"So long and thanks for all the fish!" – our good bye from enfold

I love Enfold. I really do.

When we started using Enfold 2016 for our own and for customer sites – of which there are more than 40 active installations now – Enfold was the theme that introduced our editorial staff and customers to basic site building. Gone were the days where the Admins had to be called for even the most minute of changes to the look of pages or sites overall. Sure, billings went down at first and we did alot less custom coding as a matter of business. But that was more than made up by the sheer number of sites and customers we could serve. We are doing just fine and couldn’t have done as much going the self-customized theme way.

As of today, we run event sites, shops, e-learning sites (Learndash) and standard landing pages with Kriesis Enfold theme. And all those sites work very well.

(Un)fortunately, this new way of doing things resulted in staff and customers who are much more capable to run and administer sites. And with that, ideas and demands popped up that people simply hadn’t thought of before or weren’t aware of as a possibility.

• dynamic content and “the loop”: Our customers want more freedom in how to present their unique content, be that events, product lists. Its not enough anymore to, basically speaking, allow or disallow comments when showing a list of content. A easily customizable loop and archive pages are in top demand.
• deep custom post type integration, advanced custom fields
• dynamic visibility (above and beyond responsiveness): should elements be shown only to logged in users, certain roles, at certain times or when other conditions are met?
• the influence of the Gutenberg-editor on what customers and staff expect in terms of usability from and a content and page editor/builder
• Plugin- and theme-updates via wordpress (and let me tell you, Envatos way of handling license codes in my opinion is really the worst in the entire wordpress market right now)
• a market place of addons for every major Theme or plugin in use on our sites, for new UX-ideas and simply a huge supply of specialized developers. Premium addons for example for site builders like Elementor and divi, plugins like Gravity Forms, Learndash, membership plugins and WooCommerce

That is a good position to be in, from our point of view. But its a road we will have to take without Enfold, for which we don’t seem to be the right customer anymore. To be clear: We couldn’t have gotten there without Kriesis Enfold. But we also cannot go further with Kriesis Enfold, I am afraid. Which is why we will be phasing out of using Enfold over the next 12 months.

We wish Kriesi and his staff all the best.