updates, nevertheless parts of the codebase are outdated after a few years. New layout techniques like Flexbox and CSS Grid are now available and also WordPress Core has gone through many innovations in the last years. Six to eight years is simply a long time in web development.
The last time we discontinued a major part of our theme collection was in 2014. At that time there was a major break with Responsive Design and the Customizer and our old themes with static width (i.e. no mobile friendly layout for smartphones) and own options panel in the WordPress backend were not up to date anymore.
With the Gutenberg editor and the transition to block-based themes or full-site editing, we are also now facing a major upheaval. I expect that this transition will take a bit longer and we will have a few years of old PHP-based themes and block-based themes coexisting. I also hope that we can migrate our existing themes completely to the new system when the time comes.
Only I don’t like to do this for our older themes and also not for the complete product range of 28 themes. It just doesn’t make much sense to make an eight year old theme fit for full site editing. Therefore, we will discontinue our very old themes in the course of the next few years.
End of sale as of 31th Dec 2021
I don’t expect Full Site Editing to be fully available and mature as early as this year. For 2021, therefore, classic PHP-based themes will continue to be the standard and will be maintained, updated and sold by us as normal.
Then, on 31th December of this year, we will stop selling our Pro Add-ons for these themes to initiate the end of life cycle.
End of updates and support as of 31th Dec 2022
One year later we will stop updates and support for the themes and the Pro add-ons.
A mistake in the past was that we announced the retirement much too late and rightly upset many customers. That’s why the current announcement comes so early, so that all users can prepare for the end of support and have two years to switch to a newer theme.
Affected themes
We will retire these themes:
- Admiral
- Anderson
- Beetle
- Courage
- Dynamic News
- Glades
- Leeway
- Merlin
- Momentous
- Pocono
- Rubine
- Smartline
- WorldStar
- zeeDynamic
With Dynamic News, Smartline or Leeway there are also very popular themes among them. I can imagine that we recycle these designs and publish them as a new edition in the form of a block-based theme.