Comments 135 Responses

1. I’ve been using Toolset for approaching 10 years – and you guys have always given great support – I’m relieved to hear that this won’t change. All of my client sites are reliant on Types and Views, as (I suspect) are many other Toolset users’ sites. I look forward to seeing what comes next, but I won’t be switching to Gutenberg any time soon…

   • Same here toolset is great

   • Thanks a lot, and yes, you can count on using Toolset in the future! 🙂

     • Thank you! We have been using Toolset since the beginning and will continue to use it as it makes WordPress and the web a better place!

2. Ich erstelle meine Websites nur noch mit Toolset, einfach ein grandioses Plugin! Ich hoffe sehr, dass ihr eure großartige Arbeit weiterführen könnt! Ich habe nicht vor zu wechseln und finde auch eure Preissttuktur sehr angemessen und euren Support erstklassig. Macht bitte weiter so!

   • Vielen Dank, André! 🙂

   • Hallo André, können wir mal in Kontakt treten. Wir haben es auf unserer Seite http://www.tierheimfreiberg.de genutzt, aber leider sind wir den Blocks gefolgt und dort fehlte dann Unterstützung einzelne Einträge nach Kategorien zu sortieren. Es wäre schön, wenn man sich mit jemanden auf deutsch über die aktuelle Möglichkeiten unterhalten könnte, um unsere Webseite wieder zum Laufen zu bringen. Wir haben einzelne Beitragstypen für Hund und Katze, die wir dann mit Kategorien wie vermittelbar, Zur Probe und vermittelt, sortiert haben. Irgendwie sind wir dann aber falsch weiter voran gegangen und die Möglichkeit war weg.

3. I’m a ling time toolset user coming up to 10 years. I couldn’t even think of building a site without toolset for my clients. Have you ever considered forking WP and creating your own version without all the extra code? WP has always failed to deliver core features that matter like Toolset, Elementor, etc.

   • There is an actively maintained fork of WordPress called ClassicPress. I wish Toolset would support it.

   • Hi, Mayur and Viktor! Forking WP would be a huge project and as pointed out in this post, we believe in working with WordPress, even though that’s not always easy to do.

4. This sounds… like a pre-announcement of something else, and not good, to come. The language and overall idea, that no more features can be added while WP rolls out FSE, doesn’t quite make sense. Mayb I just don’t understand the complexity or hugeness of FSE… But while I love the product, having used it for years and just looking in the forums anyone can see heaps of simple little issues or needs that small/medium new features could solve.

   A public feature voting system would clearly show this, but for some reason it’s never been implemented has it?

   You must have 10,000s of paying users at this point so stopping ANY feature development, for this particular reason, just doesn’t feel right.

   Perhaps Automatic has approached you for an acquisition? I don’t expect you could answer this even if it was true, but…

   • Tbh I had the same thoughts… I hope we are wrong

   • Hi, Tim. Thank you for your comment, I get what you mean and I will forward it to the team. Just to clarify that this is not any sort of a pre-announcement, and nobody approached us for acquisition. 🙂 The thing with FSE is that it promises to completely rewrite how WordPress sites are built, for better or worse. We need to see where Toolset fits and most importantly what actual users/clients need – in the long term.

5. You are great & fantastic company for 4 years using Toolset & will keep using it.
   God bless you.

   • Thanks a lot for your kind words, we really appreciate it! 🙂

6. What a great, honest post. The expectation of never-ending cutting-edge progress is just exhausting and unsustainable. Good on you for focusing your efforts where they are most needed while you wait to see how WordPress moves. I’ve been a customer for 5 years and am a big fan, will definitely not be moving to Gutenburg any time soon either – it gives me hives every time I have to use it :-D. Your support staff have always been amazing and the creative freedom Toolset gives me without the tech headache is phenomenal.

   • Hi, Orla and thank you very much for your support. 🙂

7. This was scary to read at first, but you make a good argument. It sounds like a smart decision to make. I wish you all the best and look forward to the future of Toolset!

   • Thanks, Albert! Yes, I can imagine, but the main point is, as you put it, we’re not going anywhere and you can count on using Toolset in the future. 🙂

8. Our entire agency relies pretty heavily on Toolset. It goes far beyond the capabilities of what you can achieve with any theme or Gutenberg. We use it to build literally any type of functionality – from custom dashboards, job boards, search engines, postcode search tools, reporting tools – literally everything. We still use WPbakery which I still believe is considerably better than elementor etc. We use a customized version with Salient.

   Whilst the core of the product does pretty much everything we need it to, one way or the other, it is disappointing to hear this news. I think there’s going to be a lot of resistance to FSE and there will always be a huge demand for a legacy type WordPress. Gutenberg to us was a massive no when the team tested it out, so limited and unintuitive.

   I really hope Toolset invests some more into the marketing of the product to generate more users. There’s nothing which compares to it and the support has always been amazing.

   • Hi, James! Thanks for the comment. Well, WordPress leaders are going all-in on FSE, so no matter how it turns out, it is here to stay. Whether that will be good for the whole platform or not, we’ll have to wait and see. As we use Gutenberg to publish all our content here on Toolset.com and WPML.org, I can tell you that for actual writing, I do prefer it over the old editor. It’s just easier to display things side-by-side, to style them, and not to worry about some custom HTML tags breaking, or adding some custom CSS just to make something “float left”. However, with FSE, it feels like WordPress went against its long-time policy where it provides the core features and leaves the rest to plugins. Let’s see where that approach takes us all.

   • Hi James, we rely heavily on Legacy Views too. So much power but for some reason, the TS team does not value it like we do. For those of us that are developers or power users of Toolset, check out this new FB power users group.

9. I’m glad that your team is not pushing against FSE, however I would have liked to see the growth of the Gutenberg Blocks you have. I don’t see how improving blocks would have any negative effects on the progression of FSE. the templating side etc sure, however I’d love to see blocks work independently without the requirement of types and just be a stand alone plugin. I think that would hit a larger group of people too as WP moves towards FSE.

   • Hi, Nicholas! I understand what you mean and will forward your thoughts to the team.

10. This smells bad, really bad, to me.

    • Hi, Luis! Could you please share a bit more, what concerns you the most?

      • Well, like others have already said, this looks like the beginning of something else, and not good, to come.
        The bottom line is that I don´t feel I should rely on Toolset for future projects that need a lot of time and effort to build and launch and which should work without problems for years to come.
        Too bad, because it´s been 11 months since I chose Toolset for a large project that I haven´t managed to finish yet and, after all the work I´ve put into it, I think I´ll need to approach it in a different way.
        Plus, your post came the same day, and almost at the same time, that I got a reply from Toolset support telling me that I´ll need to wait for a month and a half at least to see a Toolset update with the fix for a Toolset bug I´d reported half a month ago.
        My license is due for renewal in less than a month, so I guess I´ll just need to forget all about Toolset.
        When Toolset support tells me that it is totally normal to wait for two months for a bug fix being addressed in a plugin update (in case I´m lucky and it does not take several more months), and then I read your post, and then I learn that Toolset developers are not developing anything new… let me tell you, Dario, that something smells bad, really bad, here.
        I truly wish I were wrong, but I don´t feel like taking the risks.

    • This is a good suggestion.

      For those like us that just renewed our license, there isn’t much upside in your announcement. Improving your blocks would be a good focus, to provide value to those of us not using support much.

11. So no chance for this from 2019 I guess?https://toolset.com/2019/06/do-you-need-calendar-view-for-toolset/

    For me I do not use FSE and I am still using Views plugin.

    • Hi, Bob! No, I’m sorry but that won’t be happening. We clarified this multiple times in the past. When that announcement was made, we didn’t realize the scope of such a project so later, after getting the full picture from the developers on what this would take, we decided to not get on it.

      • That was a huge disappointment and would have really turbo charged Toolset. Even a minimal calendar system would have been enough to have made maybe 80% of us satisfied.

12. Toolset has been an essential tool for a lot of big and small projects. Its flexibility is priceless!
    Stay right where you are guys, professionals (and not just) need you!! FSE…. well, let’s see where it goes… although I know where I’d like to send it 😛

    • Thanks, Leonardo, and yes, we’re staying right here. 🙂

13. I appreciate the honesty, but really just it feels like a sort of half-truth/cop-out – and if I were really cynically, misdirection.

    I appreciate the need to see where full site editing goes, but as Tim says in the comment above, there’s all sorts of features – small and large – that could and should be added completely independent from Gutenberg/FSE. And, again as Tim says, if there were a public feature request page rather than a black hole, these potential features would be abundantly clear to everyone.

    Combing that neglect of customer feedback with the fact that there’s been little-to-no development for at least a year (and now you’re saying none for another 1.5 years!), I’d feel alot better if you’d just come out and say (and, better yet, explain) what everyone knows – the plugin has essentially been abandoned. I’m sure there’s legitimate reasons for this, so it would look far better on you if you just explained why. Is Gutenberg and it’s query block etc… threatening the need for Toolset? Something else?

    Again, as Tim says, it feels like a pre-announcement for deprecating the plugin altogether. And, again, if I were to be really cynical, I’d say this announcement is just to serve to milk the product for extra revenues until that happens…

    It seems to me that the reasonable and fair way to move forward would be to adjust the license/pricing structure to reflect this legacy product. You’re no longer paying for development for it, so why should we continue to pay for such an unmet expectation? Toolset support is industry-leading, but their cost was only a part of our license fee.

    And even better approach would be to adjust it to some sort of needs-based support license – I’ve paid for 1.5 years and received zero features and only submitted a handful of tickets. It would be nice to be able to pay for support when I actually need it.

    If and when you resume development, I think that everyone would be delighted to resume paying the full rate.

    • Hi, Nick! Thank you for your thoughts. I do understand you and will be forwarding it to the team. However, I do have to disagree with you on us abandoning the plugin. If that was so, we wouldn’t have just made Toolset compatible with PHP 8, for example. If we really wanted to abandon it, we would just drop it and walk away, or sell it to the first bidder. Also, we wouldn’t keep paying for a whole team of people for support and development. However, I get what you mean, and as I said, will forward it.

      • I’m glad to hear it isn’t being abandoned – I very much do not want to move to an alternative, such as Meta Box.

        But do you have any response to my (very reasonable) suggestion about lowering the Toolset license fee to reflect the lack of development that will be happening? I just can’t see how you could possibly justify the current price given this announcement.

        • Hi, Nick! I don’t have a response at this time. I’m meeting with the team soon and will discuss all the comments and suggestions provided by you and the others.

        • Hi, Nick! I want to clarify this point with you… Even without new features, we are still actively maintaining Toolset. We are keeping it compatible with WordPress, and without this, it wouldn’t work properly in both WP 5.9 and WP 6.0. We also fix compatibility and security issues when they arise, plus bug fixes. And again, we just updated all Toolset plugins so they are compatible with PHP 8. So, to support all of this, it requires paying a whole team of people, plus infrastructure. It’s not like we said, “OK that’s it”, disbanded all the teams, and are just hosting the plugin on our site and milking you guys for money for as long as it goes. Again, if that was the case, Toolset wouldn’t work with latest WP versions at all.

    • This is the risk of proactively posting that you are pausing development. It’s honest of you, but there is more downside than upside. Potential new members who see this will think twice before buying in and might pay for Meta Box instead.

      It makes sense that you either reduce the renewal fee, or justify it by continuing to actively improve the product in place (not just do maintenance). Example would be to make your blocks better, per suggestion above.

14. Everything seems to be fair and clear. But still, a feeling of sadness does not leave me … I hope it seemed to me and everything will be fine with you. This is not the last major change from WordPress. The next phase is multilingual…

    • Thanks, Max. Don’t worry, we’re not throwing in the towel. Plus, actually, the next phase is collaboration, and multilingual features then in 2025, as per Matt Mullenweg’s own words on WordCamp Europe just the other week. So, let’s see, but at least we can’t complain that we’re not living in interesting times. 🙂

15. Dario,
    I sincerely appreciate and applaud the news that you shared with the community. Ensuring that we can continue to count on the content we have created using Toolset (and rely on for our clients!) while we all try to understand where FSE will take us makes perfect sense! I also see it as a sign of the maturity/wisdom of Toolset management that it won’t try to invent/add “new stuff” (creating new complexity and support requirements) in an effort to keep busy that could take us all down “blind alleys” that we may come to regret.
    Scott

    • Hello, Scott! Thank you very much for your support! And yes, you can count on Toolset going forward. 🙂

16. Since so much is changing within WordPress, your decision seems to make sense. It will take some time before FSE and Gutenberg are solid. And that’s what you need to build upon.

    I’m not sure what the exact definition of “new features” is though. I’m only using Toolset for 6 months, so I still have a lot to learn and did not find any product that can do everything that Toolset can do. But like anything, Toolset is not perfect and small things that seem a no-brainer for a beginner like myself are sometimes not included. Today I had to add a custom shortcode to get the number of selected terms in a taxonomy, for example. That’s the kind of things that I expect to become available because it makes sense, even though strictly this might be a “new feature”. Keeping to work on performance improvements is not a new feature either in my book.

    To pause new features for FSE and Gutenberg, sure, that makes sense. As long as you pick it up as soon as possible. Both are the way forward. I will never use the classic editor.

    James suggested more marketing and I agree. A vlog/podcast/whatever to spread the word about how unique Toolset is would be great. I would subscribe for sure.

    I hope you’ll publish a post like this every 3 months or so, to update everyone about the status.

    Thanks to Dario and the team for what you are offering us!

    • Thanks for your thoughts, Arno!

17. Hello,
    I understand that the current Toolset position between different page builders could not be easy to manage.
    Nevertheless, I’m still convinced that Toolset needs to have better interactions with WC. Currently, we know that some functionalities are not available like :
    – Ability to retrieve meta of a WC order in a Views (which is important if you have variable products for example)
    – For Cred Forms, ability to buy several products and create the different needed posts at the same time (today, only one post is created, so if you have an order with more than one line, then some posts are not created !).
    My feeling is that it should be good to use this period to move forward on those Toolset – WC weaknesses.
    Regards
    Pat

    • Hi, Pat! That’s definitely an interesting idea and I’ll forward it to our team! Thanks!

18. Hi Dario, thank you for the explanation and insight into the process. That is important. I also appreciate the maintenance and updating for the future so that existing projects are not immediately affected. At the same time, I have to say I’m a little disappointed and concerned. There would certainly be some things that could be improved even today or long postponed feature requests. For example, I’m thinking of more possibilities to comply with the GDPR. At the moment it´s hard to impossible to use Maps and still be GDPR compliant. Better integrations to existing cookie solutions would be necessary here. Other map providers would also make sense – like open street map. But what scares me is that there seems to be no vision for the future of Toolset with FSE yet. Even if many things are still open, FSE is already here and meant to stay. I can understand that development efforts have to be carefully planned and it´s not easy to find the right place in the new ecosystem. However, there would be many possibilities, for example, to increase the added value in the direction of Gutenberg and FSE. Possibilities to create your own blocks, integration with many other providers, block themes and plugins. You can see what ACF, Meta Box and others are doing here. These are exciting times with WordPress 6 and I would have liked to see a more positive vision for Toolset. A vision to create a more or less codefree possibility to create awesome flexible, dynamic websites using the full potential of FSE. A lot of things are already possible and will still be possible with Toolset and FSE. But this will not use the full power FSE and blocks bring. In 18 to 24 months competing products will probably be much further ahead, unfortunately. That’s a shame and it doesn´t make me more confident to use Toolset in the future. I really don´t like to say that but it´s the way it feels to me. These are difficult times. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for you and all of us. I hope you will surprise me positively, save the resources for a better toolset version and come up with the best Toolset version ever. Stay healthy and confident.

    • Hi, Daniel, thank you for your thoughts, you have some good points there and I’ll definitely be sharing them with the team. As my own personal comment, I’m not really sure about products like ACF. It’s a huge product with tens of thousands of users and yet, it was sold twice in the last year. I personally don’t see that as a good signal. While these are definitely exciting times, the fact that huge companies seem to be acquiring so many plugins can probably mean either: a) WordPress moving more towards the enterprise, or b) WordPress getting in trouble and losing its ground in the future. I hope it’s the first one. But again, we’ll have to see. Wish you all the best too! 🙂

19. Hi, just finished reading this article and, to be honest, it seems to me that you are preparing a ground for something else, some other announcement. Your arguments for not adding new features is hard to understand from my point of view. E.g. the infinite scrolling with button – a feature that has been called for for years – how is it connected to FSE so that you have to wait with implementing? Ok, you won’t be adding “big” features in 1.5 year, but why don’t you have a look at feature requests in the meantime? Honestly, what new BIG feature have you implemented in the past year?
    I have built 100+ sites with Toolset but it seems to me the time has come to start looking for some alternative with your recently stated attitude 🙁

    • Hi, Tomas! I understand your frustration and will share your thoughts with the team.

    • Hey Tomas, here is a way to do an infinite scroll with toolset and a load more button , just remove the class that toolset uses to loadmore posts when it’s in view then the loadmore has nothing to hook onto, and then manually add a next page pagination button as your loadmore and you are done!
      
(function ($) {
$(document).ready(function () {
$('.js-wpv-layout-infinite-scrolling').removeClass('js-wpv-layout-infinite-scrolling');
});
})(jQuery);

      [wpv-pager-next-page force="true"][wpml-string context="wpv-views"]Load More[/wpml-string][/wpv-pager-next-page]


    • I’ve been looking at CrocoBlocks JetEngine.

      I think it’s time to look a bit more seriously.

20. To start, not all of the features being asked for are big or WP dependent. We can’t see any reason why TS isn’t offering options for the latest Recaptcha version, especially when that version is YEARS old at this point. Seriously, what’s the deal? We had to completely abandon TS Forms for end users, and that was a major contributing factor.

    And what does WP have to do with investigating / refactoring code to make the plugin faster / smarter? Nothing WP is doing is stopping you from looking into new frameworks and query methods. We use Yootheme for theme building (it’s like Elementor), and their Dynamic Content query speed blows TS out of the water because they build everything with Vue and GraphQL.

    Look, your support is fantastic. Easily the best support of any service or plugin we pay for. And we are VERY thankful you listened to users and came to your senses on that terrible “deleting old forum posts” idea.

    It would be nice though, especially if you’re not planning to develop anything new for the next 18 months, for you to restore legacy documentation in full. Every time we click a link in an old forum post it takes us to a Blocks tutorial which is extremely unhelpful. I still can’t understand why you would completely erase a video which explains how to make a “CLICK TO COMPARE” tool with Views!? We’re not asking that you undo all these redirects, but if you could make all that old material accessible it would take the edge off – heck make it downloadable from the cloud as PDFs and MOVs files if you need to.

    As others have posted, not everyone can use Blocks. Views are still hugely powerful especially for advanced users who need to solve really complex query paths. This dilemma you’re facing – waiting on WP – is exactly why you shouldn’t be so heavily invested in their path. Making Views a legacy plugin was a mistake. You could be offering Blocks for people who want to strictly follow the Gutenberg path, while also offering new versions of Views with cutting edge code, giving people a superior alternative. Thus in the times where WP is stagnant, Toolset wouldn’t be.

    • Have to agree with ShawnW on this. While there has been some great steps forward either the block editor there are many place where it falls down, notably in the area of styling st the main breakpoints for the most popular screen size and linked to this the live preview of these in the editor. Ironic that it is Toolset and Kadence who have put effort into some solution to this when the Gutenberg team should have cracked this years ago, way before FSE was considered. And then we see how inconsistent and unintuitive FSE is compared to what others like Toolset and the main page builders do anyway in a far better manner.

      I suspect then that Matt M ad the core WP team are the problem and it’s no just Toolset that is stymied and thwarted in their roadmap for the future.

      With this in mind, and in the interim, best bale would be for On the Go Systems to review what they have achieved in the last ten years in light of all the feedback from users and polish what they have, especially in the areas where Toolset always works best, using the old roll it yourself interface where you build with pure html, css and js. Once the block editor grows up, port over the new features bit by bit.

      I’ll end by adding, the sort of curmudgeonly/narrow mindset that we see in some technology is why we end up with stuff that never really works in a user friendly manner. This isn’t aimed at Toolset, suggests that we shouldn’t be hitched totally to the block editor wagon. It needs to be challenged and in doing so may lead to a better product because as it stands there are many thing not addressed by the new editor.

    • Yes! I could not agree more with your post. My exact thoughts and frustrations. Speed/optimizations improvements are a clear need with ToolSet. And so many feature requests I’ve made and see countless that others have made have nothing at all to do with FSE… and have been repeated for years in the forums. And making View legacy was indeed a big mistake.

      Toolset should really, deeply consider what you have written.

    • Hi, Shawn! Thank you for your comments and points, which seem to be shared by more users as well. I will forward them all to the team.

21. Your plans sound very sensible to me. I love Toolset, it adds enormous value to my site, meaning: I wouldn’t have been to build my webite the way it is without Toolset. I will definitely stay around.

    • Thanks a lot, Gabriele! 🙂

22. Appreciate the update.

    I’d like to echo some of what shawnW-3 said above about legacy documentation. With nothing in the near future for getting the Blocks stuff up to feature parity with the legacy, I’m going to lean into the legacy for projects currently under construction.

    • Thanks, Darryl, I will definitely discuss the topic of legacy docs with my team.

23. I’m a big Toolset user with over 100+ websites over the last 10 years. The biggest mistake is moving all updates to Gutenberg. You have such a powerful tool -> Types & Views. Nobody is waiting on a Gutenberg version, at least no power-user and nobody is waiting on a live-site-update version.

    I recently worked with WP Gridbuilder and it was very fast, very simpel and had many high level features. It was a great experience.

    I can only hope you will see the light again and refocus on the legacy Types & Views and update it with the latest technologies to make it blazing fast with all the cool features we need.

    • Totally agree with you Gille, and with most of the other commenters.
      The Toolset team doesn’t have to abandon ALL dev work, they can just re-focus their efforts until the dust clears on FSE.
      Things like enhancing performance, security, privacy, documentation. Bug fixing, of course. Plus adding much requested features, those that are totally not related to Gutenberg or FSE.
      Let’s hope this will be the direction from now on, and not a totally stale product…

    • TS needs to move towards data programming features and away from the clunky/slow blocks design features. For us TS was a way to speed up database coding – it would be better to have more tools to make that aspect faster. Easier ways to query, etc.

    • Thanks for your comments, Gille, Yuda, and Malaga! It’s an interesting take and I will be sharing it with the team. On a personal note, I think that in the long term, the community can ignore new, central features only for a limited amount of time. But sooner or later, users will all have to embrace blocks and FSE in some way or another or find another platform.

      • Dario, thanks for the feedback. I kindly disagree on the fact that user will be forced to embrace blocks and FSE. The mainstream user maybe, but the more experienced user will use the legacy plugins without blinking an eye. Toolset became so big because you have such a power-user group using the plugin. Look at Metabox, WP Grid builder, etc.. they all have a key-focus -> Latest codex , fast updates, many new features, … without focussing solely on blocks and FSE. The provide blocks for it, but just to embed what it is made in the backend.

        Toolset can become a top-3 query plugin but you will have to refocus your resources.

        Good luck and I can only hope you will.

        • even if they did that, they would need to split apart blocks into it’s own tool. if blocks was to go away sites will flat out break that use it! that’s a LOT of sites. Blocks isn’t perfect it needs some work to be as good as generate blocks etc but people use it, in fact it’s 90% of what I use toolset for because I needed a good container block and toolset was the best when it released. It no longer holds that title but the integration of dynamic content that it has it’s still one of the best ones if you already own toolset there would be no reason to install another. Split apart toolset into 3 different plugins, Views/types/blocks that can all be activated independently, YES PLEASE! refocus and make toolset just another WP query plugin? no thank you, I’ll just use a custom block when needed and other less technical user have a TON of options out there these days for that. and the current toolset query only has one fundamental issue it uses the old/slow non restapi to fetch posts.

24. We love Toolset for the way it combines custom fields and relationships between posts. These basic structural benefits are important even independent of “Views” or “Full Site Editing”. These fundamental tools help us build more thoughtful WordPress sites.

    We hope that whatever lies in Toolset’s future, you find a way to maintain this core functionality.

    If you find you can no longer do so, we hope that you make Toolset’s code available on Github for others to maintain. Is it there already?

    • Hi, Eric and thank you for the comment! We certainly plan to keep actively maintaining Toolset for years to come. To answer your question, no Toolset’s code is not available on Github or publically.

    • I agree with Eric here. The relationships set up is something I haven’t seen replicated in other alternatives for custom post types. I have used relationships in a number of sites a and if Toolset was disappear it would be a big headache for me.

      On feature requests and improvements relating to relationships, I have requested frequently that the in post mechanism of connecting to different posts should have the option to disable the delete and add a post from a different post type. This is a dangerous set up, potentially leaving orphaned children and contrary to good database design. That’s a small thing Toolset could be doing in the interim.

25. This will feel like toolset is abandoned.
    And after 18 months It probably will be. Because other block libraries supports dynamic data in their blocks as well, and they will probably support the FSE along the way.

    So if toolset halts feature development in 18 months, then developers will have to use the other libraries which evolves.

    So I believe that developers will not dare to trust that Toolset will not be left behind.

    The result will be that toolset gets abandoned. It already kind of feels like it, with the lack of updates recently.

    I don’t think it’s wise, but I understand that you can’t pull ressources into development until FSE gets stabel.

    • Hi, Henrik! This is definitely not our plan. As per the announcement, we’re actively maintaining Toolset which means it will be compatible with all upcoming versions of WordPress. This includes keeping an eye (and code) on any libraries and other dependencies in Toolset plugins.

      • This post is just a self fulfilling prophecy.

        Other plugins will stop supporting toolset. They can’t risk putting development and support resources in their product, and developers using those plugins will stop renewing toolset licenses.

        New licenses for toolset will not be acquired, because the project will be seen as dead.

        OTGS, will have to reduce resources even more.

        And when you are finally ready to jump back in the gap has been filled by other tools.

        This announcement was a huge mistake. With no new feature releases to types or blocks, this product will die.

        • THIS ^ 100%

          Self-fulfilling prophesy. See my comments before about our team phasing out TS Forms, and recognize that it’s just the beginning.

          Also, Dario, with all due respect, you seem to think that FSE and Gutenberg is the only future…

          Please look at Theme Builders with Dynamic Content and SEE that there is a vastly superior alternative for people who want drag and drop design combined with advanced query features.

          They’re fast and sophisticated and they’re quickly replacing BOTH Views and Blocks with advanced content filtering. I can’t abandon Views just yet. I don’t want to for the record… But as OTGS keeps making such baffling decisions, like removing documentation and refusing to provide speed improvements … How could we not double our efforts to replace TS entirely?

          That is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

          I just don’t understand tying your fate so closely to WP especially when they’re working to make plugins like Blocks obsolete. The query block is too basic, sure, but it’s just the beginning, especially when you’re not going to be improving it for the next 18 months.

          Do what theme builders are doing, and be a better solution that people can get excited about.

          • THIS ^ 🙂

26. I hope Toolset continues for a long time. Who knows, to do a survey of which new features are the most requested and do them. For example, calendar.
    As far as I know, it’s the most complete plugin for post types. And what it doesn’t have, I end up doing with PHP, JS and MySQL or some other very well analyzed and chosen plugin.
    Thank you!

    • Thanks, Fernando for your kind words, we’re here to stay! 🙂

27. TL;DR… “What’s Next For Toolset”… The END!

    If you’re taking anything away from this blog post other than Toolset is a almost certainly a dead plug-in, you’re very naive.

    Saying that you’re not gonna add new features or improvements for 2.5 years(as you’ve added nothing over the past year) because WP is changing is ridiculous. I have wondered how theme developers etc are gonna evolve as FSE gets better, but if you can’t see a future for Toolset because of that, then you should just say so. I’d understand if you weren’t willing to tackle really big features that are already on the WP roadmap, but there are, and have been for years, tons of smaller improvements that could be made to the existing blocks that would make a world of difference… primarily much more thorough styling options in my case.

    My personal interpretation of this blog post is that you’re gonna maintain Toolset for the next one and half years, then will almost certainly turn the lights off. Sorry, but I won’t stick around and take that risk. It’s been frustrating enough to see no progress for the past year, there’s no chance I’m gonna renew a license for a product that has no future planned. I’m guessing you’ve probably let a bunch of your developers go to make your last couple years in operation more profitable before you close up shop which is why you can’t deliver new features.

    Although I clearly find the news disappointing, I wish all the staff at OTGS good luck in an uncertain future.

    To the users of Toolset, I encourage you to make plans and find possible alternatives to Toolset in the near future just in case. Don’t wait until a year from now and say you weren’t warned when Toolset ceases operation. TODAY was your warning.

    Thankfully after over 20 years, I’m actually on my way out of the web development business, so the pain of losing Toolset will be short lived.

    • Hi, Peter, thanks for your comment. There are no plans to shut down Toolset but I understand your frustration.

28. Life follows a cycle of birth, growth, and death. This is true for all things, whether they are plants, animals, humans or projects. We have to accept that Toolset is nearing the end of its useful life.

    • Hi, Alpha, thank you for the thoughts but still, we believe Toolset is far from the “end of its useful life”. It still works, it still has a ton of features, and we’re still very actively maintaining it.

29. Please, please don’t go anywhere. We rely on you and I develop sites for clients using Toolset. Your support is second to none. I recommend you all over the place on Social Media – but will feel a bit conflicted doing that after your post. There must be lots of fine tuning you can do that isn’t reliant on the FSE roadmap. But just don’t stand still entirely. 🤞

    • Thanks a lot for your kind words, Lindsay. Again, we don’t plan on going anywhere. 🙂

30. There are a million new features that can be added to Toolset that are completely unrelated to FSE that Toolset needs and many of them have been requested for years. This is just an excuse to let the project die. 🙁

    • Hi, Francisco. I understand your disappointment, but assure you that there is no intention of letting the project die.

    • I agree, FSE does not affect the core features we could have added and have requested for years now. I’d even be willing to pay more if I felt I could trust TS after all they’ve done to their legacy views userbase recently.

31. Seems many users aren’t using Toolset blocks? I started using it and actually liked it better. Anyway, I hope you come to your senses and continue develop Toolset as the complement to WordPress we need. Exactly what that is may change over time and WP versions but I’m sure Toolset could continue to be relevant for a long time if you look at your options.
    I will continue to support you until then.

    • Thanks, Jesper, we appreciate your support very much! 🙂

    • Agreed. Took a while to dig into but I am liking it a lot too.

32. I’ve been using Toolset for a very long time—at least 10 years. Fantastic suite of plugins, and the support has always been excellent. I can appreciate the difficult situation that FSE puts you in with regard to mapping out the future, and I think your approach to that seems very reasonable. Whatever the future holds, I just want to express my gratitude for the great work you guys have been doing all these years!

    • Thanks a lot, Clay!

33. I really hate Gutenberg…. please don’t go anywhere! I much prefer to build with layouts and views, where I have control, like the interface, and don’t get 8000 unnecessary lines of code added.

    • Thanks, Ashleigh, we’re not going anywhere! 🙂

34. I really wish Toolset would support ClassicPress fork of WordPress, no Gutenberg/FSE nonse. Better performance than WordPress, more stable, more reliable.

    • I will forward this to our team. Thanks, Viktor!

    • I second that!!

    • I third that!

      I run toolset successfully on CP since a while and apart of a few quirks it’s actually working great. You’ve to shim a few of the blocks-only functions, to avoid fatal errors, and of course it’d probably be better to strip out the Gutenberg code completely if supporting CP officially, but so far I’m pretty happy with that „legacy“ setup.

      This would be really an awesome move. You’d be the „first“ again, no doubt with that, and not need to follow a unclear development path, since CP fully focuses on keeping things stable rather than constantly adding (and changing) things.

    • +1 🙂

    • Hi, Viktor, Jay, Beda, and Kostas! Again, thank you for your comments and enthusiasm. I just wanted to clarify our approach to switching to forks like ClassicPress. We get it, and it’s great that it works, but it works for you and your clients, and it would work for a small, minority group of site developers. And it’s really cool, I get it, however, for us, this is not a viable market, it’s simply not big enough to sustain the Toolset project.

      • Thanks for your reply Dario. You don’t have to switch completely. I understand the economics. All you need to do is simply make Toolset compatible with ClassicPress, which is make it compatible with WordPress 4.9. This basically means for WordPress 5.0+ functions, check if classicpress_version function exists and if it does then don’t include those 5.0+ functions. Guide here:
        https://docs.classicpress.net/developer-guides/best-practice-to-detect-a-classicpress-install/

        ClassicPress backports a lot of the features from WordPress, as long as they are not Gutenberg/FSE related. So if there are missing functions you need, you can request them and ClassicPress team can work on backporting them.

        This wouldn’t replace WordPress, but it would open another avenue to monetize as ClassicPress grows. If you announce your support for ClassicPress, based on the comments in this post, there would be many users that would try it for the first time and most likely use it for their projects. ClassicPress is a lot better match for the features Toolset offers than WordPress with Gutenberg/FSE.

        You could write a blog post asking users for feedback on supporting ClassicPress, see what they say in the comments.

        And again, I wouldn’t drop WordPress. Just make Toolset compatible with ClassicPress to give your users more options to build websites.

35. Sad to read this. I have been using Toolset for many years. I primarily use legacy views and front end cred forms for web apps.

    Back in 2017-2018, I got very excited about the direction they were heading – which included announcements about fixing and improving their brittle cred frontend form problems, fixing the issues with repeating field groups on the frontend, etc… And the day never came. They instead moved to focusing on GB/blocks, now …?

    I hate to say, I’m one foot out the door… after nearly a decade. 😖

    • Hi, Jay! Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts on this. I understand how you feel and can only reiterate that we’re not planning to go anywhere.

    • I feel your pain Jay, you’re not alone on this. The sad thing is TS is still better than most options (if you are using Legacy views) but since we’re not getting any improvements to that it’s also very concerning for me. I’m taking it upon myself to try to help the userbase by offering everyone a Poll to fill out.

    • My sentiments exactly. I also use toolset for web apps and have yet to find anything as feature-complete.

      I haven’t bought it to try out yet, but crocoblocks jetengine has been on my radar for a bit now. This announcement has me putting renewed effort into finding an alternative.

      I’ve actually done some basic development using google sheets as a backend on https://www.glideapps.com/ – pretty decent nocode tool, but very basic. Things like conditional display just aren’t there.

36. Hi Dario,
    thanks for sharing some info about TS future. I am positive and want to think that there are no “hidden” communications behind your message. I understand that TS has thousands of great funcionalities already and it must be complex to make them all compatible within the new WP paradigms that, like it or not, they are here to stay and TS must comply. Consequently I can agree that new modules/plugins are not critical at this stage, but I also agree with who thinks that some really basic features are missing or could be improved, features that force users to buy other plugins to fill the gaps, meaning this that another licences need to be paid for and another provider need to be trusted. A few examples: the login form is outdated, missing the possibility to add captcha and/or checkboxes for accepting legal documents that nowadays are a must like cookie policy, terms & conditions, privacy, etc.; need to add a function to convert currency separators; no way to have a calculated field shortcode in order to simply perform basic calculations directly on the page (Field3 = Field1+Field2+…); etc. Why don’t you make a post like this where people could raise thir flags on most wanted BASIC features that don’t mean a full new module development ?

    I don’t understand why a lot of TS users here refuse to try Gutemberg. I was fine with my trusted Avada + Views before, but I decided to take the leap and moved to Kadence blocks and I have to say that I wasn’t disappointed: overall Gutemberg is still quite cumbersome and slow, but it didn’t take too long to learn, works fine and a “normal” user can achieve almost everything could be achieved with a classic editor + Views, that BTW I still use in some occasions.
    I close confirming once again that your support is FANTASTIC, keep up the good work ! thanks

    • Thanks a lot, Nicolas, for your support and your comment. I will discuss them all with the team soon.

    • Hi Nicolas, I also use Blocks heavily now but trying to build a view with blocks is just not flexible enough. That’s why it’s a must for us to use custom HTML and CSS to get our view results looking awesome. Also, Views has a few advanced features that the block view does not offer.

      • Hi Ben, you are right, I use a mix of the two too, depending on the complexity of the view.

37. Since you stopped actively developing WPML a long time ago and now stopping with Toolset, what do you actually do?

    • Hi, Vojkan! I think you mixed up WPML with some other plugin because it’s still being very actively developed.

38. Been a long term supporter of Toolset. This announcement was not wise – particularly when paired with a request for us to continue to urge people to use the plugin. There are many features and functionalities and blocks that could have been added.

    A calendar block or field for instance.

    I fear that that an immediate reaction of some will be to seek alternatives; and for new customers to more seriously consider alternatives.

    I hope I am wrong about my fears.

    I hope Toolset continues to exist well into the future.

    • Thanks for the comment and your thoughts, Andrew! As with others, I will forward them to the team.

    • I’m with you, Andrew, well said. I’m taking it upon myself to try to help the userbase by offering everyone a Poll to fill out.

    • I’ve been weighing a purchase of CrocoBlocks JetEngine for a while. I don’t think it has anything like Toolset’s Access plugin though, which is vital for the sort of things I do with toolset. TBH there’s not anything I’ve found that is quite as good (despite the few shortcomings it may have) as toolset.

      This is a very disheartening announcement.

39. Hi
    Thanks for the update. I’ve been using Types for years, and have built well over 100 websites using it – I don’t use Views, as I prefer to keep layout stuff away from the database, so I’ve been working programatically with templates and there’s never been a task it couldn’t handle.

    I do hope support continues as with such a large legacy of sites behind me I’d hate to think they may stop working at some point.

    One ongoing bug that still seems to need ironed out is the WYSIWYG editor which often fails to save changes unless you switch to text/html view. Is this going to be fixed soon?

    • Thanks, Craig! Did you create a ticket for this WYSIWYG issue? If so, can you please share it here?

      • Seems to be logged already here:

        https://toolset.com/errata/visual-tab-of-wysiwyg-fields-may-not-initialize-correctly-appear-not-to-save-data/

        Wasn’t working on a site I’m developing on 3.4.14 but have just updated it to .16 and it appears to be fixed now, thanks!

        • Cool, thanks for the update Craig! I’m glad it was fixed. 🙂

40. This is a duplicate of a comment I made in reply to Daríos update in the Facebook group post.

    As one of the most vocal critics/skeptics here, first I would like to say thanks for the response and reassurance that Toolset isn’t going anywhere. That’s the number one concern for me and many others, as there isn’t anything that comes close to comparing to it.

    However, as with the original announcement, I yet again get the feeling that a lot of important (and deeply discussed) issues have been side-stepped here and it leaves me continuing to feel uneasy/skeptical about Toolset.

    1. Of course there are costs to maintaining and supporting Toolset. I can’t imagine that anyone said or expected otherwise. But surely the costs are far lower than doing that AND actively developing new features… Shouldn’t the price reflect the fact that you’re no longer going to be doing that?

    2. One of the most common comments here and on the blog post is to the effect of “we understand that you need to wait to see where FSE goes, but that has no bearing on developing many other features that have been requested for years, as well as refining performance, new integrations etc…” Similarly, there’s been lots of feedback about how feature requests just enter a black hole, receiving no response, let alone action. Both of these concerns have gone completely unaddressed.

    3. Related to your #3 and my #2, putting aside the disappearance of the legacy documentation, the documentation is an absolute mess. I went into enormous detail about this with the prior fiasco, specifically that Toolset doesn’t even seem to use Toolset – it’s incredibly slow to browse, search is brutal, there’s no filtering, etc… It’s also just strewn about in numerous places that are poorly linked, or even unlinked.

    Again, we all deeply appreciate Toolset – the product and tech support has no peer. But there’s a continued, seemingly deliberate, complete lack of communication and attention to/respect for clients. Yet you seem like very decent people, so what’s the issue?

    Reading between the lines (as we’ve unfortunately forced to do), it seems clear that a lack of resources is at the root of all of the above and your official announced indefinite pause of development. So, any strategies formed and actions taken should be in service of increasing subscriptions. Do you really think that this announcement will result in anything positive?

    Here’s the real problem with Toolset – there is NOTHING online about Toolset. No blog posts, no YouTube videos, no webinars, no WordCamp or other seminar/summit presentations, NO ANYTHING. I and many others shout its praiseS wherever we go, and we’re just met with blank stares or even confusion – no one has ever heard of it, and they don’t even take it seriously when recommended. How is this possible?!

    Let me help you get some clarity on the situation and present a fairly reasonable starting point for a new and flourishing direction.

    First and foremost, you need to get someone on the team who has a clue about marketing to start getting the word out. If you don’t do this, it will die sooner or later, but probably sooner.

    Second, you need to get your documentation and website in order. It’s a disaster and a major turn-off when people do actually check it out.

    Third, you need to actually start paying attention to customers/the “community”. Create a public feature request/roadmap voting system. It’ll help define and refine the priorities so that you don’t feel like you’re getting pulled in a million directions by external, uncontrollable FSE forces. It’ll also help users feel heard and appreciated.

    Fourth, you need to keep developing the product, not just maintaining it. Why would any prospective customer want to consider, let alone subscribe to, something that has officially announced they aren’t doing any more development, and whose changelog already shows negligible development for the past year? There’s a ton of things you could and should be doing independent of FSE. Moreover, as Toolset tries to tread water, maybe some of the alternatives will meaningfully catch up to the point where Toolset is no longer in a league of it’s own – I’ll certainly be monitoring their progress regularly, rather than contentedly ignoring them all.

    Fifth, seriously consider restructuring the legacy LTD licenses. It’s a dead weight dragging you down. Many such license holders here have said they’d actually WANT to start paying an annual fee – they both feel guilty for getting so much for nothing and also see the writing on the wall and would rather pay something than get a defunct product for free.

    Sixth, you might even consider increasing the price on the standard license – Toolset offers tremendous value in comparison to the competitors. But, obviously, you’ll need to prove to us that we’ll actually be receiving something for these increased fees, which will be even more difficult and necessary following this announcement.

    Seventh, consider splitting up the modules into different subscriptions. Legacy users don’t want/need the new stuff. And most users don’t want/need all of the modules – I don’t need woocommerce, for example.

    Overall, there’s no reason at all for you to be admitting defeat in the face of uncertainty. There’s SO MUCH that you could be doing to improve Toolset – both the product and the commercial entity. I think everyone would prefer a future where Toolset continues to grow and enable amazing dynamic websites rather than be begrudgingly maintained, seemingly at a loss (which, let’s be honest here, will only happen for so long before being abandoned…)

    I’d be more than happy to discuss this further with anyone on your team. Better yet, this would be better discussed in the open, as a community – there’s a lot of very smart and experienced people who will surely have creative ideas on how to right the ship.

    I beg you not to sidestep any of the above – we all see/sense whatever vulnerability you’ve been trying to hide/gloss-over and it only serves to worsen the trust and situation when you do so. Help us help you help us.

    • I’m taking it upon myself to try to help the userbase by offering everyone a Poll to fill out. I agree with everything you’ve said in full.

    • Hi, Nick. Thank you for your comments here and on Toolset’s Facebook group. Allow me to add a few more short comments.

      First, I’d like to address the topic of trust. We made this announcement exactly because of the fact that we have always been honest with our clients. And as we made this decision, we could have kept quiet for at least another year or so. However, that’s not how we work or who we are. You ask me if I think this will make any good to Toolset. Monetary, probably not. But trust-wise, I actually hope it does because it proves a) our transparency, and b) our devotion to keeping Toolset going. We don’t gloss over anything, if we did, we would not be having this discussion now. And again, we are aware of the many sites out there powered by Toolset which is why again, we are not abandoning Toolset. It will continue to work, it will continue to be available, and you will have access to our support.

      Next, as the company’s Content Manager, I would like to mention documentation again. All the complaints about it come from people using legacy, shortcode-based Views. Most of the feedback we received about documentation from clients using Blocks is actually excellent, they’re happy and really like it. I don’t know if you are aware but we do actually have a pretty big section with legacy documentation. And, based on the recent feedback, we will be expanding it further by bringing back more of it from the archive. The only thing to note here is that it will not be indexed by Google, on purpose. We had that in the past and it was a complete mess where people using both legacy and Block workflows didn’t know which documentation pages are for them.

      Next, a bit about the general situation. When WordPress ventured into its Gutenberg-first future, we thought that Toolset finally found a page builder, built into the core, which we can leverage for visual building of Toolset components. And while Gutenberg’s development had its challenges, it still advanced with time and this could have actually worked. However, as Full Site Editing was introduced WordPress made it clear that they’re going for the whole thing there. So, ultimately, at this point, they’re slowly adding features that sooner or later will make Toolset (and many other plugins), in the way it is today, redundant. The best example is the native Loop Query block. Of course, it cannot compete with Toolset Views at the moment, but it aims directly at it. And look, it happens, we went for it but it turned into a direction that’s not ideal for Toolset to say the least.

      This brings me to the development point. The “new Toolset” is based on Gutenberg and blocks. It leverages new technologies and libraries and is generally up to date on the code level. The legacy Views and Forms, however, are not. To really push the product like Forms forward, it would need to be rewritten to be block-based, and that was indeed our original plan. However, now, it simply doesn’t make business sense to do so. It is an enormous project that cannot be profitable in this market, at this time. I am sorry, but it simply cannot, we did the numbers.

      So, again, we cannot and do not want to compete with our own platform. It’s simply not viable in the business sense. This includes the comments to go all-in with the legacy Views/shortcodes approach and leverage something like ClassicPress. This all is too niche and too small to sustain a project like Toolset.

      Finally, I do not want to “sidestep” any comments related to marketing Toolset but I honestly have no comments. It is such a complex topic and requires one to have the inside information about everything. In short, it’s not something we can (or want to) have a forum/community discussion over.

      To sum up, we decided to wait and see where WordPress goes with Full Site Editing. What we hope to see is a more clear picture of where Full Site Editing ends up and which opportunities for Toolset remain financially viable. In the meantime, we’re staying here, fully supporting Toolset, and updating it to make sure it’s working with all upcoming WordPress versions.

      • Hi Dario,

        Very sorry to see the point you make about the general situation with WordPress. It indicates how WordPress has been taken in a very closed and arrogant direction with the Gutenberg Project. In itself the block editor is not all bad but is hobbled by the attitudes of its creators and how all the good work of companies like On The Go Systems are, as you say it, made redundant. This is very sad.

        On a personal level it means that it is likely I will have to spent time, over the next number of years re-adjusting sites I have mede for clients to work in a new way where the deep integration I implemented with Toolset may potentially break. It’s at times like this that my gut reaction is to walk away from computers all together… but we are generally a decent crowd, up to help people who. have invested in our work.

        Going back to WordPress and the Gutenberg project, I have said this before, the block editor should have been engineered to with a closed set of layout blocks (sections, rows, columns etc.) and then all the other usual block elements. An API should have been then presented to all third party plugin vendors and page builders to add their own interfaces with bells and whistles. Deactivate any of these and then at least a site would retain some form of integrity relating to content and basic layout.

        On the face of it the block editor is now opening opportunities for a lot of new issues other than those it purports to solve. We are not given a very good workflow in relation to media queries and the main device breakpoints. There is no version set up to cater for data entry, where the back end of each post instance can be set to just custom fields, the front end of the post designed to a template elsewhere. FSE seems to be an answer that doesn’t make any sense. Irony of ironies, even WooCommerce is stuck in Classic mode. For one of Automatics main products this sure is odd?

        I see the poll below, have filled it. I sure hope we can be persuasive in seeing something new in the future.

        • Hi, Stephen, and thank you for your thoughtful response. Actually, your summary of what Gutenberg should have been is exactly what we were hoping to see. A nice, usable, page builder that leaves room for others to add all the “bells and whistles” as you put it. Well, let’s see how it goes.

          • Yes, that’s it. All the way, since the start of the Gutenberg project, there doesn’t seem to have been a sense of generosity to the community of third party developers who had filled in the gaps that had been left in WordPress, the block editor coming late to the game.

            There was no invitation to third party builders to get on board. Nothing about the final product that was really attractive in terms of page builders flocking to a solid foundation that addressed compatibility and reliable roadmap into the future.

            I use Divi and I would love to work with a framework whereby, if working with a module, it would work through a common block implemented by the block editor and if Toolset was I stalled its features would be available, all this done with the insurance that it would continue to work into the future.

            I managed to discuss the his and other suggestions with Joen A. from the Gutenberg team on a number of occasions, and while he could see the rational of my suggestions, he didn’t see that the team overall would be receptive to these; there was already a vision set in stone. This seems to be the problem with WordPress at the moment.

41. First, let me say the Toolset support team is great! But as others have pointed out the leadership team has had me very concerned for a couple of years now. The comments about lack of marketing are also very concerning (but this seems to be a problem for many WP plugin companies in general). I’ve always felt it very odd that the TS leadership team does not get feedback from their userbase. They get an idea and just go do it regardless of how it affects us.

    So I’m taking it upon myself to try to help the userbase by offering everyone a Poll to fill out. The poll will show instant results to anyone who takes the time to fill it in. I’m happy to share the results with the TS team once everyone has had a chance to take the short poll.

    For those of us that are developers or power users of Toolset (check out this new FB power users group), the writing has been on the wall for several years now that we’re getting pushed out or pushed aside. The first warnings came when Views was set to “Legacy Views” and the very limited and weak Blocks were created as the main feature of Toolset which stole development time/power from TS’s core value. After that, we systematically had all our documentation hidden, and eventually, the documentation was deleted (thank God they gave us that back).

    I’m hoping the core group of power users and developers can come together to ensure we all get to keep the features we need with new features being added often (like the good old days before Blocks). There is a solution one way or another if there are enough of us to band together (and I’m not sure there is but that’s what the poll is for). Even if that would regrettably mean moving to another solution and helping each other with training and the learning curves (God forbid though b/c I love Toolset).

    -Best Regards to the TS team and fellow users.

    • Hi, Benjamin. Thank you for your comment. I would just like to be open with you and reiterate that moving Toolset’s focus back to legacy/shortcode Views will simply not happen. The user base for this is simply too small to sustain a project like Toolset. It’s too niche and wouldn’t be financially viable at all for us.

      • Dario, the community is constantly asking to refocus on the legacy/shortcode views. Don’t just refocus but reboot it. Make it better, faster, full of features -> and get the right pricing for it. Toolset is one of the best query plugins on the market, use this advantage!

      • Dario, thank you for the honesty. It’s really helpful for those of us that use the API and advanced functionality of Toolset to streamline our development and save time. I realize Toolset has always been open about being “No PHP/Code” but the crazy thing is the API and general legacy views setup is better than most if not all options out there for power users/developers. I wish the TS team could see this value and find a way to capitalize on it. You could easily capture a large part of the ACF group and other similar solutions if you did. -Best regards

42. The timing of this post and the way the facts were presented, I think, were inappropriate, in my opinion.

    If you really have the desire to continue this project, you have to make options, including asking for help from your customers, but perhaps the lack of a clear vision will result in failure and certainly death of the project.

    Continuing to develop is part of the life-sustaining process of your products, and it would have been better to put options and possibilities, like for example making Toolset Blocks to be an independent tool such as(GenerateBlocks or Spectra) instead of affecting the entire Toolset.

    I think it would be a better way to see for alternatives ideas without affecting the commercial side of Toolset because of the way things move NOW probably WPML also see the same result.

    • I’ve been recommending to Toolset for ages that they should release a blocks plugin called something like ToolBlox which would have a cheap entry price for a version with little or no dynamic functionality to drive on-boarding and then have an upgrade path to a higher priced version(s) with the full Toolset functionality. I warned them that if they didn’t, they’d end up a niche product that only appeals to the most advanced users… and here we are.

      If WordPress is moving to blocks, there will obviously be demand for block plugins… and if you are early to this market people will be more likely to invest in your system and stick with it. OTGS/Toolset should have jumped on this market long ago since they’re already building blocks but they kept going on about not stepping on their partners… You know, the same partners who dropped compatibility with Toolset and are actually still developing their products including adding dynamic functionality.

      You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

43. I guess this means the Calendar view isn’t coming any time soon.

44. I’ll make my last comment here on the reluctance to go back to the investing in legacy views. Any platform the restricts itself, or third party resting it, in leaving space to create in raw html, css and js, is limiting itself in the world of web design and storing up problems for the future.

45. I’m using Toolset for about 4 years now…

    When Gutenberg and all its new features were released, I first thought that I can phase out Toolset too sometimes in the future…

    But no, instead I’m still using and loving Toolset. Toolset Views is a very, very good addition to Gutenberg.

    My stack is basically: “Standard” WP with FSE (Blockbase as parent theme) + ACF Pro + Toolset Views (+ WPML).

    What I would like to see for Toolset in the near future:

    * Improved Views quality for Gutenberg… There are too many small errors
    * (My thought: finally get rid of old stuff and just concentrate on FSE)
    * (get rid of jQuery, will improve page performance even more)

    I’m also using Types, Forms and Access here and there, but not really like them. These really would need some love. Especially Types could be improved a lot.

    • Hi, Adrian! Thank you for your comment, it’s really interesting and shows how different Toolset users prefer different Toolset features in different ways. 🙂

46. I’m glad everyone is still extremely efficient, especially for advanced users who need to tackle really complex query paths. My colleagues are happy that you have created such a set of tools!
    Thanks from the development team