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.

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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.