Adeptris
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Artisteer,
You could save some of us wasting hours investigating "How-to" for WordPress 3, and add a news article as to what support and when you will be launching Artisteer version 3.
Already the upgrade to WordPress 3 dialog is showing up in the admin panels.
The main issue seems to be the menu support and the vertical menu widget, at least a hot fix for 2.4 should be released now instead of making your customers wait for a major release.
It is not like you have not know about this for sometime, and you look to be behind the game, most free themes have already been updated to work with version 3.
Artisteer as "paid for software" is now not usable and out of date, if we cannot produce themes that work with the new standard features of current wordpress version for 2-3 months, will we get a 25% discount when we upgrade?
I am a supporter of Artisteer and will defend the software in my blog posts, Linkedin and other wordpress groups, but I will find it hard to do this now 
Sort this farce out, make an announcement instead of ignoring Your Customers
I am working on a theme AdText addin, and I have just found myself implementing this in the new WordPress default theme and not an Artisteer one 
Adeptris (Dave.cox@digitalraindrops.net)
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Hunter gatherer
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Thanks for standing up on this Dave.
Artisteer should have patches available now to be considered any type of long term player in the Wordpress theme business. Wordpress 3.0 has been in the works since before 2.9.2 came out in December 2009. All the features and development environment have been available the whole time.
Artisteer knows that there themes would not be compatible with the new menus in Wordpress 3.0. They should patch it immediately. There are only 240 million Wordpress users out there. I would think that don't want the stink of falling behind the most important Wordpress update in years to linger around the water coolers.
I agree 100%
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savoirfaire
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So what is missing and/or needs to be fixed?
There are the menus, for which a 3rd-party has provided a patch.
Also, doesn't WP have some kind of integrated thumbnails that Artisteer doesn't support?
What else? It would be nice to have a list of things Artisteer is behind on providing support for.
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Dave Porter
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I too agree with the thrust of this....
The Artisteer team do not engage their audience (read paying customers).
The news page stays untouched for weeks at a time.
It is sad that they rely on the fact that they have such a good product, but do not keep their valuable customers in the loop (sorry for the WP pun).
They ignore (and I know they say they don't) suggestions from regular visitors to these forums (and support requests) (A new forum for example - how many months has this been discussed & they just repeatably say they are writing their own - how lame, they could install one of the free PHP forum packages in an hour & have a decent forum in use).
Guys you really need to lift your game or you will slip away into the annals of software failures !
They should check out the web sites and forums of notables like WooThemes, Thesis etc... and see how a working community engages it's visitors...
cheers Dave
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Adeptris
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Quote savoirfaire:
So what is missing and/or needs to be fixed?
There are the menus, for which a 3rd-party has provided a patch.
Also, doesn't WP have some kind of integrated thumbnails that Artisteer doesn't support?
What else? It would be nice to have a list of things Artisteer is behind on providing support for.
The theme should have all the functions of the default theme, the new theme is "Twenty Ten" and has the menu's, thumbnail support, post types, footer widgets, customizable header and background, these are the minimum requirements to make Artisteer current.
Artisteer Added Value suggestions:
Vertical Menu: to be able to select a custom menu
Second: horizontal menu selectable from admin
Upload or create a number of headers at design to include in the export
Lets start with a free bugfix for Menu support for version 2 Artisteer users that do not want to upgrade yet.
I am working with the default Twenty Ten theme and not an Artisteer generated one at the moment, so my AdSense theme module I will be releasing at the weekend will not be Artisteer specific.
David 
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savoirfaire
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Artisteer 2.4 doesn't support post types? Say it ain't so!
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mwoffenden
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DNN users have the same frustrations with DNN skins. The Artisteer team does not engage their customers and this is a big problem.
A perfect example is the sorry state of this forum software.
Awesome product? Yes. But it's greatness is tempered, indeed reduced, by the corresponding lack of proper support and customer engagement.
We still have major problems with Articles and their rendering in DNN. Nobody seems to be listening.
At the end of the day this will come back to haunt Artisteer.
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Hunter gatherer
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The only suggestion I have is for those of us that want 3.0 compatibility to start a PR/blog blitz against Artisteer.
The idea is to tag every blog to "Artisteer " and "Wordpress" and "Wordpress 3.0" with comments about the condition of the programs current status and the nature of the company's lack of response.
Use those keywords in comments and they will pop up when people are looking. It might light a small fire under their butts.
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Kevin
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Artisteer is out to lunch on this release. Its as if they were clueless about one of the biggest wordpress releases even. Not a good sign for a premium product.
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Mark C
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Can we presume the same is going to be true when Drupal release version 7 in the coming months?
Do Artisteer KNOW that Drupal are going to release version 7? If not, here's your notice.
C'mon Artisteer, make yourselves proud.
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Ted
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& Jooma upgrade is is n beta 3.
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Mark C
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Wordpress update not supported?
Drupal update not supported?
Joomla update not supported?
Anyone get the feeling that Artisteer is going to be out-of-date very soon?
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Adeptris
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One user in the WordPress forum has created a set of files you can download, replace the Artisteer templates in the application, to bring Artisteer 2.4 inline with WordPress version 3.
But there is a statement that Artisteer many want to revise:
Quote Artisteer Wordpress:Artisteer can help you instantly create professional WordPress themes without having an artistic talent or struggling with Photoshop, Dreamweaver, HTML and CSS.
This statement implies that Artisteer will work with WordPress "out the box", and I would understand that to mean that the current WordPress menus are supported.
Again a version 2 hotfix is required NOW to support the menus and fix the vertical menus, not the "Artisteer 3" product that can wait.
I cannot believe that Artisteer have chosen to ignore the customers comments in this forum, and as it stands at the moment by the 1st July 2010, if there has been no communication from Artisteer on this, then I will stop using and supporting the product, there are other products out there that are proactive and reactive to their Customers and community concerns.
David
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JReese
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I too am quite saddened to see that Artisteer doesn't even have a news update on when we could at least expect a release fully supporting Wordpress 3.0.
Lately it seems I have been working away from Artisteer more and more and my one year of free updates will be over in just a little more than 30 days. At this point I don't plan to re-purchase Artisteer unless some quality information is revealed. To me without updates to the product there is no point in using it any longer and I will move on to something else.
This is a paid for product pushing annual renewals but with the slim amount of actual product improvements/enhancements each release over product bug fixes it is barely worth it now to keep paying; at least for me.
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Dragos
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Quote Adeptris:
I cannot believe that Artisteer have chosen to ignore the customers comments in this forum, and as it stands at the moment by the 1st July 2010, if there has been no communication from Artisteer on this, then I will stop using and supporting the product, there are other products out there that are proactive and reactive to their Customers and community concerns.
David
Really why someone from Artisteer: owner, manager or someone else do not want to tell us something about this WP 3 update, to give some kind of hope and understanding.
I have my net club with support too, and I listen my members and I do tell something... in worse or good.
Come on people be professional like always
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Isaah
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As much as we would all like to jump immediately to Wordpress 3 it simply is not supported by the program yet. I have found that wordpress 3 doesn't offer me enough to lost support with Artisteer. You just have to decide if upgrading is worth it yet. Patience is crucial. :)
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Brett Bumeter
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Quote Isaah:
As much as we would all like to jump immediately to Wordpress 3 it simply is not supported by the program yet. I have found that wordpress 3 doesn't offer me enough to lost support with Artisteer. You just have to decide if upgrading is worth it yet. Patience is crucial. :)
I see it as a given that Artisteer needs to move forward with a hot fix ASAP. That said Wordpress has a history of taking dramatic mostly untested turns at major version updates, and even some half way steps like 2.5 and 2.8.
With that in mind, I tend to relate more to Isaah's statement above, and probably won't truly feel that Artisteer is out to lunch unless a hot fix is not available by the time 3.1 comes out. (I do not recommend to any of my own paying clients that they should upgrade from 2.9.2 to 3.0 with heavy and rigorous testing.
Now, all that said, I had a nice in depth discussion about 3.0's coming (in person) early last fall.
I think the push to add more support for each new type of system (joomla, drupal, dnn) etc greatly increases the risk that the team at Artisteer might have more difficulty keeping up with major changes in these systems, even when those changes are telegraphed in the open source community for a year in advance. :)
I also agree with Dave(Adeptris) in that the marketing material is now a bit dated. I think a modification disclosure should be added to identify which version of each system Artisteer supports.
In their attempt to keep the company lean and focus on development of a product that was in early early beta and not yet remotely close to a product group like Adobe's, while still providing a very useful tool on the way, they seem to have missed some steps as far as growing the organization enough to keep up with communications with customers and maybe more importantly telegraph where they are heading with their roadmap, not in a way that puts them at a competitive disadvantage but at least keeps paying customers updated on when future 'fixes' will be available.
I bought in to this product on version 0.8 and had a pretty low set of expectations then. The price point has barely changed since then, even thought he feature set is larger by a factor of about 20.
However, expectation sets are much higher now as people read the value added promises in the marketing material.
I think that the price needs to rise to help fund the growth in the organization to keep up with both development, communications, and intelligence on open source product evolution.
This product has been wickedly cheap, functional and effective, but at this price point we are now all experiencing a weakness in the business plan.
Time to make the change, light a fire, provide some bonuses for around the clock development of a hot fix and get through this stronger and better than ever.
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Didier
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Can you explain why Artisteer does not work with wordpress 3.0 on all the sales platform, or is that up to WordPress 2.9 compatible
In life you have to make choices, or to subscribe to wait on a platform of changing the theme CSS for customization or translation, but have a version compatible with WP 3.0
Artisteer display any post or date of change for WP 3, this is not correct commercially
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Adeptris
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WordPress Version 3 thoughts:
The main issue I have with the lack of an immediate fix for the menus is that I have free themes on my website with something like 1000 downloads between them, these are no longer current for WordPress 3.0, when should I tell My Customers an upgraded theme will be available, without knowing when we will have a fix?
Many here have control over the environment where thier themes are being used and it is not a problem to ignore the upgade prompt, but many others supply themes free or paid themes to other users and do not have control over the environment and upgrade.
When our customers visit our websites for an updated theme and see there is not one available or a notice as to when, we will likely loose customers, visitors and traffic to our websites, if we rely on advertising revenue to pay for hosting then this is affected.
Artisteer seem unaware of how thier lack of information will affect thier customers, users will now be searching for "WordPress version 3 Themes", Artisteer and non of our themes can be classed as "WordPress version 3" and should not be returned in the search, so we will all loose traffic and revenue.
A search for "WordPress version 3 Themes" currently does not return Artisteer, something else they should consider.
As I have said if there is no response from Artisteer then I can only assume they do not value the existing customers other than as "upgrade cash cows" and I will look for alternatives.
David
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Tuomas Leppänen
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Have to say Im quite worried about this aswell. It feels that Artisteer is going to be outdated for long time. I can't currently use artisteer anymore for most of commercial projects I work on (or atleast its not productive due extra work to fix themes)... 2-3 more months without hotfix of any kind is unacceptable.
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savoirfaire
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Sorry to harp on this, but it's the most important feature for me. I've just tested custom post types and it seems to be working... Am I missing something?
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MD
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There are no end of deprecated functions in WP3 which are to be removed at a later date and a considerably amount of these comments: "This file is here for Backwards compatibility with old themes and will be removed in a future version." Artisteer/Extensoft need to be careful to ensure that they are no longer using deprecated code.
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Adeptris
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Quote savoirfaire:
Sorry to harp on this, but it's the most important feature for me. I've just tested custom post types and it seems to be working... Am I missing something?
Hi Savoirfaire,
Post Types work fine with Artisteer, once you edit the code for different layouts, one feature required is the ability to create different content layouts based on post type.
Artisteer would have to build this into the UI as lots of Artisteer users are not at a level to change code, and the statement that there is no need to touch the code, implying that WordPress built in features will work "out the box".
David
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savoirfaire
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Oh I get it, with Artisteer I only have the one page template... If Artisteer implemented this properly, it could be really powerful.
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Artisteer
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Current WordPress designs created by Artisteer will work in Wordpress 3.0 but some of the new features such as the custom menu and footer sections are not available.
Artisteer will be releasing an update in the future that will allow for some of the new Wordpress 3.0 features. Unfortunately, I cannot provide a release date at this time.
Best Regards,
Kevin P
Artisteer Support
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BigCat
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That's a pretty typical response from Artisteer if you ask me. They're saying "yeah it works, sort of, but we'll get around to getting it right someday, maybe." This company really irritates the hell out of me.
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Adeptris
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Not an answer I would expect from a supplier, I expect my mobile (cell) supplier to supply and support the lasted products online, if they can't then I just take my business to another supplier that does!
I will not use the product or post in the forums until this is released, no point spending time in creating free Artisteer themes or writing tutorials that do not harness the new features of WordPress.
I will however spend the time working with the default twenty ten theme, I have a few Ideas for addins, like an AddText module, which are theme independant and will work with Artisteer but these will now be presented in the twenty ten theme.
Also looking to see what alternatives are out there, but as Artsiteer seem to have a monopoly, dusting down a visual studio program I wrote a few years ago for creating DotNetNuke containers, maybe create a little application for WordPress themes with colaboration.
David 
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Grumblemarc
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I can tell NONE of you are programmers. If you were you would know that you do not program for something still in BETA!!! It doesn't matter HOW LONG you could have known that the next version was coming it would be the height of stupidity to write code for something that is in a BETA state as the code for it can change drastically, or even not-so-drastically, as to render what YOU have written obsolete-maybe even totally non-functional. Obviously this is a MAJOR release from WP and as it is a simple "patch" probably won't cut it as many of you are under the false assumption of believing.
Yeah the communication is absolutely HORRENDOUS on the developers part. Shame on them. But if you don't know exactly what it takes to create such a program as Artisteer then you are speaking out of the side of your faces. Things have to be written. Committed to some kind of SVN then tested BEFORE release to the public. This plus the fact that there are probably only handful of developers working on it and you get the situation you are in now. The STABLE 3.0 only was released on the 17th of June and here it is not even 2 weeks out and people are already talking about finding alternatives. Again you people have not a clue. Were you actually expecting an update the day the new WP came out!
This will teach you to try and base a business off selling templates based on a program that you yourself do not control the development of. Is that Artisteer's fault? All they advertise is that their program creates templates. What you DO with them is your business and yours alone.
I'm waiting for the same kinds of rants when the Joomla! Beta goes stable.
Let the flaming begin!
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Lee
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I like Artisteer and bought it the first week it was out, but they are an odd little set up. Like this forum is set up badly, they do not answer questions and until recently guys who said they did not "work" for Artisteer were the ones answering questions, (and often quite rudely as well.)
I tried to find out who owns and runs this company and you can not find any real names or address online.
That was strange to me. There is no company profile, address or phone numbers and this forum really bugs me. It seems like no one at the company wants to take responsibility. I hate it when people use a name and an initial too.
If anyone has more info on this company I would love to hear it.
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Lee
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I read all their articles and found this listed.
Paul Hudson of Extensoft, Inc
Extensoft, Inc.
93 S. Jackson Street, suite 9225
Seattle, WA, 98104-2818, USA
CONTACT: Paul Hudson of Extensoft, In
c, 1-888-796-6777, pr1@extensoft.com
But I think that is the PR person, but still more info then I ever found before.
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