Follow Up to Revolution Announcement

First off, I’d really like to thank all of you for the comments you’ve posted on my announcement that Revolution is Going Open Source. As much as I wanted to address each of them personally, I thought that writing a follow up post would be more efficient. I wanted to take a little time to help clear things up – it seems that there is a bit of confusion about some things, so hopefully this post will help.

About the current Revolution themes…

As of 12:00 midnight, October 31st, they will no longer be available on the site. What does this mean? It means that you will no longer be able to purchase them, which makes them a bit more valuable in my opinion. This also means that they will NOT be made available on the new site under the GPL. Only new themes will be on that site. So if you think that you should wait until Revolution goes GPL and open source, you will miss out on the existing themes.

What kind of support can I expect for current themes…

The Revolution community is what it is today because of the support that is available. The amount of users who are actively assisting others on the support forum has continually surprised me. People care about one another, and I can personally attest to this for a number of people have thanked me for providing such an incredible experience with support. I only deflect the thanks back to the community because they are the ones who truly deserve it.

Having said that, if you have purchased, or want to purchase a current Revolution theme before October 31st, the level and integrity of support for those themes won’t change. There will be a dedicated section on the new support forum that will allow you to receive the support that you hoped for when purchasing a theme.

I might be going crazy here…

But I am offering support of the current Revolution themes for life. There won’t be any date where I’ll close the support forum or turn things off. It has always been my intention to offer up my themes and support this way, and even though a few things might be changing, you deserve to receive what I have promised.

Even though the current site will be forwarding to the new site, I plan to make the existing support forum accessible (read-only) in some way. There is a ton of knowledge there (almost 40,000 posts) and I feel that current theme users would benefit greatly by still having access to that information. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to leave it at the actual url, or how that will look, but I’ll do my best to preserve that resource.

What about current theme updates…

I will be making theme updates, as necessary per WordPress updates, available for 12 months. This means that if WordPress comes out with a major update that affects the current themes, you will be emailed or notified of an updated version. If after November 1st, 2009, there is a WordPress update that affects the current themes, you can still ask about it and learn how to resolve the issue on the support forum.

For those who’ve purchased the current All-Inclusive package…

I realize that many of you might be asking what this whole transition means for you. Well, the first thing I want to say is that you will receive all of the benefits of the new open source program without any costs. But more importantly, I have plans to develop and release a few more Revolution themes that will be made EXCLUSIVELY to you as a way of saying thanks. Details on that will follow, but know that there will still be some themes that will be released to you and only you.

Last but certainly not least…

Because I explained the value of having/purchasing the current Revolution themes, I wanted to extend an offer for the rest of the month. I am lowering the price of all current theme packages by 25%, and this will be reflected on the website and won’t require a discount code. This will be the adjusted prices until the new site launches.

In closing…

Once again I want to thank everyone for their kind words. If you have more questions, please feel free to leave a comment below. I will do my best to address each one, so there is total clarity in this transitional period for Revolution. And if you want a little more info, you can find it here…