Here at Theme.fm apart from creating our own themes, we like to play around with other people’s creations. It’s not just an opportunity to see what others are doing, how they’re rolling out and what kind of features they’re implementing in their themes, but to actually learn from them by reading their code, structure and documentation.
Today we’ve taken the Unspoken premium theme by WPShower which is a magazine and blog theme for WordPress. It was released last month with a couple of updates afterwards. Today Unspoken comes with 7 unique color schemes, a featured slider, customizable home page, widgets, menus, shortcodes and social bookmarking built-in.
First Impressions
After downloading the theme archive and looking at the file structure, we figured that the installation process was as simple as copying the folder over to our themes directory on our WordPress setup, so we didn’t bother to read the documentation, but seems like we were wrong.
After activating the theme and browsing to the home page of our playground website, we saw this:
We did have quite a lot of posts and pages in the installation but the only thing Unspoken seemed to pick up was the popular tags at the bottom of the page. Quite a disappointment for a first impression, right? Of course an experience WordPress user, one who had dealt with more than one premium theme would eventually figure out that it requires setup.
Theme Options & Setup
The good thing we noticed about Unspoken is that it didn’t create any new fuzzy admin page in our Dashboard (gosh we hate those!), instead it placed a Theme Options page right inside the Appearance section, just where an average user would be expecting to see it, perfect! But wait.. Really?
So the guys at WordPress.org have spent endless nights and gallons of coffee to come up with a brilliant Settings API designed to create options and settings pages, perfect for themes and plugins and all you give us is a form with a bunch of divs and table layouts just because it looks cleaner?
Well maybe it does look cleaner, but hey, think about the average developer who would want to build a child theme based on Unspoken, how on earth are we supposed to add our new settings to that Theme Options page? Fine you can keep it this way, but in that case at least give us a couple of action hooks on the options page and the update options function ;)
Other than that, the Theme Options page seems fine — quite a lot of things to play around with and quite self-explanatory settings names. But this still hasn’t made it clear on what happened to our home page and why is it blank. So we went off to see if the Add New Page screen had anything interesting, unlucky!
The Widgets
We read the theme features that said highly customizable home page so we kept looking at where that homepage customization place is hidden so eventually we stumbled upon the Widgets section and there it was! Turns out there’s a registered sidebar called Homepage, so first thing we squeezed in there was the standard Recent Posts widget, sounds fair doesn’t it? But meh!
We did get the list of posts, but nobody bothered to style them accordingly, so we had a bunch of blue and purple links with a completely unreadable font size. Most of the other standard widgets seemed to work the same way, so we figured that we’re only allowed to use the widgets with the WPSHOWER prefix, okay!
Then again, we dropped the recent comments widget, the one with the WPSHOWER prefix and got the blue ugly links again, oh well! Oh and then we dropped in the shower Tabs widget, gave us a blank page again and then one more with an admin-ajax.php fatal error, what a frustration ;) We surrendered at this point.
Color Options & Alternative Layouts
The color options. This, together with the points outlined above made us give up. Completely. We switched the color skin to black and here’s what we see:
Toggled a couple of other color skins, and the blue links persisted, what a mess, right? Well at that point we figured that the theme might not be as bad as it seemed to us, it might be us after all. We didn’t read the documentation, we didn’t watch the videos, we didn’t even open the readme file, but hey. Do you have to do all that just to get your theme working?
Think Twenty Eleven, it might not have all that functionality of a premium theme, but think how obvious it is to work with and you’re up and running in one simple click! Most premium themes are lacking this feature today and so does Unspoken.
Conclusion
Unspoken is a good theme and WPShower is a good company, and their documentation is okay, the videos are fine. It really would have been nice if we didn’t have to read and watch that to get the theme running. We’re all busy people and have no time for that, seriously.
Unspoken is available for $59 and has a demo page too where you can see of what you might have achieved ;) On our scale from 1 to 5, Unspoken is rated at 2. Sorry guys, but we would have given you a 3 if your docs didn’t say Word press instead of WordPress. Twice!
Thanks for reading and respect the global trademarks, it means so much to the community and the foundation. If you’ve got a theme you’d like us to review, give us a shout at our contact page or hit us on Twitter. Have a great day!
nice to read an honest review!
It is, isn’t it! I hope they’re not too mad at me and send me their next theme to review for free, this time I had to spend sixty bucks! :)
I also appreciate the honest review!
Please keep it up. A truthful review means so much more to your readers than some puff-piece.
I have burned in the past – I read a glowing review on a theme at well-respected WP site, only to find out after I spent $79 for it that the underlying code was a mess and uncommitted. My email requests for support went unanswered. I even wrote to the author the review and he also ignored me.
Thank you WIldscribe, I really needed to hear that, especially after the comment below.
I have a feeling that most premium theme companies are now targeted at the average Joe who can use his FTP client to upload a theme but could care less of what’s inside. Oh and support requests is a totally new story, it sometimes gets even worse than just “RTFM” ;)
Thanks again for your comment!
It’s sad, that you’re too lazy to read documentation and watch the video. There is a special widget called “WPSHOWER HOME”, to setup your homepage, other widgets is just for sidebar and footer, like in every other theme. We used widgets for the sake of simplicity, we don’t want to get 10000 options for theme, everything must be simple. So now theme in screenshots, looks like a crap, really. You have not even figured out how theme works before you write this review, it’s not a blog theme, you can’t setup a news website just in one click. Anyway, thanks for your efforts, but writing next review try to understand, that people who need a simple blog, doesn’t buy themes like “unspoken”.
Oh hey there WPShower, I was expecting you! It’s funny how you call me lazy when you’re using the Twenty Ten text domain in your header.php file. Too lazy to read what you copy pasted, eh? Embarrassing isn’t it?
I didn’t write this review to start a fight or anything, but rather to get my feedback over to you guys, so you could hopefully improve your products, but if you don’t listen, you will never learn. I picked Unspoken not of it’s good or bad design. It’s design is fantastic, especially in the demos. I picked it because of what’s inside.
You are right, I’m too lazy to read your documentation and I’m too lazy to watch your videos but I’m never too lazy to browse through your theme source files only to find out that you don’t even care to comment your code, that you’re using twentyten’s text domains, and that you’re using cURL functions when the WP_Http wrapper functions are available and didn’t bother to localize that twitter class. I could go on, seriously …
After playing around with the theme my co-worker said that this theme is not worth the money and should at least be given away for free at the WordPress.org themes directory. I told him that themes there are of higher quality and that Unspoken would not pass the review.
Oh and using a sidebar to customize your home page is so not simple. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a blog theme, portfolio, magazine, e-commerce, community or real estate. If your theme has got a huge learning curve there’s a big chance that people would not want to take it. Keep in mind that they have already taken the learning curve to work with WordPress itself.
Have a great day!
~ K
Nice review, Unspoken seems to be a great theme. I’ll have to try it …
Hello there. Thanks for your review of the Unspoken theme. I was looking for some detailed commentary on the theme, as my girlfriend is considering purchasing it for her own blog. That’s why I want to make sure I know as much about it’s upside and downsides before making any recommendation. And to be honest, I can only see plusses. Personally I’ve been using the Thesis theme for several years, but now that I see this slick technology I’m really considering getting a copy for myself as well. So, to finish this appraisal, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to write this. Keep up the good work!
Stijn, you’re welcome and thanks for your comment :) Unspoken is not perfect but it’s worth giving a try if you have time.
well Konstantin Kovshenin, you know you’ve done a good job when you get the company angry…….good stuff :)
Lawrence, that wasn’t my intention but thanks! :)
I personally am disappointed in the “7 color theme options”. You would think a premium theme would allow multiple things the ability to change colors, i.e. the slider box, the footer background. You are screwed if you don’t want orange or ugly green. You do get to change the background color though. Wow.
I do like the simplicity of the theme and how clean it looks for a news site like mine. This theme will do the trick. For now.
Thanks for the review!
Hey its nice and honest review really liked and planning to buy this theme for my blog.
Please suggest some good theme that you’ve experienced…Actually I was counting on Unspoken. :(
Hi there, it’s good to read reviews of premium themes, there aren’t enough out there and there are so many themes.
Just wanted to add that I recently purchased the Unspoken theme (after having read your review, even; I love the looks of it) and though I haven’t had a chance to use it yet, the few questions I had for the developer were answered almost immediately and very thoroughly and helpfully. That’s a blessing when you’ve got a more complicated theme.
Another magazine theme that’s really terrific is Volt (thru themeforest); That theme’s developer is unbelievably helpful, responsive as well and the theme has some very useful options that go beyond the usual baked in theme options, while still managing to look very clean and non “corporate”. (I have nothing invested in either theme, btw). You should review that one!
anyway, thanks!
michelle