Sunsetting Warp 7 Themes
Happy New Year, everyone! We hope you enjoyed the holidays and had a good start into 2021. Today, with a smile and a heavy heart we are sunsetting our Warp 7 themes. The Warp 7 framework was released back in 2013. Built with UIkit 2, it was a huge success from the very beginning and quickly got a lot of excited users. However, 7 years are light years in the tech world, and after the release of UIkit 3 and YOOtheme Pro, Warp 7 themes stayed behind on many levels. Since most of our customers already made a transition from Warp to YOOtheme Pro, we have decided to move forward. For those of you who are still using a Warp 7 theme, now is the time to switch to YOOtheme Pro. You will benefit from the update on so many levels. Here's what you can look forward to.
Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and join our Discord Chat Server for all news and discussions.
A Theme That Never Gets Old
Warp themes are stand-alone themes which just share the Warp PHP framework. Many front-end features like JavaScript effects were included in the theme itself and were not available in all Warp themes. Even worse, those features got rarely updated after the release, and the sites using them are now stuck with outdated JavaScript. All this is solved with YOOtheme Pro which is not just a framework, but a complex software including a theme, a page builder and so much more. It's a single product which gets regular updates and never gets old.
More Feature Updates
Speaking of updates, Warp never got any feature releases, and it was impossible to update to a new major version. For example, to update from Warp 6 to Warp 7, you were forced to start from scratch. YOOtheme Pro, on the other hand, gets new features every 2 months. Each feature release includes tons of new functionalities and gives you new possibilities to build websites. You can even update to major versions with just a click. For example, last year we introduced the much anticipated YOOtheme Pro 2.0 with the dynamic content feature, and every YOOtheme Pro website, no matter how old, could benefit from the new features.
Better Theme Releases
We had 12 stand-alone Warp theme releases per year. Each theme mostly had just one simple layout for the home page, 6 styles and a few images, which were available for just the specific Warp theme. YOOtheme Pro instead has theme package releases. They consist of up to 12 page layouts, 6 styles and hundreds of free to use images – all shown in a dedicated demo website. Last year YOOtheme Pro had 6 theme package releases and around 110 page layouts, which is huge compared to 12 single Warp layouts. The best part is, the layouts, styles and images are available through a dedicated library in every YOOtheme Pro website. This means if you start with a YOOtheme Pro website today, you can choose between 335 page layouts, 205 styles and thousands of free-to-use images. This blows Warp's socks off.
Additionally, we really care about the quality of these libraries and therefore put a lot of work into maintaining and improving existing layouts and styles. For example, we just reworked about 260 existing page and footer layouts to make use of the latest YOOtheme Pro features.
Built With UIkit 3
Warp themes are built on UIkit 2 which is as old as Warp itself. YOOtheme Pro is built with UIkit 3 and makes use of all its features. It's much lighter than UIkit 2, for example, the JQuery dependency got removed, and its JavaScripts are in average 25% smaller which makes your site faster. At the same time, the JavaScripts got greatly improved, for example, supporting touch and swipe navigation. You can literally catch an animation with your fingertips, and it even accelerates to keep up with your pace. There is so much more like improved accessibility, keyboard navigation and lazy-loading images. One blog post would not be enough to describe all the UIkit 3 features.
Is the page builder evil? 😈
We know there is some bias against page builders. But rest assured, YOOtheme Pro is different. It doesn't work like a common WYSIWYG editor. Instead, it evaluates and applies settings by using templates. It doesn't save any page builder markup nor shortcodes into the article, just the content. This means we can update every layout built with YOOtheme Pro any time with no hassle, for example for future markup updates. Additionally, this makes it possible to discontinue using YOOtheme Pro any time without loosing any content. So if you are using YOOtheme Pro, you are not making a life-long commitment, you are still free in your theme choice, and not "locked in".
What do others say?
YOOtheme Pro has been on the market for 4 years now, and while it started with a small feature set, it developed to be an unbelievably powerful website builder. With the release of 2.0 the scope of YOOtheme Pro changed fundamentally. You can now load dynamic content into your layouts and create site-wide templates for Joomla, WordPress, ZOO and very soon even WooCommerce using the YOOtheme Pro builder. The 2.0 release turned out to be a real game-changer for the community which can be seen from the overwhelming feedback we received. And we say "Thank You" ❤️
Thriving Ecosystem
Last year the YOOtheme Pro ecosystem overtook the one from Warp, and it doesn't look like its pace is getting any slower. The number of 3rd-party extensions for YOOtheme Pro exploded as you can see on our extension page. There are form builders, content sources, builder elements, icon libraries and even e-commerce solutions for YOOtheme Pro. We can't wait to see what 3rd-party developers come up with next. There is also a big community of YOOtheme Pro enthusiasts on our Discord server discussing new stuff and helping each other every day.
Sunsetting Warp 7
For all the above reasons, we are sunsetting all Warp 7 themes. They won't be updated for Joomla 4, and they will no longer be maintained except for security patches (which never occurred before 🤞). We also removed them from the demo server, but they are still available for download just like Warp 6.
To make the switch to YOOtheme Pro as easy as possible, we've been working on the YOOtheme Pro documentation extensively. With over 200 documentation videos on YouTube and over 50K words it's the biggest documentation we've ever written.
So if you are still using a Warp theme, now is the time to update to YOOtheme Pro and get ready for Joomla 4.
Migration Tutorial
As promised, we have created a tutorial on how to migrate your Warp 7 site with Widgetkit to YOOtheme Pro.
pmarty
I worked so hard on so many website using Warp7 that I feel sad to read these lines.
But I must recognize working now with Yootheme Pro that YTP is a great a very flexible framework.
I encourage all those who have not yet taken the plunge to take the few hours needed to get the hang of it, they won't regret it. What power and elegance in the code.
Thanks to Yoothme Team for all their great job, I'm a fan!
mathias.popp
i have over 40 client sites with warp, because i am your client since over 10 years. so tell me please, what i can do? There are not all very old. When do you stop it? Do you have a migration?
david.henry
chris.rowe
Can you PLEASE do a tutorial on how to rebuild these sites using the new templates?
hanna
Also, see my comment below regarding the tutorial.
hanna
michele.jordan
hanna
hanna
But with this blog post we encourage you to:
- build new websites with YOOtheme Pro and not Warp,
- migrate your own site to YOOtheme Pro,
- and migrate important clients to YOOtheme Pro.
A tutorial is a good idea, but of course it's not that easy because every Warp theme was different, and YOOtheme Pro may not have the exact same design or the old JavaScript effects. But maybe for the basics... If this is required by many users, please let us know in the comments. In the meantime, we recommend to start a new small site with YOOtheme Pro to get to know it.
Check out the documentation, it's immense: https://yootheme.com/support/yootheme-pro/joomla/installation
There is even contextual help with documentation videos within YOOtheme Pro: https://yootheme.com/support/yootheme-pro/joomla/customizer#contextual-help
Additionally, grab a coffee and watch our documentation playlist, and you will be a YOOtheme Pro expert in about 2,5 hours.
Joomla Documentation Playlist
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrqT0WH0HPdPfykSwhMt6Jl2_RgJ6ixU-&index=1
WordPress Documentation Playlist
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrqT0WH0HPdM3qcWFqRRj_SOZ80ze0nKj
nacmweb
arthur.rosa
They need to go ahead, WARP is the past.
Embrace yootheme pro and be happy.
peterk
solutionz
Yootheme and Pro are the now and future.
Cheers.
hanna
We already supported Warp 7 longer than Warp 6, but at some point it's getting too old and everyone needs to move forward.
rick.borstein
hanna
Logo
https://yootheme.com/support/yootheme-pro/joomla/site-and-logo#logo
Menu
https://yootheme.com/support/yootheme-pro/joomla/menus
If you have coded custom HTML markup with UIkit 2 classes within your content, here is the migration guide to UIkit 3 https://getuikit.com/docs/migration#migration-from-uikit-2-to-3
hanna
Joomla Documentation Playlist
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrqT0WH0HPdPfykSwhMt6Jl2_RgJ6ixU-&index=1
WordPress Documentation Playlist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErVm26cL8mY&list=PLrqT0WH0HPdM3qcWFqRRj_SOZ80ze0nKj
dhphllps
akcreation
In Yootheme Pro, if you select the 'Uikit' template that is the equivalent of your old bare bones Master Template. I use the Uikit template on all my YP projects for the same reason and then build my sites (and custom templates) out from there
hanna
I recommend to grab a coffee ☕️ and watch our documentation playlist, and you will be a YOOtheme Pro expert in about 2,5 hours ?.
Joomla Documentation Playlist
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrqT0WH0HPdPfykSwhMt6Jl2_RgJ6ixU-&index=1
WordPress Documentation Playlist
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrqT0WH0HPdM3qcWFqRRj_SOZ80ze0nKj
totoweb
hanna
peterk
florianwachter
Just some thoughts about all that and about the last years
I am with yootheme for some years now and was pretty happy in the beginning with the warp things. The question ist: Why do i join a "Template club" - (we all know YT is more than just this - but let´s focus) - The answer is: It makes me more efficient and safes time for me and my work.
In the last months the theme release was absolutely poor. I know - we can build our own designs with ytp - and this ist totally great. BUT it needs TIME
The release of the builder is a milestone - and it is a fantastic tool i don´t want to miss. Thanks for that -
The release of dynamic data was fabolous - the themes following to this were - in my eyes - too much focused on dynamic data - and mostly the same.
Now we hear about the end of warp 7 - joomla 4 standing in front of the door. In My opinion you had the chance to do sth. epic and to migrate the old themes to ytp-builder. That would have been fantastic.
Let me reflect my feelings - In the world out there - i sell for 80% simple - good looking homepages for craftmen and little companies. I like the design and the look and feel of yootheme - and it made my life easier to use these - and of course this is what i pay for. And i like to pay for it.
In the last ... almost 18 month.... (June 18, 2019) i got 1 theme i really was impressed. That was Makai. Sure the others may be good and functional, but they did not meet my taste.
You had to work on the builder - great... we accept
You had to work on dynamic data - we accept
you had to work on GraphQL Scheme ( ni idea what does that for me) we took it
At least there was the Zoo thing -which i do not use ... ok-....
Now we are send in the next level, by kicking the warp7 themes...
I am not charging anyone, or anything - but please UNDERSTAND and See that there might be a wrong way for customers like i am one. All the fantastic things and hightech solutions may be cool - but they are not that great for me as they seem to be for you. I get less and less for my money - this is the feeling i have. Please do not forget us little basic users - i want to stay with yt - but the more difficulties, problems and work this causes - the less it is valuable for me.
Thanks for your Help and work.
ozelot
YTP layouts and styles are quite redundant and only clean.
The overview is slowly getting lost with increasingly similar output.
"In My opinion you had the chance to do sth. Epic and to migrate the old themes to ytp-builder. That would have been fantastic. ..."
Oh yeah! With dynamic eye-catchers like in Frequency, Inspire, vertical navigation like in Peak, typo effects like in Avanti, etc ... subtle & fine.
That was yootheme style!
hanna
The most wished feature back then was to use features across all Warp themes, which is exactly what we solved with YOOtheme Pro. Now any feature release is available across any YOOtheme Pro installation, no matter how old it is. This is also why we have to choose wisely which features and effects we are adding. They have to work perfectly with existing features, and we have to maintain them forever.
Also the web design trends change over the years, and they are now cleaner compared to the old Warp days. Additionally, the focus last year was on dynamic content and layouts which serve as perfect templates for blog and ecommerce shops. But we hear you, and we will have more diverse styles and layouts this year.
ozelot
rppeo.bhit
I'd love to see a theme developed that is setup for a Doctor/Dentist/Hospital. Medical professions.
Keep up the great work
donnie.l.rollins
hanna
mark.yetto
I am very disappointed as a long time customer personally and professionally. The support is simply not there, it never has been, but the magic of the older Warp framework was it simply worked with very little support needed. We had hoped that eventually the older templates would be "upgraded" to the new UIKit system and the older workflow incorporated in some way. R.I.P. Warp, and most likely our subscriptions with Yootheme.
In short, Warp + Widgetkit offered the ideal solution for building complex websites and that functionality is still not available with the new framework despite the recent updates. Sure if you want a website builder, that's all well and good, but Warp was a theme framework for developing websites and Yootheme Pro fails in that regard.
hanna
1. You can create a template with the page builder for pages, the blog or any other content in Joomla or WordPress and map the content into those templates, even using custom fields. This means your customers are not using the builder, and can still enter all their content natively by editing the Joomla article or WordPress post. So nothing will change for your customers. Even better, the content is perfectly templated by your layout and can even be updated by us for future UIkit versions.
2. We are sorry to hear this. We are really putting a lot of effort into the support and documentation for YOOtheme Pro. As written in the blog post, we have about 2,5 hours documentation videos for WordPress and Joomla each, showing all the YOOtheme Pro features in detail. This is an ongoing process, we are working on the documentation every day.
3. If you find Widgetkit ideal, you will love the YOOtheme Pro page builder. It works just like Widgetkit. They are both using templates to evaluate settings, but Widgetkit maybe only covered 5% of the page builder settings. This means with YOOtheme Pro you can build complex websites and layouts which you could never achieve with Warp or Widgetkit.
oguz.copel
sascha
A really huge YOOtheme Pro 2.4 release with tons of new features in planned for early February, together with a new theme package which will demonstrate the new 2.4 features.
oguz.copel
easy4u.gmunden
sascha
bernhard.rossmann.86
solutionz
hanna
bernhard.rossmann.86
actually I had to use widgetkit several times since YTP wouldn't allow me to use individual map marker, nor a slideset (which comes in very handy for different breakpoints and is not really comparable to to a slider), a slideshow containing just plain text without an image (ytp won't show text without an image defined), possibly a parallax with size and opacity settings etc.
hanna
2. The Slideset from UIkit 2 is discontinued. Instead, we added a Set option to the UIkit 3 slider. The YOOtheme Pro Slider element makes use of this option.
3. The UIkit 3 slideshow is only an image slideshow and no longer works with text like in UIkit 2. In UIkit 3 it is recommended to use the Switcher to slide between text. So please use the Switcher element in YOOtheme Pro instead of the Slideshow element.
In general, the UIkit library evolves with each major version. And sometimes effects get deprecated like in the case with the slideset and the text slideshow. Often there are alternatives offering similar functionalities.
If there are features which you are missing, request them on our Roadmap https://yootheme.com/support/question/103519
nico.van.der.neut
Then I also need some advise to enable me to decide on Pro, maybe you can help me with that. The current Warp based templates allow me to have one(!) Joomla! instance, while running (seems to be on the outside) two or more 'websites': www.hervormdede.nl and www.hervormdede.nl/nieuwekerk is a good example (in total we have 6 'sub-websites').
Is this possible with Pro?
The reason I ask is that in Pro you have like SITE settings, which I need to be multiple sub-SITE settings. But maybe I'm looking in the wrong direction as I'm less than a novice on Pro.
Kind regards, Nico
phuncity
Don't get me wrong, we love YOOtheme Pro ❤️ (especially the new possibilities with custom content, templates etc.) and create our new websites with it.
But we also have a few customers with some very big websites build with warp.
In addition to the effort of migrating them to Joomla 4, we now also have to completely change the template framework, the css framework, rebuild all pages and articles, etc... :-(
By the way: Some time ago I wrote with Hanna on Facebook and back then it sounded like this:
"Was Warp angeht werden wir schon dafür sorgen dass die Warp 7 Themes auch mit Joomla 4 kompatibel sind, aber YOOtheme Pro ist jetzt unseres Hauptziel was wir ständig updaten und verbessern."
hanna
Sebastian Kunz
Thanks for highlighting that it's time to change.
By when we can expect the Demo Packages of YooTheme Pro provided for Joomla 4?
Thanks, Sebastian
hanna
mghaze
And please add a slideshow / slider mode to the Gallery. So that you can create previews of goods, as in all full-fledged stores. As here, for example, https://i.imgur.com/b5AoR3P.png And on ordinary pages it was possible to fit photos in one row, and not stretch them to half a page.
akcreation
(I'm hoping that seeing as Sascha has now announced to us in his comments on this post for the first time that Widgetkit 3 is due for launch next week, that possibly this will include this functionality in it)
hanna
If you need some of the Widgetkit widgets in YOOtheme Pro like a gallery with a slideshow or a slider, please create a feature request in YOOtheme Pro Roadmap ( https://yootheme.com/support/question/103519) and vote it up. Technically, it's very easy to port a widget to a YOOtheme Pro element.
hanna
akcreation
OK thanks for clarifying that, that's very good to hear that it will be coming in the future.
Cheers,
Keith
bodo.neumann
whats about a community Hackatron to rebuild all
warp 7 themes in YTP templates
Every user take one of it.
this might cost max. a few hours per template
Thats not a one click migration but a beginning
best
bodo
florianwachter
Joerg
I can still remember very well when your team started in Hambur with YooTheme. You have provided me and my agency with great website design options all these years and have always surprised our community with cool, new features.
The world keeps turning and in many areas outdated technologies slow down progress unnecessarily. That's why it's all too understandable when YooTheme says goodbye to Warp 7.
Keep up the good work, go on having fun with it and take care in these hard times 💪😉
Joerg
hanna
klara.bauer
If we update to Joomla 4, will the pages stop working?
We have a lot of warp sites, a lot!
We cannot persuade every customer in such a short time to take over the money for a new page. These are also the websites of local authorities that use widgetkit extensively, and especially the Zoo-component. We need 2 years in advance to act here. Have you ever thought of that? Probably not!
hanna
So there is enough time to start the transition to YOOtheme Pro. Even if Joomla 4 is released, there is no need for an immediate update. Joomla 3 will be supported for a long time. If do update to Joomla 4, we definitely recommend to charge for extra work. It is not an update which your clients should take for granted.
klara.bauer
hanna
dene.wilby
I resisted YooTheme Pro initially. It didn't make sense to me after using the Warp themes and getting used to them over the years but I HAD to move forward and i'm really glad I did. Pro took my sites to the next level, isn't that something we all aim for?
klara.bauer
hanna
hanna
nallus
Thank you for your valuable tutorials. I have now started studying YOOTheme Pro in anticipation of migrating the most important sites built with warp 7 and widget 2.9.27. I have followed your tutorial and am left with a few questions:
- to upgrade also widgets (many switchers and slidesets don't work) to version 3 does it require an additional widgetkit subscription?
Alternatively: is it preferable to rebuild them with Yootheme Pro elements?
The module position diagram of the warp sites is no longer available: do I have to reinstall the corresponding demo site?
Finally: can your tutorial in the style of "learning by doing" be the first in a series "for dummies"? I would certainly be happy.
Thanks, Ciao
hanna
We are considering creating more how-to tutorials 😉
nallus
I look forward to your next tutorials
vladimir.bulgaru
For all the Warp 7 developers out there - we've created an open-source project for Warp 7 Theme compatible with php 8.0. Suggestions are welcome and feel free to contact us for help!
vladimir.bulgaru
onefirefly
Any timeline on how long Warp 7 will continue to be security supported for?