Newspaper 10 – the useless update

I understand that updating a theme can be difficult, but should it necessitate rebuilding the website?

We used your theme and page builder in confidence that moving forward TagDiv would continue to support those tools. We complained about speed, but were told that it was just us. We used the tools you provided, which you apparently now want us to stop using.

Now we (and many others) are faced with the following (and please correct me if I am wrong):
1) If we have used TagDiv Composer to build our site, we will have to rebuild any pages, headers or templates under the new theme because the short codes are put right into the text. For many, that is essentially rebuilding their entire website!
2) If we do not want to see all of the TadDiv short codes from Composer, we must use the Standard Plugin, which essentially returns the site to 9.8 compatibility and the same old CPU/speed problems.
3) I cannot see (and I have looked) how upgrading to 10 from 9.8 would benefit someone currently using your theme? There is no comparison on your website to show the benefits of the upgrade.There is nothing to recommend updating except the dubious honor of rebuilding your website.
Are there major security patches?
Is it needed for 5.3 compatibility?
Will 9.8 continue to receive security/other patches?
4) TagDiv Newspaper 9 is not a fast theme, there is unneeded JS running creating CPU cycles where there doesn’t need to be. The code just isn’t clean. This may be due to legacy code but I’ve had conversations with TagDiv before this related to speed and was always assured that the theme was fast, it was just my site was slower. Now I will quote the truth from your website:

Deactivate Standard Pack for blazing fast-websites. To gain page loading speed for your website, you’ll need to deactivate the Standard Pack plugin. This step will separate the templates (pages, singles, headers, footer) you’ve created or imported from the tagDiv Cloud Library from the ones built inside the Newspaper theme panel. All of the default templates from the theme and some of the elements from the tagDiv Composer will be disabled by deactivating the Standard Pack.

5) So, by running the standard pack we are negating any reason to update. The 9 theme was causing websites to be slower and by deactivating all of those features you spent so much time creating and selling to us in 9, we essentially slowed our sites down. The solution? Upgrade to 10 and turn off the Standard Pack Plugin. Which brings up the following…
4) Deactivating the Standard Pack plugin will cause any site that has modified any part of the Newspaper theme using the TagDiv Composer to show up as short codes and break the site completely.
I will again quote from your site:

For example, your website uses one of the default headers from the theme panel, and you deactivate the Standard Pack, your header will be displayed as a series of text and symbols on the frontend.

Guys, you screwed up. It’s pretty obvious to those of us who used your theme and if you can’t see it then that’s on you, and your inability to remain customer focused and customer centric.
• In 9 you introduced a bunch of cool toys, showed us how to use them and set us loose.
• These toys introduced a bunch of extra code that slowly but surely slowed our sites and caused excessive CPU cycles on our servers. (for those of us who pay for SPU usage, this not only slows our sites but eats into our pocketbooks)
• In 10 you back tracked and told us to turn OFF the cool toys you gave us to make the site run faster. Ah, but if you do that then your site will break, affording you the “opportunity” to rebuild your site.

Unless you can be upfront with us and admit you made a mistake and are now trying to fix it the reasons to continue using Newspaper become nearly non-existent.

(and yes, to all of you out there who know “all of the things”, these conclusions were discovered using a test site which has been wiped and copied several times to come to the place we are today)
I’m an independent and my time is money. I can’t charge my clients for upgrading their websites can I now? When the recommendation to go with one of the most popular themes in use came from me?

As a test, I’m going to delete Newspaper and scrub it’s existence from one site. Then install a flexible, fast page-builder friendly theme and rebuild that client’s website to see what the difference is and how long it takes. I’m going to guess between 30 – 40 hours of my time. I guess we’ll see what the end result is…

Where do I send the bill? (rhetorical question I know)

Hi imkimc, please let us know what the difference between Newspaper and your alternative theme / plugin set is. I am also thinking about switching theme as I am very unhappy with the last 1-2 major releases here. I am still fighting with tagdiv composer (no, it’s not that intuitiv as you think!) and now the next update is already here.

I have the same problem. My website is slower, even if I deactivate the standard pack plugin.

Thanks for the original post. I’ve been holding off doing the upgrade to 10, because I was fearful of the very things you note.

Version 9 is working well for us, and the speed is not too bad. (But, we didn’t use a lot of the cloud templates or other goodies.)

I REALLY don’t want to leave the Newspaper theme; we have put a lot of work into our site, and since I do all the tech work, I get horrified thinking of the work it would take to change. But, at some point, version 9 will reach EOL, and we’ll have to do something.

• This reply was modified 6 years by BruceInLouisville.

Hi there. Upon update I can’t seem to update the TagDivi Composer plugin. It keeps failing! Which is now making my site look like a mess. Any ideas?

Guys,
some essential questions were asked and you should answer as soon as possible. Step by step. We deserve to know how it works and if imkimc has right.

So when I updated my clients to v10 and activated the Standard Pack plugin, I did not notice anything beneficial about the update. The site still sucking down extra CPU cycles via AJAX commands, many of which seem to be some interaction with Advanced Ads (which can be CPU heavy in itself). CPU is the single largest expense per month for my clients. And before they had a ssytem that could handle the CPU load of Newspaper, was the single largest point of failure during high load periods. Constant 404 and 503 errors and very slow page performance when there wasn’t an error (I’m talking 13-20 second load times for a page that loads in 3.5 seconds normally)

And yes I know that TagDiv has no control over Advanced Ads, but that plugin does not exhibit this behavior with other simpler “builder themes. I can’t pin the issue on TagDiv, but I can say that there is an interaction between the theme and the plugin that negatively affects server performance.

I know that some people wondered how I was getting along with my site redesign… I decided to use a “builder” theme and a different page builder (which I purchased out of my funds without charging my client for it). It’s not 100% yet and it’s taking more time than I initially thought it would. I keep finding little bits of Newspaper code is still lingering.

So here’s my advice, the only reasons I can think of for upgrading to 10 are:
• a critical security fix
(if this exists, TagDiv has not publicly released the vulnerability)
• a WP upgrade that breaks Newspaper 9, which is a likely at some point.

If either of those events occur, then you my recommendation would be to rebuild your site. If you stick with Newspaper at that point or not is a decision for each site owner/developer to answer. Also, always test on a staging site, never live.

My clients just want a little peace and quiet for a while. I know they’d like to have faster, slimmer sites. But for now, they had to go with a high end, reliably fast hosting provider. Do they want an even faster site that uses less CPU, sure, but that requires them to pay me to rebuild/re-develop their site and comes with all of the risks of new problems. (CPU costs alone are $300 – $500 USD/month for one of my clients)

And to be clear, THAT is my biggest disappointment here. TagDiv took code that they appear to have stopped development on and stuck it into a plugin that v9 sites must use if they upgrade.

Evidence that the Standard Pack plugin is ONLY required for compatibility with v9 sites that use the TagDiv page builder
AND
the same problems that existed in v9 are present in v10 with the Standard Pack
AND
the Standard Pack hasn’t been upgraded since it was released.

That’s just not a business practice that I can recommend or support in any way. I don’t think they are evil, I just think they got in over their heads with their code and are trying to find a way out. But in the process they are doing a disservice to their clients that bought into their page builder.

Lesson learned: Do not rely on your theme builder to supply a page builder and custom code. Just get the best dang page builder you can find and then choose a theme that it works well with and doesn’t try to get too fancy. There are a number of other coders out there who supply good plugins that do what the Standard Pack does who will continue to support their work.

I guess if you’re looking for a ready made solution you can just switch out colors and images, then a theme like Newspaper is fine.

I have moved on.

Thanks for the long and detailed reply.

I have a question for you or for anyone else who knows: when the documentation says to use the cloud templates instead of the built-in ones, are we still not dependent on tagdiv in the future? In other words, if we use the v9 templates or the v10 cloud templates, aren’t we will going to just see shortcodes if we move to another theme?

I’ve become more and more leery of “shortcode hell” from changing themes, plugins, and so on. Some of it can’t be helped; I understand that. But, with a site with over 2,000 posts and publishing 10-20 new articles a day, going back and fixing shortcodes is not on my short list of Fun Things to Do.

Hi Calin,
You said:

…if you rebuild your website only with cloud templates then you can deactivate the standard package, then you should be able to see an improvement…

This is precisely the problem we are talking about here. We have to rebuild our sites to get the speed improvements from v10.

There should have been a automated way to migrate from using the v9 templates and the standard pack plugin to using the new v10 cloud templates designed into the upgrade process.

The burden of moving away from the slow v9 code has been transferred onto your customers. It would have been better if the slow code from v9 was fixed instead of being shoved into a plugin and forgotten.

TagDiv has posted the migration process in this blog post for those interested to read it. It clearly shows the elements affected and describes the labor intensive process to migrate from a site that relies on the standard pack.

This is a problem for me as well… the worst part is i am on a PAY AS YOU GO PLAN and they CHARGE for CPU, RAM which newspaper is increasing on daily basis.

Thanks guys.

Still didn’t get an answer to my two questions above:

1. If we move to all cloud templates, are we still not dependent on tagdiv? The templates use their own shortcodes, correct? They don’t actually implement HTML that will remain if we change themes, right?

2. Imkinc, what was the difference in the test you ran?

I have installed v. 10 on a staging site, and began looking at the work to remove all the v. 9 pieces. It’s not horrible, but it’s a bunch of work, and I’m not sure I want to take it on. If I’m going to do that anyway, perhaps I need to look at another theme. Ugh.

Hi BruceInLouisville

I have held back developing my website any further due to the difficulties in the updates. I am on v 9.7.4, so a few updates behind – I thought I would hang back a bit from updating the theme until the bugs were fixed. I was drawn to the Newspaper theme for the simple reason that I am not a developer/designer but a mere novice with a reasonable amount of knowledge of WordPress themes, a willingness to learn a bit more and a budget which only extends to paying someone to do a fair amount of technical work behind the scenes and SEO. I really like the Newspaper theme but the person who does the updating has also suggested I move to a different theme, one which isn’t perhaps as complicated to maintain.

Good luck with whatever you decide to do!