Could be so much better

  • I’ve used 2 other themes extensively, twenty ten and customizr. I tried the free version of Virtue. There appears to be no trial period to check out Virtue Premium ($45).

    Took me a while to find the documentation. https://docs.kadencethemes.com/virtue/ Sadly it was out of date. Talked about Revolution Slider plugin. Many of the Theme Options in the docs don’t exist (Choose a Header Style, Choose How Many Menus Per Side, Enable Sticky Header to name but a few). Perhaps they are part of Premium as there is no distinction in most of the documentation.

    Some Theme Options did not work (e.g. selecting sidebar1 for my Home page but disappears when Saved).

    The “Virtue About with Image” widget (yes that’s the longest widget name I’ve ever seen) won’t permit HTML in the text. That would not be as much of a problem if the alignment and font size and color could be changed but they can’t (I suppose if I dig down far enough in the code I could tweak the CSS but it should not be necessary and can easily be handled by permitting styles on tags like span and p).

    Five different positions for the menu and I didn’t like any of them. The location of the Primary menu did not match the documentation – I found it hard right at the top below the top bar – looked very lonely way out there. If you use just the Secondary menu, the vertical space allocated to the Primary menu is not collapsed (I tried setting the line height to 1px on the Primary but it still consumed the same vertical space). There is no option to put the menu under the Sitewide Banner, a common position on other themes.

    There are many page templates because some of them provide functionality which normally requires an extra plugin (contact form, portfolio grid, etc.). Some of the names are not obvious and the documentation doesn’t provide any example of what they look like. You’ll just have to try them out. Creating a page is a two step process. First, decide which template you want, give the page a name and save it. Then when you edit the page, all these extra fields will appear that relate to the template you picked in the first step. These extra fields will not appear dynamically if you change the Template from one to another without saving first.

    The inbuilt slider only works on Feature and Feature Sidebar templates. It positions the slider at the top of the page ahead of the title and there is no way to move it to another location on the page. The inability to move it around makes the slider rather limited especially if you don’t want it at the top of the page. You would end up using a plugin for most of your slider content.

    I did not try the posts. The documentation seems much better on posts than pages as it provides samples of what the different posts will look like.

    Overall, I was not impressed. It took me most of a day to try out this theme and, in the end, I didn’t really like it. It could have been so much better.

    [Moderator Note: Please ensure that you are embedding links correctly in your post so that you do not turn it into one huge link. Link corrected.]

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Hey,
    Sorry to hear you didn’t like the free theme. You are correct there isn’t a trial of the premium, not sure how thats a negative? does any premium theme offer that?

    You mentioned that the docs are out of date. But in fact they are not, they are the docs for the premium version and free which is says right in the intro for the docs. That is why things are mentioned that are not available in the free. In general though, a lot of what is said in the docs are helpful for people using free and in some situations there are specific items that are mentioned about free. Same is true for the tutorials on Kadence Themes.

    You mentioned that some theme options didn’t work? That is news to us and if you had opened a support case we would have loved to help you trouble shoot what the problem could be.

    You seemed to discredit the theme for having a simple image widget, it’s not intended to have a lot of options or customization.. of course if you wanted a complex one there are hundreds of plugins. You also seemed to discredit the theme for having a built in slider that doesn’t work like a plugin but when developing that was the point. If you want a slider in the page content there are lot of plugins. I agree both areas could be better and of course they are in premium but for the free theme those options weren’t intended to take the place of plugins if the user wanted specifics beyond the standard theme layout.

    You mentioned not liking the menus, these menus are very easy to customize if their default is not what you like, posting on the support form would have give you a chance to be impressed by how quickly we respond and how we can help with a little css to create a desired look. And just to state if you want to remove the primary menu spacing you can do so in the theme options > main settings under menu spacing.

    The page templates all must be published or saved before the metaboxes show. I’ve looked into ajax to make this happen automatically but it’s not finished yet.

    Thanks for taking the time to review and giving me some things to think about. I see that I need to add a link to the docs in more places then the theme options > main settings. I would add a notice but it’s not allowed with www.ads-software.com themes. I have a link on the Kadence site under support. Can you give me any insight as to where you would naturally look for the link? And it seems I need to separate the free and premium theme more in the docs or make it more clear. I will add some page screenshots for the page templates.

    Kadence Themes

    Thread Starter dccharron

    (@dccharron)

    Many thanks for addressing each point (and fixing the link in my review). I agree – I don’t know any other premium themes offering a free trial period (although that would be handy). I only mentioned this because I wanted to make it clear that my comments were on the free version and why.

    You ask for suggestions on where to put the documentation link. I find it is an issue for all themes – WP doesn’t provide a standard place (that I know of). It depends on when you are looking for it, “before” or “after” installation. “After” maybe in the text of Appearance=>Themes=>Theme Details. “Before” perhaps in the codex page Description tab or in a sticky Support note. That’s where I’d look.

    I understand that you’ve written the docs for the premium version but it does make it hard for users of the free version unless it is clear which features are premium only. In fact, you should see this as a selling point since you make clear what we get for the money. (Of course it’s hard to see how Revolution Slider is better just from documentation.)

    I picked on your image widget because of the lack of customization for the text. I know that there are heaps of plugins that do this and provide customization. The same applies to my comments about the slider being limited to appearing at the top of the page. I know there’s lots out there that you can put anywhere on the page or sidebar. On menus, I did see where to turn off the Primary menu but could not find a way to release that vertical space (though I’m sure it can be done with CSS). BTW your Topbar does release the vertical space when not in use which is great.

    I didn’t bother raising a support ticket for such a small problem as the sidebar1 issue. Easier to work around it. I have noticed that you are very prompt with your replies to support (which is part of what attracted me to try out your theme).

    On the way your page templates work, I was only making the point that the two step process is quite different to most other themes. Sure it would be great if you can get ajax to dynamically change the form but I understand that this is not a trivial thing to do. Adding some page screenshots (of the finished pages) would be an invaluable addition to your docs.

    I took off 1 star off because the documentation did not match what I was seeing and another star because of the sidebar fault, image plugin, slider and menu controls. Sorry if that seems a bit harsh.

    Documents link – Themes can’t have sticky posts in support so that option for linking to the docs is out. And you can’t put a link in the theme details (description area) so that is out too.

    Primary menu – you can remove the space right in the theme options > main settings. no css needed.

    You titled this with “Could be so much better” – so that is to stay if the image widget and built in slider had more options then it would be there?

    Kadence Themes

    Thread Starter dccharron

    (@dccharron)

    It seems the boys and girls at www.ads-software.com need to add a tab for theme’s for FAQs and documentation which permits external links. For example, on Plugins, they have an optional tab of “Other Notes” which permits an external link. Seems silly not to permit links to a documentation page on the Description tab but if those are the rules…

    I agree that you’ve addressed enough of my points to warrant something nicer in the title. If I could, I’d change it to “Still room for improvement”. I think that’s fair.

    Your incredible download numbers are a better reflection of what people think of your theme than any single review, especially mine. Keep up the good work.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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