I think I will stick with this one…

Last few weeks I spent countless days and hours examining and testing about 50 themes for my blog redesign, free and premium. The free ones tended to be very limited (with the exception of the popular hueman theme) and/or havent been updated for a long time and havent received any support. The premium ones tend to be all overloaden and seem to lock people in also I hate the popular membership fee model where I have access to countless themes of one company for a yearly fee …. who needs so many themes in the long run (unless you are testing but ultimately you decide on one).

Finally after weeks I came across this one. It has lots of options, is free and is still being updated it seems. Also the designer answered my messages after a few hours on a saturday afternoon, definitely a nice touch.

I also like the idea that the developer does not lock you into his “theme world” with this theme, everything is nicely coded as far as I can tell. The only thing that is kinda weird with this theme is that you need a plugin (Amplifier) to even have access to the theme options. This seems to be this designers codex to put shortcodes and all options into the plugin (which is free anyway). I can certainly live with that.

The theme is optimized to work with the visual composer builder which however is crippled (or should I say “adapted”) by the amplifier plugin so you cannot use the shortcodes that come with Visual Composer but only the ones that the amplifier plugin delivers. I thought that was a bug at first but Oliver cleared that up for me and said it was “by design”. This is just something that was not documented (or I havent found it) so people should be aware of that.

After taking a while to get used to this new idea of interaction between theme, plugin and builder I think I will stick with this theme for a while and get to know it better.

Also following Olivers suggestion, I have started using the free beaver builder light plugin instead of visual composer (there is a video about using the beaver plugin with this theme in the documentation videos) and I have to say I really prefer beaver builder light compared to visual composer, at least for this theme.

I can definitely recommend people looking for a powerful and flexible but still free and suppored theme to check this one out or take a look at Olivers other themes (they seem to be more geared towards professional sites though and less suited for blogs). I hope Oliver will continue supporting this theme and not abandon it !!!!!