After purchasing, installing and configuring 3 WP templates from the same author (1-Hypershot and 2-Blame) I find that the author has decided to not support these “older” templates in favor of his newer templates. This leaves me to pour the content of these sites into one of his new templates after testing on a separate server. Which may or may not produce satisfactory results. These were from one of your “elite” developers and the Blame theme was touted for corporate use… My question is: How do I find templates here that will not be dropped by their author after a few year??
The truth is that nobody here can guaranty you a long-term or endless support or continued maintenance of any product you purchase on Envato.
Authors are free to discontinue (and pull) their items at any time or simply stop providing updates for them, as there is no requirement that an author must update an item. A minor exception to that rule is when a security issue with any of the supported platforms an item might list has been found and the author wants to keep the item for sale.
Once an author has decided to not provide any further updates for an item, but still wants to keep it for sale, it will most likely be marked as “unsupported” by the author, which means that no technical assistance for that item will be provided to the buyer. An “unsupported” item does not always mean that it is discontinued by the author, but can be a good indicator.
In general, the update frequency for an item since its release, and the release date of the item will tell you a little bit about whether the author intends to further develop and update the item, or not. But in the end, even a best selling item that has been around for several years already can be dropped by the author at any time.
It also helps to check the overall portfolio of an author; if it consists of dozens of items that are somewhat familiar and it appears the author is operating alone or with only a small team, it can mean that the author is more about just releasing new items, than maintaining existing ones.
As you see, there are several indicators to look out for when buying an item, but as stated at the beginning, in the end, there is no guaranty.
Well, you need to buy from trustful sources. Here’s one if you need Ecommerce/WooCommerce theme. It also comes with a bunch of premium plugins that are also supported when used with the theme. You can also update plugins using theme purchase code. Thanks!
Yeah, I thought I did my homework before making these purchases but apparently not well enough. Anyway, thanks for your detailed response. It was much appreciated!
Thanks - I’ll check it out.