Blogging Tips

Last month David Peralty sent me a copy of WPUnlimited, an All-In-One WordPress theme solution which he recently launched. It currently retails for $59 for a personal license and $150 for a developer license. I have been using it for a week or so now so I thought it was about time I showed you all this clean looking WordPress theme.

WPUnlimited – The Ultimate WordPress Theme

As you can see from the Demo, WPUnlimited is a really slick yet clean looking WordPress themes. I am a big fan of simplicity and the large text, tidy sidebar and basic look reminded me of the Thesis Theme. These themes are great to work with because they are so easy to customize and help you get your blog looking the way you want.

The real beauty of WPUnlimited can be seen from the backend. As an All-In-One solution, the theme has an 8 tab options area which lets you change just about every aspect of your sites design. This is the perfect solution for people who don’t know much about coding but still want to have full control over how their blog is structured.

Here is a preview of the WPUnlimited options area :

Here is a brief description of what you can do in each area :

• General – From here you can do a wide variety of things. You can decide which pages are shown on your navigation menu, integrate your Feedburner ID, include Social Bookmarking Icons and much more. My favourite option is the ability to add code directly into your header or footer from here. This is incredibly useful for adding stats trackers etc.
• Layout – In the layout section you decide whether your header title is shown, what width your main content area and sidebar(s) are and what design structure your design has i.e. whether you have 1 sidebar or 2 and where these sidebars are placed.
• SEO – In this section you can decide how your blogs title is displayed in your browser bar and whether categories and archives are allowed to be indexed by the search engines.
• Header/BG – In this section you can upload your own logo or background to your blog. Very handy
• Design – In this section you can customise colors, font size, font type, border colors and more. Unfortunately, some areas of the site can’t be changed here so you may have to edit the main stylesheet to get your blog looking the way you want (for example, I had to edit the main stylesheet to edit the font size of some content areas).
• Advertising -A useful feature which lets you enter your Adsense Publisher ID and then integrate Adsense ads into selected areas of the site.
• Hooks – In this section you can add WP Plugin Hooks directly to your blog.
• Unlimited.css – Last but not least, you have the ability to add new classes to the Unlimited.css stylesheet, which is where all the changes you made are stored.

The video below shows you how easy the options area makes it to get your blog design the way you want it. It really is child’s play

Is WPUnlimited right for you?

There is a downside to All-In-One solutions like WPUnlimited. I uploaded the theme to BloggingTips and to my personal blog to try it out but the design was all messed because it clashed with some of the plugins I installed, which surprised me a little with my personal blog as it only used a few plugins.

This is a big problem with All-In-One solutions. They are trying to replace so many different WordPress Plugins that it’s almost impossible to stop it from clashing with one of them and messing up. So because of this, WPUnlimited might not be for everyone. Those of you who customize your blogs a lot with plugins and are used to coding might prefer to look elsewhere.

However, I have to say I am a huge fan of this theme. I started a new blog a few weeks ago and tried out a few themes but wasn’t happy with any of them so I decided to upload WPUnlimited to this newly installed WordPress blog. And I was incredibly impressed.

I wasn’t keen on spending a lot of time messing around with a new design and wanted to just start writing articles and WPUnlimited allowed me to do just that. Including the time it took to upload the theme and change some settings etc, I probably spent less than 20 minutes getting everything the way I wanted, and 5 of those were deciding whether the blog should have 1 sidebar or 2 and whether the content should be at the left, in the middle or at the right hand side (I’m sure that everyone who uses WPUnlimited does this!).

One of the best features I found was the ‘Customization Schemes’ option in the Design section. It quickly allows you to change to preset color schemes and then modify them from there. You can choose from white, blue, purple, pink, green, red and orange. If you are not sure what color your blog should be, you are really going to love this feature!

Overview

I am not usually a big fan of themes which try to do everything but WPUnlimited seems to do everything right. One thing I hope they add to future releases is the ability to change the general font size of the site and/or the ability to change the size of certain content areas (for example, the sidebar, main content or comment areas) so that you have no need to edit the templates whatsoever.

This theme would be perfect for anyone who isn’t great with coding or isn’t looking to spend a lot of time messing about with a design. If you’re a good coder then I would still recommend this theme as it’s a fantastic base to build upon and develop the theme you want. However, if you are planning on using certain plugins with your blog it might be prudent to contact them about this and double check there won’t be any problems using the theme it (alternatively, I can upload the plugin to my blog and test it out for you).

Credit has to go to David and his team though as they have did their best to ensure that the theme works with the majority of WordPress Plugins without problem. In their defence, with dozens of new WordPress Plugins being released everyday, it is impossible to develop a theme like this and guarantee that it works with every plugin out there.

I am not sure if WPUnlimited is The Ultimate Theme it claims to be, though I’m not sure such a thing exists either as everyone has different priorities and requirements when it comes to choosing a design.

What it can claim to be though is one of the best priced, best designed clean themes available just now and at only $59 for a single license, one which offers tremendous value for money.

If you are looking for a clean premium theme which is easy to customize, I strongly recommend checking WPUnlimited out.

Link : WPUnlimited