Arcane Premium Theme Retired?

  • Unknown's avatar
    creatorvilla · Member ·

    Hello all.

    I recently noticed that the premium themes were “retired,” because they are not compatible with some new features of WordPress. I’ve been using the Arcane theme by DesignOrbital for a few years now on WordPress.com. I was told by support that I am able to continue using it so long as I don’t change my theme, after which the option to change back disappears.

    Does wordpress.com have any intention of bringing back and supporting premium themes, specifically Arcane? I looked through dozens of the other available themes, many of them “magazine/newspaper” style. I’m not really seeing anything that has a similar enough layout to Arcane or some of the other more clean, professional premium themes by DesignOrbital, etc.

    I also have a few hundred lines of CSS inputed, having been using this theme for as long as I have. The only reason I would ever change it is if I was forced to.

    I’m not sure what it means for a theme not to be compatible with “The Editor.” To my knowledge, I’ve been using the Block editor without a problem for as it’s been available. Maybe someone can shed some light on that?

    I would think premium theme developers would have an incentive to make their themes compatible with the latest technology since they make money off them. I would definitely pay for one given the current state of alternatives.

    Thanks.

  • aleone89 · Staff ·

    Hello there,

    Happy to help you with this.

    Does wordpress.com have any intention of bringing back and supporting premium themes, specifically Arcane? I looked through dozens of the other available themes, many of them “magazine/newspaper” style. I’m not really seeing anything that has a similar enough layout to Arcane or some of the other more clean, professional premium themes by DesignOrbital, etc.

    As far as I know, this is not in the pipeline.

    I’m not sure what it means for a theme not to be compatible with “The Editor.” To my knowledge, I’ve been using the Block editor without a problem for as it’s been available. Maybe someone can shed some light on that?

    There are quite few facets to this, and the Editor is the main one in the fact that, its development is moving quite quickly – which also has an impact on the scope of support.

    With WordPress.com themes, we know we can support these themes when changes are rolled out rapidly.

    That’s not to take away from theme developers in anyway, but more about how we can best support our customers when these developments roll on.

    If a previous premium theme is not yet active – technically, it is still possible to use these themes on WordPress.com, but you would need the business plan to be able to do so and you would need to obtain the theme from the theme developers themselves. When troubles arise, you would need to contact the theme devs for help directly.

    https://wordpress.com/support/plugins/third-party-plugins-and-themes-support/

    I hope this helps.

  • Unknown's avatar
    creatorvilla · Member ·

    Thank you for your response. I’m going to keep using my premium theme for as long as possible..

    That said, if you guys have a suggestion box, I’ve been a premium user on two separate blogs for a few years each. The theme is one of the most important things about a blog. If the premium themes are gone, I request changing the rule to allow premium users to upload their own premium themes that they have purchased from a third party. My blog isn’t a business and I couldn’t justify upgrading just for that feature.

    If I’m forced to change my theme, I would probably have to switch to WordPress.org, which I don’t want to have to do, since the current arrangement has been working great otherwise.

    Thanks again

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