Entrance and exit strategies

[runebrink]

Hello

I am in love with Laytheme, theres nothing like it and i would never consider using any other theme these days than Lay. I recommend it for all my friends, and i use it for all the websites i make for clients...

BUT, some of my client projects are large projects, with contracts and terms that goes beyond what Laytheme offers in security for the future right now...

Being based on its own custom content types (or whatever :) and me being a designer at not a programmer, leave me with some kind of insecurity when considering Laytheme for larger client projects.

Ive seen smaller theme developers disappear before, leaving me with obsolete themes having to go trough a redesign or theme change. BUT what do i tell the client about what would happend to all their content if Laytheme shuts down? Changing to another theme leaves the site blank and i have no other option than building a backup of all the texts somewhere else, for me to be able to reconstruct the site in a possible lay-less future.

The same goes for clients who want me take over their existing WP sites, to build them as cool as Lay can do, but i have to copy paste all the text content into new text fields, and this is a large task with larger websites.

A future dream would be a laytheme that supports previous content made with standard text editor, and a way of re-using the content made with laytheme when switching to another theme...

I hope Laytheme will always be here, and i wish i could make all my projects from scratch but is there any way this could be done?

Sorry about this long rant, but its a re-occuring concern on my different projects..,

And thanks for all the work, without you i would "only" be a designer :)

Best Rune

[edgrbnz]

Well…

As far as I know Armin and the team are considering (or already working at) a PHP based version of Laytheme. That version should support all the standard inputs wordpress offers.

On the other hand: if the theme won’t get supported anymore in the future – which I also hope to never happen – it won’t just vanish. It might be that some features get broken with wordpress updates but it will surely work for a good amount of years.

And to be honest (speaking from my own experience) no website lasts longer that 5ish years in its current state since technologies change and a redesign is due after some time to stay fresh.

If there are really huge projects I won’t suggest to work with a theme / out of the box solution anyway.

For the big things a classic approach of building a team of information architects, user experience designers, graphic designers and developers would be the best and most sustainable way to go.

---

And there also is the LayGridder which basically is the core of LayTheme so you could built a custom Wordpress theme with LayTheme’s layout funtions.

Lay Lay Lay …

[mariusjopen]

Dear @runebrink
we are happy that you like LayTheme. If one day we will stop to update LayTheme, you can always use the lastest version with a Wordpress which does not update.
But we do not plan to stop. The opposite :-D

If you want to be super sure for big projects, we recommend to code your websites from scratch. But even that is not for eternity.

What @edgrbnz is quite right. Heads up!

Best!

Marius