Retiring the theme collection
Today I am retiring all of my themes and will no longer be selling them. I will continue to provide my plugins and sell all the same addons.
If you have previously purchased one of my themes, your theme will continue to work. Your license has been extended indefinitely and you will be able to access any future updates to the themes from the Customer Account area.
Why are the themes being retired?
WordPress 5.0 will be released today with Gutenberg, a brand new editor for writing content and building landing pages.
Gutenberg has a lot to offer WordPress websites. I believe it will make things better for the majority of my customers. Most of them are web or digital marketing professionals who build lots of websites for clients.
Usually, they must learn a new way of doing things for each theme they buy, which leads to frustration and uncertainty both in buying the themes and actually using them.
In time, I hope that Gutenberg will provide a more consistent way for themes to provide rich layout options. If that happens, the WordPress community will be able to work faster, with more confidence, producing better websites.
I have always tried to build products that are as easy to use as possible. I invested heavily in the Customizer, WordPress’s live editing interface, to give customers an easy, fail-proof way to build a great homepage with my themes.
With Gutenberg, WordPress is building a first-class live editing experience that is entirely independent of the Customizer. Over time, products that don’t integrate tightly with Gutenberg will seem outdated, clunky, and confusing — exactly what I have sought to avoid in my own themes.
Why not just update the themes for Gutenberg?
To be frank, I never got my footing in the market for WordPress themes. I put a great deal of time into providing an end-to-end experience for restaurants. But I don’t think my values ever aligned with what the majority of customers in the theme market wanted to buy.
Today, themes are a small fraction of my sales. Financially, I can’t justify the effort it would take to convert the layout and design management tools I built over to Gutenberg.
Should I change themes?
No. My themes will continue to work as they always have without any problems after WordPress 5.0 is released. I will continue to address any significant compatibility issues that arise.
You will notice, however, that many of the rich layout options provided by Gutenberg will not display as nicely as they should. That’s because my themes were not designed with these components in mind, and I won’t be updating them with new styles.
If you are using my Luigi or Augustan themes, you will notice that you can now edit the homepage directly by going to Pages and editing the homepage. You can do this, but if you want to take advantage of the theme’s homepage layout tools, you should leave this screen alone.
Instead, go to the Customizer > Homepage Editor interface you’ve always used to edit the homepage content.
Otherwise, the themes should continue to work as you are used to, and as is described in the user guides.
What about the plugins?
I will continue to maintain and improve my reservations, menus and SEO plugins. I hope to improve their integration with Gutenberg and plan to continue supporting them for years to come.
