Deprecating themes, club price changes & the way forward

It’s been around four years since we released our first theme and since then we’ve covered pretty much every niche with a WordPress theme. Change happens and several really good things have happened in the WordPress community. Its about time we embrace this new, exciting wave and leave out the old one.

Adopting change is never a smooth sail and we need to make some hard decision which some of you might not like. With that said, we firmly believe this is a crucial and necessary step in the long run. Here’s some of those decisions.

Having lots of themes in our store is certainly a good thing for you guys, the customers. It’s also good for us since it provides a great incentive for joining our Theme Club. However, maintaining & upgrading all these 60+ themes is not easy. It becomes a big barrier when we wish to introduce new changes and bring in some awesome features.

So, from August 15th, 2012, the following themes will be discontinued from our store and member area.

Academy
Article Directory
Consultant
Destination
Enterprise
eProduct
Gourmet
Grace
Hello Magazine
iBusiness
InspiredBits
iProduct
Magazine
MagFolio
Mini Magazine
Mini Magazine – Dark
Mr. & Mrs.
Musician (ecommerce)
NewsFlash
NewsTime
Photocraft
Plus One
ProductFolio
Productz
Reinvent
Restaurant
Snippet
StoreFront (ecommerce)
WikiBase
WPLocator

If you own one of these themes please note that:

• No new feature upgrades will be released for any of these themes
• Small, patch updates (in case of an issue) will be released until December 31st, 2012. After that no updates (no matter the issue) will be provided
• Theme support will be provided for every user until the end of his/her 1-year license
• There is no limit on just using the theme. Feel free to use it even after your license expires

You likely noticed that new theme releases have slowed down in the last few months. That’s because during this period lots of new things have happened and the amount of work each theme requires is a lot more substantial than earlier. Also, portfolio themes do not “work” for us anymore and we wish to create more complex and unique products in the future. In short, this means that we don’t know exactly how much time the new upcoming products will take and simply can’t commit to releasing one theme per month.

To make it up for club members, monthly renewal price is reduced from $15 to $9, beginning today.

While this is a setback, it will allow us to bring important upgrades to existing products while creating new, unique products the way it should be created.

Unfortunately, this renewal price change can’t be done automatically. If you are an existing club member here’s a guide on how to enable the new renew price:
http://templatic.com/theme-support/changing-the-membership-renewal-price

Over the last four years our team has grown to a considerable number. What started as a 3 person team is now a full blow company with 20 people working full time, focused 100% on Templatic growth plan. 18 of our team members work from 2 offices in India while Vedran and Russell work from Croatia and USA. While we could write several blog posts about the team and how it’s all coming together all you should know is that Templatic is stronger than ever with a clear plan on how to make it even better!

As described earlier in this post, our plan is simple. Upgrade existing products and create new, meaningful and unique products. Version 2 of Events theme is coming up next week and some new products are coming then after.

While this can be considered a setback, we are taking few steps backwards to take a giant leap forward. Since these changes are two weeks away feel free to use the comments below to talk about these changes, we’re always open for discussion.

What do you think? :)