Buying a good theme
July 12, 2012 9:24 AM Subscribe
I'm currently shopping for pay themes for a Wordpress blog. A lot of theme websites have previews for their themes, but are rather limited in their implementation. Are there good review/forum sites for themes that aren't SEO backwash, or is there an effective search method to find sites that use a particular theme?
As I've mentioned in previous questions about this I need a Buddypress enabled theme.
As I've mentioned in previous questions about this I need a Buddypress enabled theme.
Response by poster: A few of the themes that have caught my eye have been through Themeforest, but I'd still like some more information about them... Do you think that they might have a list of sites using various themes available, so I can get an idea of what they're capable of?
posted by codacorolla at 10:29 AM on July 12, 2012
posted by codacorolla at 10:29 AM on July 12, 2012
The best thing to do is to go through the comments. Occasionally someone will post their website for trouble-shooting or whatnot. Some of them, like this one, have a showcase feature.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 10:56 AM on July 12, 2012
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 10:56 AM on July 12, 2012
Best answer: I've implemented BuddyPress twice for would-be communities that fizzled, so I know a bit of this landscape. BuddyPress is so specialized, and so many (including myself) have had negative experiences with it - I would be leery of anyone who doesn't indicate strongly they specialize in BuddyPress theming. It really is a different beast and has many more kinds of modules attached to it that require a lot of upkeep. You can add new BuddyPress add-ons that don't necessarily get themed "automatically" - so this is kind of a big task and can depend on what BuddyPress options you've enabled and how you're choosing to interrelate them all.
posted by artlung at 11:47 AM on July 12, 2012
posted by artlung at 11:47 AM on July 12, 2012
Response by poster: The project is basically for a community of writers. We need each user to be able to post to a central blog, which can then be browsed as either stories or as resources (depending on how they categorize them). There's also a social networking element that we're experimenting with in an effort to get writers to read the stories of others, as well as incorporating those stories in to their own work. Right now Huddle and Salutation seem like the best bets.
This whole thing started out with the idea of designing a custom theme for this exact purpose, but now it seems as though that's going to be extremely difficult within the timeframe that we have (around a month and a half to get the thing up and running) so I'm pricing professionally designed themes. It's just sort of frustrating since a lot of these themes leave a lot of question marks in terms of what they'll actually be like once we get up and running and try to have the site be a functioning entity.
posted by codacorolla at 12:15 PM on July 12, 2012
This whole thing started out with the idea of designing a custom theme for this exact purpose, but now it seems as though that's going to be extremely difficult within the timeframe that we have (around a month and a half to get the thing up and running) so I'm pricing professionally designed themes. It's just sort of frustrating since a lot of these themes leave a lot of question marks in terms of what they'll actually be like once we get up and running and try to have the site be a functioning entity.
posted by codacorolla at 12:15 PM on July 12, 2012
Both those themes look hopeful! They also include live previews on sites that appear to include BuddyPress-enabled. So what's the hesitation to go with those?
Hard to judge what you'll run into - for example - moving forward, if you customize it yourself, if they have an update will that break your customizations? And how's the support?
posted by artlung at 12:41 PM on July 12, 2012
Hard to judge what you'll run into - for example - moving forward, if you customize it yourself, if they have an update will that break your customizations? And how's the support?
posted by artlung at 12:41 PM on July 12, 2012
Response by poster: Well, I'm sort of hesitant about Salutation since they don't show the posting interface for a non-admin user. When I logged in it only let me update my status feed (understandable, from a security perspective) so the experience in terms of a regular user making a blog post is unknown. I guess that it would be like with any other Wordpress user, but I'm also not experienced enough to say for sure.
posted by codacorolla at 12:45 PM on July 12, 2012
posted by codacorolla at 12:45 PM on July 12, 2012
Do the answer pre-sales questions about changes they do or don't make to the admin interface? This seems like an obvious sort of thing for them to address.
There are also plugins to customize the posting experience in that way you can try out.
posted by artlung at 1:02 PM on July 12, 2012
There are also plugins to customize the posting experience in that way you can try out.
posted by artlung at 1:02 PM on July 12, 2012
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 10:18 AM on July 12, 2012 [1 favorite]