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A message from Mina:

The Cloisters opened for business on August 1, 2008 with the publication of the Maiden Voyage theme. That was the beginning of over 2 years of a fantastic journey. Along with having a lot of fun I contributed to a community that gives a lot to millions of people. My themes were much more successful than I could have ever imagined and for that I am truly grateful. I also am happy to have met many wonderful people who have taught me much. Therefore it is with great sadness that I have to announce that I am closing the doors. I’ll leave the forum up for a while as there is some good information there via other’s questions, but registrations are closed and the board will be read-only.

There are 2 main reasons for this, financial and personal which I’ll explain a bit.

With the downfall of the economy things have been getting tougher and tougher. The cost of all living expenses has gone steadily up over the past few years while my income has basically remained the same. For a while I kept the server going with donations from many many kind folks and by hiring out to do custom themes, but everyone is feeling the pinch these days and that just isn’t enough. I’ve already cut unnecessary things out of my budget and still need to lose more. Having held on to my server for as long as I could it’s now time to cut it…next will probably be my internet connection itself. I’m not destitute but I have to put important things first. I’m sure many of you know what I’m talking about. My server is still paid for several months yet but I feel it’s best to do this now.

The personal reasons I won’t go into in detail but with everything going on at my job (which is still uncertain) and in my life, I just don’t have the energy or the time to come up with good solid themes anymore. The inspiration seems to have gone on vacation or something and hasn’t given me a return date.

I’m hopeful that things will pick up in every aspect in the future and maybe I can make a comeback. Until that time, I just wanted to thank the WordPress community for making this great software available for us and a huge thank you to all the people who have used my themes and shown support both monetary and in other ways. You’ll never know how much I appreciate it all.

Thanks and take care,
Mina

Anyway, stay tuned in the next few days to learn more about it!

Now normally for small upgrades that are usually just security fixes I’ll do the automatic upgrade (after ALWAYS backing up) that is part of WP, but when it comes to major version changes (1.x to 2.x and now 2.9.2 to 3.0) or when there are new functions added I’ll do a clean install just to kind of start new. This is where the subdirectories come in handy. I can get the new blog up and running and testing out themes and plugins to make sure everything is working as it should be without any downtime. Install the new blog, import my backup to get all my content in place, activate my themes and plugins and put it through it’s paces until I’m satisfied that all is well. Then simply make the new blog live and you’re good to go!

There is a great article on basic security for setting up your blog from Weblog Tools Collection that I recommend everyone read.

So that is my suggestion, mainly to folks who are new to WordPress so they can maybe avoid a disaster.

I quickly ran all my themes through it to see if there would be any problems using them on the new version and so far haven’t seen any issues. Of course they may be some glitches with some of the new features that will be included in the new 3.0 but the upshot is that if you are using any of my themes you should be okay if you upgrade (which I strongly suggest you wait until the official version of 3.0 is released). So as it stands I won’t be doing much upgrading of the themes unless something major presents itself.

If you are using a lot of plugins you may wind up with issues there so that’s something to look into before you upgrade.

I would advise you to ONLY download from the link you’ll find on either this site or the link on our support forums. That is to ensure that you get a clean copy without sponsored/spam links or any other nasty stuff that some people add to themes before they redistribute them.

You can find the forum here and there is also a link in the top navigation bar.

So please post theme related issues only to the forum as I will no longer be answering support request emails.

I appreciate your cooperation with this change.