WordPress EvoLve Theme: Review

As a WordPress developer you seem to be always looking for a new theme, something that will be fresh, new and novel. This is what brought me to use the EvoLve theme.

On the plus side the EvoLve theme is a free theme, available on WordPress.org, from a company called Theme4Press. The look is clean and uncluttered, something I can present and work with. I do like the home page slider options, which allow you to have up to 5 slider images. I also like the 3 front page content boxes that appear under the slider. They have large eye catching icons, some text and a call to action button for more info.

Advantages:

• Free: This theme has a pro version, but the theme from WordPress.org is free to use.
• Home Page slider: Uses the Bootstrap slider, and allows you to have up to 5 slider images
• The theme is pretty clean and I like the look.
• CSS changes can be put into the theme options.
• The theme seems stable. I have not used it sufficiently long.

Disadvantages:

• “Appearance” > “Theme Options” vs “Appearance” > “Customize” clash with each other. I usually set the Customize options first, so I added my logo and hid my site name. This resulted in my logo not being not linked back to the main page. In Theme Options I can add my logo again, resulting in 2 displayed logos. Many theme options then override the Customize settings. This is really fickle and a source of confusion.
• Too much space above and below site logo. I fixed this with some custom CSS, stored in additional css
  .header {
  padding-bottom: 0px;
  padding-top: 5px;}

• Some Theme Options will reset other theme options, resulting in you having to redo many of your set options. For example I was playing with the widget area of the header, only to find that my home page slider settings were inadvertently changed, and I could not get back to the original settings. I was forced to do an options reset, which obliterated all my settings. There is no undo button for theme Options.
• The free version comes with absolutely no documentation. This is a little strange, though I have gotten by without it. I Googled for a list of Font Awesome icons and found their names. This helps in setting up the front page content boxes. A link to the icon names would have been useful. Without documentation I am unsure if I am using the theme to its full extent, or missing parts.
• Front page Content Boxes: These are the three boxes on the front page under the slider. The content for these boxes do not come from existing posts or pages, but pasted into text fields in the theme options. I recommend you develop your content in an external text processor and paste your content into these boxes. The reason is that you may lose these boxes due to changes you made to Theme Options. It is not a big deal, but may reduce frustration. See above for a link to Font Awesome Icon names, because a link nor help is not provided.
• No copyright symbol for your site name: On the footer there is a link to the theme writer’s company and to WordPress, but no copyright symbol for the site owner. This could be a problem for newbies. Copyrighting your site is a standard for a theme.
• There are complaints from the feedback that theme upgrades destroys the UI settings of the site. I can easily see this happening.
• Child theme breaks style: I set up a child theme with just a style.css file and no actual css, and it broke the theme. I am not alone.While the theme did render, the nav bar was doubled, the bootstrap slider did not work, the front page content boxes also displayed poorly, and the default 2 column area for posts became a single column. More specifically the bootstrap slider no longer slid, but displayed the images one underneath the other, with text displayed below the image. The 3 front page content boxes displayed one underneath the other, with their icons missing altogether. The default 2 column style where your post entries appear will be formatted into a single column with your featured photo spanning the whole screen.

  If you wish to use this theme “as is” with minimal changes (only CSS) then this theme will work. If you wish to use this theme as a base for further work and wish to hack php then then theme is not recommended. When a child theme does not render well you will need to hack the theme base code. When a theme update occurs you will either need to keep the old version and not get updates, and possibly leave your WordPress install vulnerable to hacking, or update and have to redo all your changes. Either option is troublesome. It is better to know that this theme does not play nice with child themes now rather than hack the base theme and get bad surprises at the next theme update.

• Bootstrap Slider does not Render well on Mobile: The sliders show the image but they are dark. The image title is cut off so only the image text shows up. Apart from the Bootstrap slider not working pretty much everything else does work and is responsive.
• Featured Image for Posts: On the home page, these images zoom in when you mouse over them. The theme takes the middle of the image and will cut off the top of the image. I had to redo some of hte images to allow more room on the top, otherwise people’s heads were being lopped off.

Here are my CSS changes to date, stored in my theme otions, custom CSS:

.header {
padding: 0px 0;
}
#tagline {
font: 27px Roboto;
}


I reduced the padding in the header, which was just too much wasted white space. The second increases the font size of the site’s tagline, which was too small.

Conclusion: Overall the EvoLve theme is a nice looking theme, but a bit quirky and could give the newby a bit of trouble. Use it AS IS and don’t do any complex changes outside of css, and you’ll be good. I have a text file of much of the copy for my 3 front page content boxes that includes the icon name, because it seems the UI settings get somehow changed, and there is no undo button.

It might appear that because my negative points far outnumber the positive that I dislike this theme, but this is not the case. I like the theme look, it works, and I can live with and accept the negatives. It is a playful theme and very child friendly, with lots of eye candy to attract attention. If I find the need to hack the php, then I would choose a different theme.

You never know if a theme will work out until you implement it. This theme has a few unintended surprises for the implementer. This is also true for purchased themes. WordPress developers beware.