Glow Blogs offers a range of themes to help you style and personalise your site. Most of these are regularly maintained and kept up to date – but a small number are no longer being actively supported by their developers, and as part of our ongoing commitment to keeping Glow Blogs secure and running well, we’ll be phasing these out over time.
Which themes are affected?
Three themes are being retired:
- Yoko
- Agama
- Make
If your site uses one of these, there’s no need to worry, nothing is changing for existing sites right now, and we’ll support you through any changes well in advance.
Why are we doing this?
Themes that are no longer actively maintained by their developers can cause compatibility issues over time and make it harder for us to ensure Glow Blogs remains secure and stable for everyone. Retiring these themes is part of our normal housekeeping, it’s how we keep the platform in good shape for all 50,000+ sites on Glow Blogs.
What’s happening and when?
We’re taking a staged approach, and we want to be clear that nothing is changing for existing sites right now.
Stage 1 (coming soon): we’ll be advising users not to choose these themes for new sites going forward.
Stage 2: we’ll disable the option to select these themes for new sites. If your site already uses one of them, it will be unaffected at this point.
Stage 3 (further down the line): with plenty of notice, we’ll retire the themes fully and help users move to a supported alternative. This is still a long way off, and we’ll communicate clearly before anything happens.
What should you do right now?
If you’re setting up a new blog, simply avoid choosing Yoko, Agama, or Make and select another theme.
If your existing site uses one of these themes, there’s nothing you need to do urgently. We’ll be publishing guidance on switching themes and will support you through the process when the time comes.
Yoko users will find the transition relatively straightforward – a move to Twenty Sixteen is likely to be the smoothest path, with headers, sidebars, and colours easy to recreate.
Make and Agama users may find a theme switch requires a little more care. We’ll have specific guidance ready for you ahead of any changes.
The short version
- Three themes are being phased out: Yoko, Agama, and Make
- Don’t use them for new sites
- Existing sites are unaffected for now – no action needed
- Plenty of notice and guidance will be provided before anything changes for current users
