Behind the scenes: rebuilding the template library from scratch
We deleted more than half our templates this month. Here is the thinking behind it.
We just finished a full rebuild of the MiraCreate library, and the headline is uncomfortable: we removed more products than we added. Twelve templates went out. Six came back, restructured.
The old library grew by accident. Every time a customer asked for something, I built it. That is a fine instinct and a terrible long-term strategy. We ended up with overlapping products, inconsistent naming, and support questions I could not answer without opening five files at once. Kind of embarrassing, honestly.
The rebuild started with one rule: every template has to share the same skeleton. Same property conventions, same date formats, same folder logic. If a customer buys two products, they should snap together without a migration guide. That meant going back through each file by hand and rewriting the databases, which took longer than building them the first time.
The payoff shows up in support. Questions about setup dropped by more than half in the two weeks after the relaunch. And the six surviving templates are genuinely better because they were forced to justify themselves. If you are sitting on a bloated product line, the fix is not more marketing. It is a smaller, sturdier catalog.