Polite Plus a MESS (save your money)

I’ve been using Polite Lite for several weeks, which I’ve generally liked, but (after much prompting by the devs) purchased Polite Plus for my birthday, as it was supposed to have much more customization, particularly of colors, which was important to me. I downloaded the theme, installed it and activated my site license, and dug into the Customizer: and the problems began.

First, THERE IS NO DOCUMENTATION AVAILABLE FOR THIS THEME. If you click on the button that’s supposed to take you to the User Manual, you get a dead link.

Second, if you need WooCommerce to work on your site, you should stay away from Polite Plus. When I was using Polite Lite, I could choose the number of columns on each page of my WooCommerce shop AND the number of items I wanted to display per page. I had 20 items per page with that theme; with Polite Plus, the Customizer preview shows that 20, but when you actually hit Publish it only shows you 5! There’s no option to change it anywhere, not even in some niche widget. (I have ~60 products on my site. I cannot expect customers to scroll through twelve pages of products, five at a time.)

Third, Polite Plus makes decisions about your title text for you. One of the big selling points for Polite Plus is the customizable typography, but no matter what font you choose, it will render a WooCommerce product heading correctly on the shop page (“Hi, my name is Eris” shows up as “Hi, my name is Eris”) but will capitalize the first letter of EVERY WORD when you click on the product page (“Hi, my name is Eris” becomes “Hi, My Name Is Eris”). This might be okay if you WANT to capitalize every word, but if you don’t, it’s a nightmare. (Again, Polite Lite does not do this.)

None of these shortcomings are things you could figure out by looking at their product page. What a disappointment–and a waste of $90 on a theme I cannot in good conscience use.