Sounds interesting and promising, I just hope it doesn't fall into the WP pricing trap that I have seen becoming the norm lately. The extreme case was this theme I downloaded for free, but later found out that in order to make all functionality work as I've seen in the demo, I would have to subscribe to an X number of paid plugins, something around a thousand dollars per year. This has nothing to do with the WP mentality from years ago.
Veteran of WordPress here: Pretty much every theme on Envato Marketplace comes bundled with plugins that at some point will create a licensing nightmare. It's been this way for years, and is not a recent development. The problem is in order to "bundle" these premium plugins (think Slider Revolution) the theme authors often devise their own propriety update mechanism that after a few years becomes...wonky at best. Separate licensing that relies on "native" update processes would actually be ideal.
The process goes like this:
1. Login to update plugins.
2. Some plugins don't auto update because they require licenses.
3. Search for the theme's proprietary update process or plugin.
4. Discover that the Envato support license is expired.
5. Renew license (typically 6 months).
6. Update plugins again and... pray that it works because support is always a gamble.
We stay away from Envato and the like if we can, but inevitably we acquire clients with themes purchased this way.
hey now, when using terms like 'Slider Revolution' always remember to include a trigger warning to avoid sending all the salty wordpress webdevs into fits of insurmountable rage
I hear you, just yesterday I was telling someone in my office how that plugin just gives me the sweats. I can stumble around sure but woah is that UI a beast. Very capable but not for the faint of heart.
Yes, I began to work with Envato back in 2008 and saw this licensing tsunami coming. I have canceled my subscription with them last November. I couldn't find a single theme without Elementor bundled up. I feel sorry for those many unadvised people who actually bought the theme to later had to open the wallet again to pay Elementor for a subscription.
I made a website for a small non profit I'm a member of recently, wordpress seemed like the natural fit but wading through the hive of scum and freemium that is wordpress plugins made me feel dirty.
With all the awesome open source self hosted apps these days I'm surprised there's nothing better for generic websites.
I'm working on a WordPress site for a test campaign right now, and pretty much came to the conclusion that most themes/plugins send me down two rabbit holes: 1) Licensing / security issues 2) Getting them beyond 80% of what I need.
Ended up using only a single third party plugin (Polylang), and doing the other stuff we need in a custom theme based on Automattic's (possibly a bit unmaintained) _s base theme.
Feels like a good decision, only took me about a day more to fiddle with the CSS to make things look right and write a bit of PHP code for some functional requirements we had. Seems way more economical than dealing with a soup of plugins and some shady theme. Since you can nowadays just create custom blocks for all the site elements, it's a pretty OK development experience.
But I also can't quite believe this is the state of the art... I use static site generators whenever I can, but for a bit more dynamic websites, it seems WordPress is one of the best out of what seems like only bad options.
Also an interesting case: Automattic seems like a company that's set up to resist enshittification. But all those theme and plugin authors with profit motives are not, which has about the same effect as if Automattic was ruining the platform for short term profits.
Same experience, i’d go for static any time i get the chance but needed something easier to edit for non techies for a non profit’s site. Ended up going with squarespace because I was so over wordpress licensing issues and plugin bloat. Now squarespace has its own frustrations like their terrible events calendar but at least the budget is under control.
> Also an interesting case: Automattic seems like a company that's set up to resist enshittification. But all those theme and plugin authors with profit motives are not, which has about the same effect as if Automattic was ruining the platform for short term profits.
What??!? Automattic took VC money. Not those small time plugin and theme authors who are trying to make a living by doing open source. When those smaller plugin and theme authors want to exit the business, they sell their businesses to people who are inside the WP space instead of investment funds or VCs. They keep things inside the ecosystem.
Whereas the 'not enshittifying' Automattic is trying to get money out of its entire ecosystem by doing a lot of shady things - from flooding google with plugin listing links that go to wordpress.com instead of wordpress.org so that those who want to use plugins will have to buy the $300/year Automattic hosting plan instead of being able to download the plugin from wordpress.org and use it at a $5 dollar hosting that they could get from anywhere. All the Automattic plugins are full of popups for upsells and upsold features too.
Its amazing how people have a lot of grand-standing opinions without accompanying levels of information.
That hive of scum and freemium makes those plugins keep existing. Like in the rest of open source world, anything that cannot fund itself eventually disappears. You install a free plugin, it works great and you are happy - for a few years. Then one day you find out that the maintainer cant continue maintaining the plugin anymore because of work/personal life getting busy, and voila - you have to find another plugin again.
Its much better to have that 'hive of scum and freemium' and pay some money to those plugins than having to look for another plugin to build your site on every few years.
But there is no guarantee that the person will not outgrow, need, or want some other plugin later. Just because somebody paid for something, doesn't mean it will be continually useful.
Well, it doesnt work like that in reality. The reality is that people scarcely shell out money for premium plugins, and that is only after using their free version enough time and then needing things from the paid version. So the freemium format keeps working.
