Platform Theme Framework Feedback

Theme License?

Listed in Style.css …

Sorry, we have to ask, as we cannot allow non-GPL themes to be promoted via the forums.

Anyway, per the style.css file:

License: GPL
License URI: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html

As a webhead who develops for multiple personal and professional projects, I am learning that stable platforms with child themes will probably save me headaches. So I am shopping platforms like yours as well as others. Honeslty, I can’t find one that hits it on all marks. I love what I can read in your forums without funding access as I play around with Platform.
Platform isn’t creating much love for me specifically in the ability to mod colors in certain areas. It appears this is an issue with the pro version as well.
For my clients and my business it is all about containing costs these days and competition is cutthroat. If I want to keep my costs in line, I have to be able to deploy fast and still create a unique experience for each client. I don’t want my sites to look cookie cutter either. On the other hand I don’t want to have to relearn where x developer has buried this or that function or style.
Having spent $$$ to get dev level access with other WCMS (Joomla) theme developers is like getting married. I’d like to know that something as simple as a color picker for lets say, the footer will be in play. That would save time and that means my musician client base might actually be able to pay me before their band breaks up.
At this point you got me on the hook, but I’d had to drop my next $$$ and have negative energy to blog about the experience.
At this point Platform is going to go into my sandbox and I will play with it when I have the time ’cause at 6am,another full day of site dev, marketing and multimedia dev is shouting at me. Then there are 8 of my own sites begging for content.
You are on a great path as I’d love the ability to drag and drop different content on different pages! That is very exciting. In today’s economy though, I want a bit more pavement as I traverse a bumpy road moving a big bag of my own sites from HTML to WP!
Peace,
J. “Wudman” Wood

PS No need to share how as I understand your side of the economics. Just that it be nice not to have to jump to other tools to mod any aspect of the css if we are being teased or actually acquiring “premium” tech.

Color Pickers are easy to add..

This is a design decision… colors, borders, background, etc… should all be done using CSS. We have added a custom CSS option and support for CSS through child theme.

The alternative is to add 100 options to control color, borders, etc…; we don’t think this is smart design.

Thank you. Subsequent sniffing around the web I did come across a post where you said that this was coming in the next update of the pro program.

As we step forward in deploying modern web portals, it would seem that having a color picker intuitive enough to make the CSS change would be excellent design. If we can drag other elements around sites for placement, why is color taking us back to Notepad?

If you want to entice more people buy up into your themes consider creating a limited access thread that supports your “free” product. All your links from the Platform theme listing at WP lead to PlatformPro.

Although most forums do require registration, every level of your forum registration requires a payment. So for example if someone wanted to see how (and if) the “Callout” works, or they have implemented it in a test bed as I have and want to understand how to fix the issue there, there isn’t even a place where they can read if the problem is resolved for those who did pay for your commercial products

In the case of Platform, your footer background is the page background which takes a bit to discover. Also, you have buried the CSS so it can’t be edited from WP. Granted you list where it is in the stylesheet, but now even a quick change involves FTP.

You have some great concepts and after spending half a day exploring Platform, I am enticed. On the other hand, I ran into issues that commercial clients are focused (i.e. how “callout” is not working well).

@wudman Agreed… that’s why we check the www.remarpro.com forums often.

Regarding the support on PageLines, the reason we do this is because we want to give the paying customers the maximum amount of help.(I.e. it’s not about what’s best for PageLines, but what’s best for its customers)

Note: Fixed the issue with callout in 1.0.6 ??

If you are using the 3 column layout on the PageLines theme then you can’t use the ‘TAGS CLOUD’ WIDGET IN THE SIDEBAR (right only, the left one you can) Why is this??? What happens is your tags show up below your post spread across your page.

@miom The only thing that would cause that, (I’m guessing) is an issue in your HTML markup.

I use Google Chrome for my browser.

I’m not able to change page content background or body background color, no matter what hex code I use under global options…. any idea what’s causing this?

Andrew, I’m still LOVING the theme and loving that there’s a free version!

Maybe I’m just not a great searcher but I can’t find a suitable plugin that will show related posts – with thumbnails – based on tags. (Plenty that do 2 of the 3.) When I found a post to edit code I thought I’d better check here first. Would this be compatible with the theme and if so, where would I apply it? I briefly tried ‘template.postloop.php’ but it didn’t quite work and I didn’t want to mess with a good thing. Thanks!

Is there an option to show the whole post on the blog page instead of ‘continue reading’?

Thanks,

Paul