After having some coding work done on our site recently, our developers informed us that we are on an incredibly old and now-unsupported theme. Looking into it, we’re actually still on Debut 2.2.1 - which from what I understand is positively ancient now.
I’m also seeing that the Debut theme has apparently been discontinued entirely as of the switch to Shopify 2.0, which leave us in a bit of a pickle. From what I understand, our options seem to be to simply stay on the old theme that we’re currently on indefinitely or switch over to a new one entirely?
Am I correct in thinking that if we were to switch over to a new theme, we would essentially need to reconstruct the majority of the site’s look and feel from scratch (i.e. I suspect there’s no quick upgrade/ transfer button, and that a lot of elements/functionality would be broken in the process)? If so this would be a very large undertaking that we could frankly do without, as we also have a number of apps and custom coding which I assume also wouldn’t carry over cleanly into a new theme.
I’ve also been able to download a .zip of Debut 17.14.1 from elsewhere on these forums (even if it’s no longer available in the Theme Store) – is it possible to migrate our existing 2.2.1 version of the site into this? I suspect it should at least be smoother than trying to transplant everything onto an entirely different theme. Shopify support are suggesting the only way to do this is to manually copy and paste the code over for each individual page (from 2.2.1 into 17.14.1) – surely there must be a quicker way than this? I appreciate that we’d need to be careful and test everything before setting it live but having do to it page by page seems a bit much.
That said, are there any huge downsides to staying on Debut 2.2.1 for the foreseeable future? We’re generally happy with the site as it is, however our only concern is if they ever pull the plug on the theme entirely and it no longer functions properly at all – or is this not likely (or even possible)? Frankly if we can be certain that we won’t lose any functionality in future by staying on the current theme then that isn’t a problem, although I suppose there’s a possibility of any apps we use no longer supporting it?
If there is a way to simply upgrade to 17.14.1 that might be the easiest option for now, as I’m assuming there’s no clean way to switch to a new theme entirely without considerable time and work if we essentially want to recreate our current site entirely as-is?