Hi John,
AWPCP will work with any well-written, WP 4.x compliant theme. Generally speaking, paid themes tend to be higher quality than free ones, so we don’t recommend those.
Whatever theme you pick, we recommend using the Theme Check plugin (available for free on ww.wp.xz.cn) to validate how WordPress-compliant that theme actually is. The more errors and warnings you see on the theme when you run that check, the worse the theme is. You can read more about it here: https://ww.wp.xz.cn/plugins/theme-check/
(This plugin was developed by WP Core developers to validate their own default themes and is highly respected in the theme community)
In general, we like WooThemes as a solid company with great products and support. You can check them out here: http://woothemes.com
Thread Starter
John
(@dsl225)
Thanks but your reply is not very useful unfortunately.
You develop a plugin that is supposed to work with third party themes and you should be able to recommend some themes that offer a layout that fits well with this sort of requirements.
The question is NOT a question of good/bad themes. I’m able to judge this by myself, thanks.
The question here is which themes would be suitable, from a design perspective, for this plugin and classifieds in general.
I’m sure you are losing a lot of potential clients because of this. You own demo at your site is really not convincing (that’s the least one can say…) and the showcase of other sites running your plugin is one the worse I’ve ever seen!
I’ve spend the week-end trying to find premium themes that work well with your plugin and didn’t find a single one! If you don’t provide any guidance in this matter from your side, you’ll have many potential customers like myself that will simply abandon and find another solution.
Just my two cents.
Hi John,
Actually, it’s very difficult from my side to recommend a theme because everyone’s tastes and site requirements are wildly different in my experience with the plugin. Some folks want it to be part of a larger site, some want it to be the site’s core focus. It just really depends.
Again–we’ve not had a problem using WooThemes to integrate with and you always have full control over the HTML we use in the template for the list and detail views under Classifieds->Settings, Ad/Listing tab. For those issues that HTML is too much to resolve, you can tweak via custom CSS. Here is an article about how to use custom CSS with AWPCP in a way that doesn’t get overwritten on upgrade of AWPCP: http://awpcp.com/forum/faq/how-to-use-custom-styles-with-awpcp/
It would help to know what specific issues you were running into to “make it work well” since that’s hard to act on in terms of what went wrong, what to suggest next and so on. It’s possible the problems you saw may have been the result of a plugin conflict instead of a theme issue. Here is an article about how to test for theme and plugin conflicts with AWPCP, which may help pinpoint the issue: http://awpcp.com/forum/faq/how-to-test-for-plugintheme-conflicts/
But again, without knowing specifics, it’s hard to recommend more than that here.
Thread Starter
John
(@dsl225)
Thanks again, but I have no special requirements at this point. I just want to get a clean and simple layout displaying latest ads on top and was wondering which layout would best fit, 2 or 3 columns (with 2 sidebars).
My point was that your demo isn’t of much help with that and the showcase you display at your site just showcases awful and terribly outdated examples (if not broken) that will rather discourage than inspire – to say the less..
I understand your job is not to promote third party themes, but I’m sure some creative examples would be something positive to have. Modern responsive themes offer great layouts these days!
Hi John,
I’ll review the showcase to make sure we’re not showing broken sites. They don’t always notify me when they go down.
We try to show sites that did a good job with AWPCP in their layout, but everyone’s tastes are different. Thanks for taking the time to respond here.
