mendax.org

Apparently, our earlier coverage of Chyrp didn’t push anyone to build any extravagant or even irregular Chyrp themes, and we still haven’t updated our broken theme for WordPress yet either. Yes, we expected to move onto something better by now, but we’ve been holding out for someone talented to bring the Redoable theme up to snuff, else move onto a premium theme.

We’ve strongly considered utilizing one of adii’s Premium News Themes, and an upcoming contest has our interest piqued. Of adii’s themes, we were most enthused by the Kineda Inspiration theme, but as it’s been discontinued, we’ve sort of been holding out on what else adii comes up with. At present, we’d still prefer a grid-based news theme, but with developer support, which the unfinished Kineda theme does not offer.

We do like adii’s Live Wire 2.0, both because of the color scheme and the reliance on smaller graphics for the “main” article. It’s also easy to see various recent articles without scrolling, and overall, the layout puts more emphasis on the textual content of the page versus some other premium themes. Still, we’re not entirely happy with the color scheme (which we could edit ourselves, naturally), and we still prefer the more grid-like layout the Kineda theme offered. Perhaps if the Live Wire 2.0 theme placed the “main” article in the center of the page, with other articles flanking the sides and bottom, we’re be more inclined to give it a go, but then again, this could easily become distracting as well. The lack of ad-space is also a bit disconcerting, and we’d prefer to see more places one could put smaller ads, without requiring to do so.

Nonetheless, adii’s themes have come a long way, and we can see using them both here at mendax.org, as well as on some other sites we administer. Should we not win adii’s latest contest, we may opt to hold out a bit longer for something closer to what we’d like to see in a theme, though we can easily see using something like Live Wire 2.0 and simply having it altered by a professional web developer.

As an aside, what most premium theme designers ought to do is showcase the configuration options of their themes, such that potential buyers can see what options they have for ad-space, feeds, columns, etc.

Anyone have other suggestions as to a theme we should consider?

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