Hi,
after nearly one year, the time has come, where I have to decide if I update from Newspaper 5 to Newspaper 7 or just get out of this whole thing.
Just a few points about the past:
– I just had my site three months running with a lot of work from my programmer, when the big update came to version 7. As it would have been again lots of programming work, we decided not to update.
– You, the programmers of this theme, promised me and others, that there will be security updates and we could use version 5 further on. There was no security update, no help when Visual Composer had to be updated because of security problems and now the final point is reached with the need to update to WordPress 4.5.
When we looked into the version 7 on a test server, we found out that many things have changed. Also some small things, that will cost a lot of time to fix. So why did you change the numbering of existing blocks and modules? Now everything is shown in a wrong way, even if the blocks and modules still exist to select (but with another number). Why did you change the font and deleted the old font? Lots of things we don’t understand. And on top of it all, we still don’t understand, why such a big update was needed, as WordPress didn’t change much. Could you please tell us?
So as you are building up your own pagebuilder, the next big problem seems to be around the corner. When will it be implemented instead of Visual Composer? Maybe you can understand that I can’t afford to pay for the work of my programmer every year to get right what you changed. And I also can’t spend time every year to implement the changes on existing pages and archives.
So you would help me a lot, if you could say something definite on your further plans!
Thanks
Mario
Hello Mario,
Unfortunately if you customize the theme it will be harder and harder to keep your customization if you require updates and this will always be the case. There is no way of changing the theme code and make it update proof. We have to keep up with current technologies and have to update our theme as much as we can to keep up in an ever changing environment. Our advice is to try using as little customization as possible and try to use the options provided by the theme so you can update your product without having to pay a programmer to adjust the code every time you update. Unfortunately there is no answer for all the ‘WHY’ questions. They were decisions made by the development team that had to be taken. We are sorry for the inconvenience caused by these decisions.
As for the new page builder, it is still in development and we cannot say for sure when and if it will replace visual composer. They will both work in parallel for some time as they are compatible with one another.
Our future plans are to update the theme as much as possible and keep up with current tech. We plan on implementing our own page builder but at the moment there is no plan to ‘ditch’ visual composer.
Thank you!
Bogdan B
