Old unsupported themes - your thoughts!

#1

I have a number of sites using pretty old 3rd party themes that to the best of my knowledge are no longer updated / supported. I’d like to persuade some of my clients to part with a little cash to get them onto a modern framework, but what is the likelihood of an old theme ‘breaking’ some functionality, and what would be the main causes? Clearly, Having a dozen broken sites that need rapid fixing would not be great!

The only theme I can personally recall breaking was actually pretty new - Depth (just after Nick Cates departed) - where the scrolling parallax effect completely broke on Safari due to a Javascript library issue - kindly fixed by Joe Workman.

The old themes I still have in place include some from BLT, Michael David and Henk Vrieselaar (I am aware the Will Woodgate supports some of Henk’s old themes) . Still holding up well at the moment but …

#2

For example old jquery cdn links (or other assets) not available any more in future.

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#3

I recommend deleting all old themes and using only those that are truly supported over time.
BTW, My templates are constantly updated.
Themes must always be up to date to be used. many developers have abandoned support and this leads to distrust of customers.

Nick Cates was one of the most popular developers in RapidWeaver history. Today all Nick Cates Design products are unsupported and this is detrimental to the whole community.
The quality must be guaranteed over time, otherwise the products are not really professional but just a showcase.

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#4

Besides the themes bought by RM and the stacks now supported by Joe Workman.

#5

my apologies, even to @joeworkman , the problem still affects all the products managed by other developers that do not offer updates.
The new versions of RW and StackApp will help renew the addons as well. Then you will see which developers offer continuity for customers.

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#6

I’m not sure I really get this support issue. The web doesn’t really change that much, and there is plenty of support for legacy technologies (the fact that people are still building fallbacks for IE is itself cause for wonder, given that Microsoft launched Edge seven years ago!)

But why can’t the community do more to support these orphaned products? The code in themes and stacks (until recently, anyway) is not compiled. Anyone can open them up and tinker about with the contents (I do it all the time, but then again I was one of those annoying MacUsers who was slashing stuff open with ResEdit back in 1988). Devs stop supporting products mostly because there is no more money in RW/Stacks for them, and they need to focus on something else that pays the bills. But if the products do break, the code can most likely be fixed — it’s just that there is nobody there to do it.

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