Needs a LOT more work before it’s ready for prime-time

Yep,I know it’s a free theme and I can easily ignore the annoyingly large and numerous “upgrade to pro” stuff, but it still needs work…..

First, I will say that it’s visually lovely…..a lot of great design work here by someone with a very nice eye, but it’s the under-the-hood coding that need tweaking. A. Lot.

For example: it’s base CSS has styles all Themes use for common image alignment (alightleft, alignright, and alignnone) but oddly does not use left/right floats for the alignleft or alignright, it instead uses display:block and centers all images, regardless of the alignment the user chooses when inserting media….a user who doesn’t understand CSS will be very frustrated at not being able to control where their images should be placed.

Another example: It’s “front page sections” customizer is a total mess. While you can use either Page content or enter text into a field labeled “Description”, it displays content from somewhere else entirely and inexplicably, not the Page chosen or the text entered.

Another example: Why no featured image support on Pages? The Page template doesn’t display a featured image if one is selected – ALL Post/Page templates should respect and display a specified featured image, even if the Theme sets the size and positioning. Inexplicably, not even its Parent Theme (this is a Child Theme of Theta) has support for featured image in any template…..it seems they put effort ONLY into building a decent-looking Front Page, but chose to ignore all other Pages, and it’s not truly a single-page Theme so this decision makes no sense at all. Given that the ‘buttons’ used on the front page – which has default text of ‘read more’ – give you the option to take the visitor to another page, then at least a modicum of attention should have been paid to the design of those pages.

Another example: I don’t want buttons on the sliders, but there is no option to disable that feature….I can hide them with CSS, but not easily since there is no CSS class or ID name as part of the specific HTML that display buttons so I have to target an enclosing DIV several levels up, and nothing in the (slider) functions that says “hey if there’s nothing entered in the customizer for a button title or link, just don’t do a button here”, which is basic coding 101……as a coder I know how to get around that challenge, but that sort of defeats the purpose of what should be a good Theme for non-coders. A simple toggle switch to display, or not, a button should be included. At the very least, if I choose to NOT fill in anything for a slide’s button text and link, then I expect no button at all, not a non-working one.

I get that Developers really want people to upgrade to a Pro version, and I fully support that (and have purchased many premium themes) to get features that are really ‘premium’, but when a free version is lacking basic standards of usability then I don’t feel motivated to upgrade, I’ll just find a better free Theme.

Which is what I’m off to do now, find a better free Theme…..