Rating: 1 star

Anc News is a very lightly reskinned child theme of Fameup. While I briefly flirted with the latter, I decided to try to implement Acn into one of my sites, but the bad outweighs the good.

Good
– Looks nice. Seems to be able to accomplish what I am looking for.

Bad
– Well, it’s that seems</em? part that is the kicker.

A lot of the features that Anc News touts itself as having aren’t there, or aren’t easy to find. Things like full-width template are in the theme’s tags, but I couldn’t find out how to activate it (more on that in a bit). The free version is, well, free. But it is severely limited and either poorly built or, possibly worse, intentionally</i> built poorly to funnel you into paying for the premium theme.

One example: While I could adjust the side of my sidebar, that change didn’t populate across the entire site. It only applies to the front/blog page, but every other page and post the sidebar is set at default. The widgets have very little customizability, making them ugly most of the time. It’s like Anc News is almost there with the features, but misses the boat.

As to asking questions? Well, as of this writing I am the only person who has posed a question on the Anc News support threads here on WP.org, and it’s been a week-and-a-half with no reply.

Some may ask “Why not go with the premium theme”? Well, to be honest, Themeansar’s website for all of their themes doesn’t give a clear indication of what functionality or options going pro opens up for you. That’s a red flag in my book. The documentation is also very basic as well, and doesn’t really answer any pressing questions.

As much as I wanted Anc News to be the answer, it isn’t. And there’s too much not right to make me caution against anyone else spending time on it.