Allowing our users to move to a different theme in the future is very important to us. Whether that’s one of our competitors, or even if you want to switch to another theme we’ve created, we want you to be free and flexible to do that without losing any of your hard work.

That’s why we separated all of our theme’s features into separate plugins, and why those plugins are automatically installed and set up for you upon installation.

Plugins like to travel.

Plugins can travel with your website forever, regardless of the theme you choose to use. Themes, on the other hand, cannot, as you can only ever have 1 theme installed at a time.

An easy way to think about it is like this:

Themes should deal with “how things look“.
Plugins should deal with “how things work“.

This is why we call our themes “Theme Bundles”. You’re not just buying a theme, but a bundle including our very best plugins, all made in-house by us, and all of it works with-or-without the theme itself.

What is WordPress “Theme Lock”?

“Theme Lock” is a problem that arose with the popularity of WordPress Themes, where themes started promising and including features, but built those features directly into the theme itself.

WordPress Themes, at their conception, were never intended to include “features”, but only affect the style and design of the page. But style and design are very closely linked with features. After all, how can you style a feature (like an event page), if no event page exists? Because of this, themes started bundling code for features like events, MP3 players, sermons, and other content, right into the theme.

The big problem nobody saw coming was that if you ever want to move to a new theme, you would lose all of your features! Your events, your MP3 Player, your sermons, and other other theme-powered content will simply disappear when you switch themes.

Because of that, people end up being “stuck” with their theme, unable to change it and get a fresh, new design, even years after their original purchase. This is where the term “Theme Lock” comes from. You become “locked” to your theme.

This is why we’ve architected our products to work the way they do. Preventing theme lock takes a very intentional and well-thought out vision and architecture from the very start, and it’s what you get with any of the themes we make.