In reply to Purple Bob.

Thank you for responding in here Jeffrey. We're not unreasonable people, but we see no reason why this screw up should be at our cost. Similarly we see no reason why any small business using Canvas should have to cover the costs of this.

A couple of years or more ago almost all Developers including yourself, were hailing what a wonderful thing Canvas and the Woo Framework was and how brilliant "short codes" were. Making it easy for non-engineers like ourselves to create wonderful sites using the huge number of "short codes" you included for us. Not only that but hailing the inclusion of more and more short codes for different things with each release and update of Canvas. All of that, along with encouraging end users to make use of these wonderful whiz bang features that made building static pages so much easier.

So of course we all listened to you and did use them....... Roll on 2017 and all I'm hearing from you and the other developers out there who spent their time pushing it to us, is "Oh No you don't want to use "short codes" because they're not cross theme compatible or compatible with the latest great whiz bang idea we had." And you're now betting on the core Customiser and Gutenberg because you think those "MIGHT" be the future.

And note that regardless of how you feel about your latest ideas, they still aren't even properly off the drawing board. Leaving us floundering around out here in the wild. Having huge time commitments involved in migrating things that we shouldn't have to be messing with. What happens if your new whiz bang ideas turn out not to be the future...... We get to pick up the bill yet again I guess!!

Small business needs stability. Not constant innovation that isn't backward compatible. Sure, innovate... sure, move things forward, that's inevitable. But for us out here that have to tolerate it, you MUST make it all backward compatible no matter how difficult you see that as being, either that or you have to absorb the cost yourselves, when you can't or don't want to make it backward compatible. Not foist this total nightmare on us.

It's tough enough trying to keep on top of any small business as it is. Without being forced into this impossible and costly corner you have now decided to create for us.

Regards,
Purple Bob.

p.s. we finally got a response to the ticket we raised.... not impressed with the response or the the suggested solutions, given that they would seem to remain at our cost. As for the dashboard issue I will be raising that after the weekend.