Most versatile THEME but gear yourself

First, I didn’t have a lot of experience with customising WP – only used Sandwich Builder before or used ‘out of the box’ WP Themes.

I must say that Live Composer Orao Theme was the only one I could find that could accommodate our requirements i.e. replicate previous site design with 100% customised header, front page, blog posts and support of vertical thumbnails. The theme supports – I presume – an unlimited number of widgets inserted in sidebars, pages, headers/footers etc.

DOCUMENTATION: The USER documentation proved to be almost completely useless when building the website. I had to refer to the DEVELOPERS documentation a lot. I also referred to additional documentation/users concerns either on Github or on other Themes support forums that are built on Live Composer.

SUPPORT: The support provided was great and very helpful. On average, I got a response within 24 ish hours.

JS ERRORS: LC is intolerant towards any code errors (both in HTML code and in plugins), which means I had to add extra time for testing.

The error will only appear after you published the changes, switched off the Page Builder and switched it back on. In case of errors, Live Composer doesn’t work – it doesn’t save changes either so even if you delete the code or HTML from the page, the changes can’t be saved.

I either had to create test pages that could be deleted in case of error or insert via widget area HTML, which means I only had to delete the widget HTML/shortcode if it generated an error.

CACHE: the majority of cache and lazy load plugins are breaking the code (in particular, minify option). In my case, both front end and back end stopped working. By way of trial and error, I found out that Hummingbird, Autoptimize, W3 Cache, WordPress Booster, PageSpeed Ninja, and myriad others are not compatible with LC.

I am using BJ Lazy Load and WP Fastest Cache (FREE VERSION). Both do their job without breaking the LC. Sadly, this info is not readily available on LC website or anywhere else. Researching and testing took me a good couple of days. The list of compatible plugins, especially so vital to the website, is an absolute MUST in my opinion.

Lastly, I noticed that carousel-slider.gif file is returning a 404 error on the front page (not deliberately included and can’t change/remove it). It slows down the load speed. I logged the issue and was assured that this will be fixed with next update.

All in all, Live Composer and Live Composer Themes are absolutely crucial solutions if you need a website that doesn’t look like a bland cookie cutter template and if you are prepared to dedicate your time for that. The theme supports vertical thumbnails, which is vital for photography based magazines, portfolios etc. With slight improvements of documentation, in particular ‘How To’ and compatible plugins, the theme will be golden.