New widget area for Pro Add-ons

Our Pro add-ons were a bit inconsistent with the position of the “Before Footer” widget area. In some themes this area was displayed above the actual footer widgets, in some above the footer copyright line.

In order to fix this “bug”, we have introduced an additional widget area so that widgets can now be inserted in both positions. We hope you like the updates!

New icons added

At the moment, 47 icons for the most popular social networks are supported. After many requests, we have now updated all themes and add-ons to add two new icons:

• Mastadon
• X (formerly Twitter)

You can find a list of all supported social media platforms as well as help on how to configure your social icon menu in the Social Icons tutorial on our documentation pages.

We hope you like the update and stay tuned for more!

Our two new themes are named Lewis and Clarke.

Lewis

Lewis is a clean and lightweight business theme using modern colors and typography. The theme supports a huge range of block patterns, which allow you to build your static pages with just a few clicks. It also comes with multiple header and footer block template parts and various global style variants to quickly change colors.

Clarke

Clarke is a simple and elegant business theme with a dark background and stunning typography. It supports a large number of block patterns, with which you can easily create complex pages. The theme comes with multiple header and footer template parts as well as various style variants to choose from.

No more Pro Add-ons

For the block themes we decided against our proven model with free themes and a Pro Add-on. With the new Site Editor, all options for layout and design are actually already included in the Core, and we didn’t want to artificially tear them apart with extra add-ons. For this reason, each theme stands completely on its own, and will be available either completely free or only for payment.

What does that mean?

If you are a customer of our old plans with manual license renewal, you will not be able to renew your existing license anymore. Instead, a new license key must be purchased by subscription.

This applies to customers of the Standard Bundle, Premium Bundle, Extended Bundle, Standard Club, Unlimited Club and Extended Club. You can not buy or renew these plans anymore.

We are thus consolidating the wide range of different prices into a uniform model.

Why is that necessary?

The uncomfortable truth is that our pricing was not well thought out or sustainable. Of course, this is entirely our fault, but it still needs to be corrected. We’ll bring last year’s changes all the way to the end.

With our Lifetime licenses and the 30% discounts on license renewals, we earned the most on the first purchase. Furthermore the renewal rate with manual renewals was simply too low.

All this has led to the result that much of our revenue has always come from new customers. Since new customer acquisition dropped sharply this year, we are simply not generating enough revenue anymore to survive in the long term. There is no alternative but to take countermeasures.

What about Lifetime licenses?

We honor the previous customers of our Lifetime licenses, which means that we continue to offer updates and support without follow-up costs. However, we will stop selling Lifetime licenses to new customers.

If you are a long-time customer and heavy user of our themes and are totally satisfied with our work, consider supporting us additionally with a new subscription or a recommendation to all your friends.

Price increase as of January 1

As of the first of January 2023, we will also increase the prices of all plans:

• Single – from 49€ to 59€ per year
• Plus – from 69€ to 79€ per year
• Infinite – from 79€ to 99€ per year

So if you take out a new subscription this year, you can save a little.

Why blocks?

Blocks are literally the new building blocks for everything. With the new Site Editor, the whole theme is created with blocks. They are now the single most important piece of your WordPress website. You can check out our new block-based Full-Site-Editing themes on themezee.com/theme-type/block/.

We always stick to Core blocks to build our block themes and continue to do so, because they have come a long way and cover well the basics. But there are still blocks missing for special use cases or things like displaying icons for example. This is where we come in.

Our blocks do not strive to replace Core blocks, but to complement them in a meaningful way.

Available Blocks

The first thing we did was to look at the topic of icons. We developed four different blocks to offer you a whole set of possibilities to display icons in the WordPress Block Editor:

• Icon block
• Icon Buttons block
• Icon Heading block
• Icon List block

All Icon blocks include the most popular icon sets to let you choose from thousands of available icons.

How to get them

Our WordPress blocks are available to all active purchasers of our Plus, Infinite and Lifetime subscriptions and can be downloaded at any time in your account.

Smartcube is now available in the official theme directory on WordPress.org and is a 100% free theme.

If you like the theme you can support us by rating it with 5 stars on WordPress.org – or any of our other themes as well. I really hope you enjoy this one.