Proposal to Retire Old WordPress Themes

WordPress is considering winding down active maintenance on older themes and implementing a new system of requirements for retiring them, according to a new proposal on WordPress.org. The proposal recommends reducing the support burden on contributors by retiring older default themes after a minimum of five years of support and when usage falls to less than 1% of all WordPress sites as determined by WordPress.org data. The three most recent WordPress default themes would be actively maintained and contributors would continue maintaining the following themes with bug fixes, compatibility updates, and security fixes. The proposal has multiple benefits, in addition to reducing the number of actively supported themes from 13 to 6, but also has the drawback of affecting an estimated 730,000 users who will no longer receive maintenance on their themes. Despite this, general reception to the proposal has been positive, as those using very old themes are usually looking for as few changes to their website as possible. With security updates still available to retired themes, these users would not be forced to update to a newer theme.