When the announcement came out yesterday that WooCommerce would no longer sell their well-known Canvas theme, I admit, I wasn’t surprised.
There had been a lot of chatter recently about Canvas and its future.
Heck, we were chatting about it earlier this month among members of our Metro Detroit WordPress group.
One of our members learned from a third-party that WooCommerce would not be investing more time into developing the popular theme.
Yet, nothing was announced by WooCommerce until this week.
WooCommerce’s Canvas Theme Announcement
Yesterday, Canvas lead developer Jeff Pearce announced:
We’ve come to a difficult decision: as of today, we’re no longer selling Canvas.
That announcement had to be difficult.
Canvas is one of the most popular WordPress themes. Seven years ago, it was one of the most talked about themes at our meetups.
What I liked about Pearce’s announcement:
- He was direct and to the point
- Explained that Canvas, with its old legacy code, could no longer work well as a site builder with the newer versions of WordPress
- Provided information for customers with active subscriptions and lifetime subscriptions
- Offered a migration path for current Canvas customers
Kudos to Pearce for being upfront and detailing what users can expect.
What You Need to Know
So, if your site is using Canvas, here’s what you need to know:
- Canvas theme will no longer be sold
- Canvas won’t immediately stop working, but it won’t support newer WordPress features (Customizer and new Editor features)
- Support for Canvas will continue for active subscriptions until the subscriptions end.
- Customers with lifetime subscriptions will continue to receive support through October 24, 2018.
- Existing documentation for Canvas is available online
- Reported bugs will continue to be fixed.
- You have a year to make a decision about what theme to move to.
- Get help for choosing and changing a theme
- Depending on your requirements, the free Storefront theme may be a good replacement for Canvas
- WooCommerce has put together a helpful Moving on From Canvas guide that covers templates, shortcodes, as well as hooks and filters
- WooCommerce Happiness Engineers are available for advice
Summary
Canvas is no longer for sale and is no longer the best choice for a successful WordPress site. Using a different, more modern theme will put you and your site on a better path for success.
From reading the comments in their post, the WooCommerce team have dedicated themselves to help customers in making a smooth transition to a new theme.
If you have an unusual circumstance, perhaps a few dozen Canvas sites that need to migrate, or other questions regarding your site move, contact their support team.
Thanks for the post Deborah. I’ve been a long term Canvas user and, although I saw the writing on the wall, the announcement was still somewhat un-expected!
Since the announcement, like many other I suspect, I’ve been on the look out for a replacement to slowly move my 25+ Canvas sites over to…
…and I’ve found my replacement and I LOVE IT… GeneratePress (https://generatepress.com)
It does everything Canvas can do (two menu bars, different blog layouts, hooks, etc.) and then some! The basic theme is free but the magic really comes from the ‘Premium’ version. It’s only $40 a year for use on un-limited sites, which is such good value.
I’ve been playing around with GeneratePress today and WOW WOW WOW it is ever nice. All the layout tweaks are so cleverly done and make it so easy to replicate what Canvas can do but with so much more also possible.
It’s got hooks so you can do custom inserts and PHP goodness are various places in the code.
The Premium modules are simply brilliant, with a couple really standing out.
The ‘Page Header’ module allows you to do some very clever custom page/post headings; and with ‘Sections’ you basically get a page builder thrown in (although the theme also plays nicely with all the big page builders as well).
And GeneratePress is FAST and I mean stupidly fast!!!! On my ‘test’ install (a pretty vanilla WP install with the wptest content and a security plugin and no cache) the site loads on the pingdom test in just over 500ms – NO CACHE!!!
So to anyone looking for a Canvas replacement (or frankly anyone who’s looking for a WordPress theme!) check out GeneratePress – it’s a bit good.
I agree, James! GeneratePress is a great alternative to Canvas. And I love that the community and the developers are so active. Didn’t realize you have 25+ Canvas sites to move over, whoa! Are you using GeneratePress with Elementor?
Yes, it will be a bit of a move…! I prefer the SiteOrigin page builder over Elementor – just works how my brain does more 😉
But I think with GP’s sections and the light columns plugin from Tom as well, I might not actually need SiteOrigin on some of those sites…
I’m planning to do the moves over time as and when I need to – nothing’s going to ‘break’ anytime soon (at least I hope not!).