Your may have noticed a wind down of our activities, sometimes with the ambiguous feeling that we may have gone away completely. That has not happened…yet and unless the universe decides otherwise we’ll stick around for a while.
The winding down is partly planned and partly naturally occurring, for both personal and economical reasons. We’ve never been money grabbers and we didn’t get into what we do only for the financial gains. Sure, a company is by definition there to make a profit, but we’ve always strived for a work/benefit/personal time balance (and the company is mostly here for the legal side of things). We have families, hobbies, personal interests and we never aimed for work to take over our lives.
Unfortunately, our local government sees a working business only as a source of extra taxation and small businesses in our country have been punished in recent years with lower thresholds, half baked extra paperwork systems and additional (and ambiguous) taxation. As we were approaching specific thresholds which would’ve mostly meant more administrative paperwork for us and higher prices (extra taxes) for our customers not yet affected by VAT, we made the conscious choice to slow down specific development tasks and curb our totals.
We’ve managed to maintain the equilibrium so far, meaning that after 4 years of world pandemic, economic crisis, energy crisis and a regional war we are still able to keep our pricing tiers the same although our operating (and living) costs increased in the background.
We love what we do and for the good of our mental health (which is always important) we prefer doing our work under our own terms, not under imposed deadlines, worksheets or marketing decisions. That’s why we never considered selling our business and creations to the highest bidder (despite the offers), we didn’t expand uncontrollably with script readers handling interactions (or worse, AI) and there was no (hostile) takeover. We continued being the same team from the early days doing the work the best we know how. It may not always be perfect but us being here after 15 years must mean we got at least some choices right.
I’m not sure how many of you glimpsed through our about page or even went all the way back to the first years of our posts. Despite some whispers about my disappearance and some surprise of Mr. Kay’s (re)appearance, he has always been here. In fact Cryout Creations (in name and values) has been his brainchild since the beginning. I may have been the more visible one in the recent years (for publishing the changelog posts and handling most of the support) but if you go back far enough in history you’ll discover it was Mr. Kay who was happily keeping you updated with the inners and goings of Zombie Apocalypse, Mantra, Parabola, Tempera, Nirvana and their WordPress.org evolution. In time we distributed the tasks as best we could as any good two-headed monster team does, but Mr. Kay was always here.
Everything you see in all of our themes is entirely his creativity and soul. Sure, I came up with the framework that unites our themes in blood code and I get to complain when things don’t work under the hood or when options absolutely must change for efficiency reasons, but Mr. Kay gets to pick and place the body parts, do the sawing and stitching and to pull the final switch and bring the themes to life, where I usually pick up and keep them fed and shocked every now and again so they don’t die out. I also get to stay in the basement and ward off the wire and tube monsters and keep them from growing too big and taking over. And no, I don’t have a hump.
In fact I’ve been so occupied with some required decennial maintenance (those pesky servers don’t run themselves) that subsequently, starting around the beginning of the year, Mr. Kay decided to expand his responsibilities and take over most of the support service. This will allow him to get better acquainted with the requests, requirements and workflow and have our next great theme superiorly designed from the ground up for ease of use and configuration. Plus I don’t know how to say no to people when support requests turn into customization requests or outright WordPress general classes. Mr. Kay can say no. He enjoys freedom of creation and doesn’t like having others tell him how his own creations should behave, when he in fact designed them and devised their abilities and limitations.
Our themes have a common family DNA but also have distinct personalities, traits and quirks. We avoided creating all-in-one bloated mutating monsters that supposedly do everything (and nothing well). And you’ll have to figure out if they work for you or not. That’s why they’re all available in the WordPress.org free themes repository for you to take them out for a spin. Mr. Kay will not be holding your hand for this…
If you’ve read this monologue this far, thank you for sticking around and you’ve earned some insight into our thoughts for the future.
An English saying goes: don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. The start of autumn is a good moment to draw a line, reflect on the past, count the hatchlings and make plans for the future. The summer vacations are over, the heat (in the northern hemisphere) is slowly subsiding, daylight is declining and that late evening / night-time appetite for creativity is slowly returning. Plus autumn is coming with its days and weeks of drizzles so what better to do then spend hours looking at a computer screen. It may not be healthy, but it’s fun.
As I’ve said from the start, we’re not going anywhere. Despite appearances, we haven’t abandoned any of our themes (except Zombie Apocalypse, but hey, zombies always resurrect themselves, right?) and we’ll slowly but surely get through the to-do lists for all our themes… eventually. Some are easier to upkeep (Bravada, Esotera, Roseta, Fluida, Kahuna and the classics) while some have strayed and will take a bit more convincing to return to the true path (Anima and Septera). And don’t give up hope for some new themes either. The block editor, for good and for worse, is out there…
On the support side, you’ll have to work with Mr. Kay and learn to give him genuine and intriguing support requests to answer, which will help him understand what features work and what don’t, where the bugs hide, whether the block editor is worth it all, whether content builders are still a thing. But feed him a request to set up your website from scratch or to hold your hand in WordPress 101 class and he will politely (more or less) say no or even show you the way out.
And I’ll also continue to be here, investing my time on the lower decks with all the rusty cables and tubes, plugging holes and patching ruptures while trying to keep everything afloat and stop it from collapsing onto itself. And I’ll also see you in the next changelog…
And maybe in the forums (no promises).
PS: Our winding down coincided with the Twitter/X shenanigans (followed by complete breakdown of their API) and Jetpack’s move of the social publishing feature under a paid subscription, so we stopped posting updates to both Twitter and Facebook. Instead, we replaced them with a Mastodon account which you can also find linked in the footer, or you can subscribe to receive any update we publish by using the subscription form below.
Thanks for your efforts, appreciate all the work you do with a small team. I’ve been using Nirvana for years and its solid and never let me down, updates come often enough and improvements to accessibility were particularly welcome 🙂