Frustration

Hi Guys!

We are pretty much working on all of the things suggested here. More features, faster theme, better documentation, improved template builder, etc
In our Github repository there are currently 10 Pull requests with new features waiting and we are adding more every week. We have changed our support system internally and are really a lot faster when it comes to responding to requests. When we previously had a queue that was usually around 200 open threads we are now usually at about 50, sometimes even less. We have started this progress about 2 months ago by hiring new team members and changing our internal hierarchy and are still improving our support and the theme. You should reap the benefits in the upcoming months when the new documentation is ready and the new team members are fully integrated.

About the Mini Updates:

Unfortunately, in order to improve Enfold the way we want a lot of the core structure has to change, and thats why we are holding back with feature updates. Those are also the reason why we are doing these smaller updates. I get why you feel you are real time beta testing, and to a certain degree this is true. The reason why we are doing those smaller updates, and don’t change everything in one big swoop, is that I don’t feel we can afford to break the theme in a way that affects tens of thousands of users. Unfortunately we also can’t test those changes on 1000 different servers ourselves upfront so we need to let the community test those changes in small doses. And I do agree that it must get frustrating if you are one of the few who are affected by those changes once or more, but I also have to tell you that in general the process has been a success for us, since the few issues that our customers encountered were solved fast, and the number of people affected was minimal.

Anyways, I hear you and maybe we can implement a BETA testing feature if we need something similar in the future, where users can opt in to those updates. The only immediate solution for everyone affected several times is to skip those smaller patches and wait for the next big one.

Now a little more detail why we are doing what we are doing:

Our focus for a long time was to carefully pre-select the best possible options and elements for our users and implement them into the theme. Basically we wanted to only add what benefits the most users and let everything else should be added by plugins or custom code. Since the users base has grown a lot and we got much more niche use cases, we agree with most of our users, that we can no longer go that route. So we will add a lot more options and features, and also improve existing ones.
In order to not slow down the theme to an unusable degree we want to make every feature and every element optional. And that is unfortunately really tricky and is the cause for those multiple smaller updates, since it involves CSS and JS file creation/compression on the fly.

To make every option and every template builder element optional we are started splitting up CSS and JS files. This allows us to only load used elements and make sure only necessary JS and CSS is loaded in the front end. We also have added a compression script that bundles all those css and js files into one compressed and minifed version. Next step will be to add an optimization tab in the theme option that allows users to fine tune the optimization themselves. (eg: which level of compression, which files to compress, which elements to exclude, etc) This should also allow us to implement google AMP out of the box. It will also allow us to add any ALB elements that we like, even for niche use cases, since if a user does not need them they will simply not be loaded. Same with additional options: if an option generates a lot of extra CSS or JS we can simply split it up into a new file and it only gets loaded when necessary. That way the only thing we need to take care of is to not make the theme too complicated to use.

As said before: it will take a little while before you can fully reap the rewards of those changes but Enfold will be a much better theme once they are done. More features, options and demos and at the same time faster and more lean and clean out of the box.

Regards,
Kriesi