In reply to sjmcweb.

Good points, sjmcweb.

Wordpress sellers just shutting down forums and open support is a huge community problem. It's cooler and more big company to solve things behind closed doors. I'm surprised to see such a Microsoft like approach taking root in our community. Woo did this a while back, Thesis did it, iThemes just did it. Notably Studiopress have not done so. There are about 135,000 posts in their customers only forum. Where would YOU rather be a customer? Note we walk our talk for our FV Flowplayer video player. With proper support forums, customers can instantly search to find info and past threads about CSS or Cloudfront issues for instance, educating themselves before they ask their own questions.

The bigger issue I think is that supporting and securing an advanced website incorporating twenty or more significant pieces of technology (to get to twenty, I'd consider our video player plugin one, a gallery plugin another, an ecommerce plugin yet another, a slider plugin still another, an advanced SEO plugin, user uploads still more) is not a hobby. Some reckless fellow decided to tell people Wordpress is easy and free. Well bare bones Wordpress (no advanced themes) is sort of easy and kind of free. Even running free barebones Wordpress is a minor headache.

We plan to make it a bit easier with BusinessPress, a security revisions only while labelled version of Wordpress with ten to eighteen month update cycles.

Still, maintaining hosting and a website requires both time and expertise. If (would-be) publishers don't have at least some time and some expertise available, they are much better off using a hosted service, whether Wordpress.com or Squarespace or Blogger or Shopify. If your hosted service is so popular that it requires custom functionality not available in one of those services, you should have the resources available to hire one of the experts who frequents WPtavern.com to build it right for you.

The laughable "pro" - everything but the kitchen sink - themes on Envato deserve to die a miserable death. With the update and security issues, they are doing a disservice to web publishing and Wordpress. As more than one of us has noted, it's usually better to rip out your typical Envato theme and start from scratch with the required functionality.

PS. Okay, as proof of concept, they have a function. We rebuilt from scratch a website for a major television network (HotBench.tv) where the proof of concept had been built on an Envato theme. But everyone going in knew that the Envato code was entirely unsuitable for use in a production site.