Glow Blogs offers several themes to change the look and functionality of sites. In the same way as plugins, we rely on third-party, usually open source, developers.

Both themes and plugins need to be regularly updated.

Updates aren’t only for new features — most of them include security fixes. When a security weakness is discovered in a plugin or theme, the developers release an update to fix it. If we don’t install that update, Glow Blogs could become vulnerable.

Updates also keep everything working well together. We regularly update WordPress itself, and themes and plugins need to keep pace with those changes. Outdated add-ons can cause your site to slow down, behave oddly, or stop working in parts.

If a theme or plugin stops being updated we have to assess it and in many cases remove it from the system. For example, back in 2020 we removed a dozen themes from the system that had not been updated for several years.

Currently we have three themes that may be a problem, Yoko (last update 2019), Agama Pro (2022) & Make (Although this was updated in 2024, the frequency of updates to the theme have gone down from many times a year to one in the last 4 years). Yoko in particular has several bugs.

As in the previous retirement we will be taking a staged approach:

1. Advising you not to use these themes.
2. Disabling the option to select these themes for new sites or to change to these themes. If your site already uses one of them, it will be unaffected at this point.
3. Retirement (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.

For the moment we would advise against choosing these themes. Yoko is a simple theme and many of the other themes are suitable replacements. Twenty Sixteen is, in our opinion, particularly suitable for a classic news or blog style site. We have guide to moving from Yoko to Twenty Sixteen.

Agama Pro and Make will be a bit more difficult to move from. Both offer custom layouts. Make in particular has a lot of unique ways to change layouts. These will not convert easily if you just switch the theme.

Fortunately most of the features of these themes can be replicated in the the Block Editor and Site Editor with block themes. We would recommend Twenty Twenty Five for this. We will have further advice on moving on from these themes in the future.

Agama Pro has not been updated since 2022. The note on the plugin page explains that the theme supports WordPress until 5.9.1 This is several versions behind Glow Blogs. We may not be able to support Agama in the medium term. We would not recommend choosing it.

The Make theme has its own page builder. You cannot use the newer Block Editor with the Make theme. You can use the older classic editor or Make’s own Post Builder. Be careful when choosing the Make theme, it allows advanced page layout in its page builder but you will not be able to use blocks. It is also difficult to convert content created with Make’s page template to other themes. Some converted pages do not work at all. Make has been infrequently updated so we are not sure how long it will be supported. The help for Make from the developers’ website seems to have been removed.