We’ve come to a difficult decision: as of today, we’re no longer selling Canvas.

• WordPress is constantly evolving, and Canvas is no longer a good option for site builders using newer versions of WordPress – we don’t want to recommend a theme we don’t think will serve you in the future.
• We’ll continue to provide support for active subscriptions, and for a year from today for lifetime subscriptions.
• We’ve created a comprehensive plan for all our Canvas customers going forward. We aren’t simply dropping the theme, we are going to walk this road with you.

We know that this is a big change for you, but we believe it will set your sites up for better success in the future. Read on for more details about how we got here and how we can help moving forward.

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Since launching on the 9th of February 2010, Canvas, our all-purpose theme, has been a consistent performer and gathered a large base of loyal users. The styling control panel added by Canvas has proved popular amongst users who aren’t familiar with CSS, yet desire a customized look for their website. Businesses have since been built on the back of Canvas and WordPress, due to the ease of customization afforded by it.

With our 2015 theme retirements happening recently, we retired our collection of Canvas child themes. This action sparked questions from loyal Canvas users regarding the status of Canvas and our view on the product looking forward.

We’re here today to explain why these child themes were retired, and to give you a look into the future of Canvas. Keep on reading to learn more about the path this theme will take in the future.

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Canvas is our most downloaded theme and has been used for just about everything under the sun. Zain Joyce worked with it to build a family of thirteen sites for Oregon Trail Schools and his use case caught our eye. We hope you enjoy hearing a little more about Zain’s journey.

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There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

The restaurant industry operates at an incredibly rapid pace. The reason for this is evident; the more covers the restaurant turns over in a single sitting, the more revenue the business brings in.

When established brick-and-mortar businesses (such as restaurants) first discover the internet, they often see a new channel through which to entice potential customers to visit their establishment. This is usually where their interaction with the internet ends.

Today’s release helps to expand the restaurant’s interaction with their potential customers via the internet.

Patrons of Café Woo, we present to you Bon Appétit, a tasty restaurant theme for WordPress.

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On the 9th of February 2010, a new theme was released into the wide world of WordPress. While seemingly an every day occurrence, little did we know the impact this theme would make. Crafted by Magnus Jepson, co-founder of WooThemes, Canvas version 1.0 was posted for sale on WooThemes.com.

Now in 2014, Canvas has grown in popularity in leaps and bounds, with developers and website beginners alike, offering a framework for advanced development, coupled with an intuitive configuration screen, for customising the design of your Canvas theme without touching any code.

Ladies and gentlemen, Canvas has had twins! Meet Uno and Duo, our first two Canvas child themes.

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Canvas has come a long way since its birth in February 2010. As we continue pushing out new and updated code in every version, our goal is to make Canvas the ultimate theme for beginners and developers alike, through lean code and a helpful feature set.

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Sometimes a theme update deserves a blog post to highlight new features. This is such a time and we think you’ll love the new additions to Canvas, our flagship theme.

Full Width Layout Option

A much used tutorial in our knowledge base was how to make the header, navigation and footer full width. We’ve now added this as an option to Canvas so everyone can use this type of layout.

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Building a photography website that stands out from all the others of its ilk can be a tough thing to do these days – that’s why, when my wife needed a new website built, I spent ages trying to work out how to make it special. In the end, she conceptualised and designed it herself and I simply implemented her ideas. The result is something unique and memorable that was only made possible by using a few of the awesome tools that we provide at WooThemes.

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By Hilton Moore – Kri8it Senior Developer

I’m a senior developer at kri8it. We’re a digital agency that has long standing relationships with our clients based on great work and we are big admirers of building child themes off of Canvas.

We have used Canvas for a number of high profile clients and the way the framework is written, with all the hooks and extra features, really makes it a great base platform on which to build a system that can handle any scope, functionality and scale.

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Canvas is a theme that is near and dear to us here at Woo. Due to it’s flexible nature and myriad of styling options and possibilities, Canvas has also become somewhat of a framework or boilerplate for many of us and many members of the WooCommunity (it has, after all, become our flagship theme). Since the initial launch of Canvas on the 9th of February 2010, Canvas has received an overwhelming response and has gathered a loyal base of users who use the theme exclusively. This indicates to us that the Canvas community is strong and ever-growing.

With Canvas version 3 out in the wild, we saw it time to take Canvas to the next level. After a few months of coding, tweaking, adding new features and optimising existing ones, we launched Canvas version 4. This update brought with it a refined action and filter structure, making the main layout even more extendible and customisable than ever before, as well as the introduction of the Hook, Meta and Layout Manager features, for even more granular control over your website’s design and the elements it’s made up of.

Since releasing Canvas V4, we’ve received countless e-mails, tweets, blog comments and Facebook updates from loyal and steadfast Canvas users, eagerly awaiting our next steps with Canvas (and providing some great ideas and feedback, which we always appreciate).

Ladies and gentlemen… without further suspense and retrospective, we present to you… Canvas version 5!

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A portfolio module has been one of the most popular requests for our Canvas framework theme. We’ve however always been cautious adding such heavy functionality into the theme and bloating the code. At least we have been until now…

With the recent launch of Canvas 4 a couple months back we are now hugely confident in Canvas’s codebase. Matty has spent countless hours refining the structure into a more modular design, flexible enough for child theming, and custom hooks, filters and functions to be added.

As seen in our popular business themes, Canvas now boasts a full portfolio component for keeping track of all the awesome work you do and showcasing it to prospective clients and collaborators.

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In this post we cover our recent involvement with the launch of a training academy and how we put its website together using WordPress, BuddyPress and Canvas.

Over the past couple months WooThemes has been involved in a joint-venture with GivenGain, Silulo, RLabs, and Web Growth in creating an academy for school leavers to be educated in, and equipped with web & social media skills to hopefully follow with real-world internships at selected non-profit and commercial organisations that are willing to accommodate digital apprenticeships.

Last week, behind the scenes, WooTeam members Matty, Jeff and myself attended the bootcamp of the “GROW Academy” – a 5 day workshop for 20 recruits, equipping them with social media, crowdsourcing, SEO and web design and development skills. With WooThemes taking the “Design and Development” workshop day teaching the recruits about web design, open source software, content management systems, and the wonderful world of WordPress.

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As our flagship theme, Canvas has seen many enhancements and additions since it’s released early last year. The response to Canvas’ flexibility and ease of use from users at all levels has been incredible. With this in mind, it was time to give Canvas a bit of a tune up under the hood and overhaul the code for even more flexibility.

When approaching a task of this nature, which concerns users of all types and skill levels, it is important to take that into consideration as a primary pillar on the project- users of all skill levels need to be able to take advantage of the new features. Enter the Manager modules.

The Manager modules, “Layout”, “Hooks” and “Meta”, provide users with an easy-to-use interface for making use of advanced functionality in Canvas (such as it’s bundled hooks via the “Hook” Manager and filtering common areas via the “Meta” Manager). This means that, without understanding too much about what a hook or filter is, a user can make use of them. Therefore, at a basic level, these advanced functionalities no longer seem daunting and unapproachable. More advanced users can, of course, still make use of a standard coded filter in their child theme, once comfortable with the concepts of what hooks and filters are.

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Canvas has been a crowd favorite ever since it was released, which is why it is our “flagship” theme that receives most of the latest functionality. Version 2.0 gave you additional page templates (Magazine and Business) to play with, and now we are adding our latest WooTumblog functionality (no plugin required) so you can use our new Express iPhone App to publish to your Canvas powered blog!

For those that don’t know what Tumblog means, it means making your blog function like Tumblr, which allows you to very easily publish snippets of content, whether they be images, videos, audio, articles, quotes or links.

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