Suggestion: use more widgets

It is a beautiful Theme, isn’t it?

Hey as long as we’re making suggestions for improving some of the widgets to make them easier to implement for non-coders, here’s what I would respectfully suggest that Wes consider.

For the Pricing Plans, why not have the functions.php add a Custom Post Type for “Plans” with a few custom meta boxes to hold things like “package name” “description”, “price”, etc., then the widget could just make use of those meta boxes and instead of basically being a text widget into which one has to add a lot of HTML and style declarations, just have a few options for things like “show XX across” where we fill in if we want 2, 3, or 4 price modules going across.

Then someone can drag that widget into the widget-holder of their choice – full width, half-width, whatever.

@Genghis7777 I’m going to have to respectufully disagree with what is suggested here. The theme is pretty easy to use, all you need to do is add content inside of the widget area and it will show up on your homepage. Keep in mind, their demo is just a demo, so most of the things you see are just for demonstration purposes. I don’t think the theme is being promoted as having a ton of features that it doesn’t….if it did, then I’d agree, as that would be considered false advertising. But if you look at the product page (where they sell the theme) and the tutorials/code snippets it explains in detail exactly how it all works.

In reference to the “Pricing Plans” code and the other forms, it’s not wise to add all of this into a theme, especially a child theme. I know some people (new to web design) would want this inside, but in the long run it would be hard to manage. This is the problem with a lot of themes on Themeforest, when you add all of these Custom Post types and a ton of other code it really makes the theme become Bloated. Appfinites themes are made simple in the same way as StudioPress’ themes. Adding too many features can cause problems and become difficult to manage…..Plus it’s not WP standard to do this. The recommended way to handle this is to either create or use a Plugin if you want to add more features to a theme. For example, if you add a custom post type and forms (and all of the other things suggested) and you like it, as soon as you switch your theme, all of that content/code disappears. That would be terrible. The correct way to handle that is to add a plugin that adds this, or at least add the code in a separate file that won’t be affected if you change the theme.

You definitely don’t need to know PHP to use any of the themes here. The ONLY time you need to use php is if you want to make customizations to the code, or if you want to add some things. This is exactly how it works on StudioPress as well. I’ve had plenty of clients setup their themes without needing to code PHP.

For a great example of what I’m talking about take a look at this legendary post – http://justintadlock.com/archives/2011/05/02/dealing-with-shortcode-madness

I hope this helps!