Where, oh where, can I begin with this one? Well, I guess, with the good news. They gave me my money back! YaY!

I’ve been involved with wordpress for many years, as a so-so developer (plugins, etc), a content author, and an all around guy. Never, ever, have I seen anything this horrific though. Let’s start from the beginning, shall we?

For the past few months, I’ve been looking for something to replace the stale orange theme for this place. I figured what the hell, maybe throwing money at it, not so much of a bad idea, no? Well, that’s where the major pain begins.

With ‘One Theme’ (one-theme.com), you’re supposed to be able to do everything. What they DON’T tell you is that unless your blog conforms to THEIR standards, you’re not doing anything. Oh yes, not a thing. Here’s what I mean.

If you’ll look at my page, you’ll notice that some days, I post things with more tags (ie: pagination), some days, I don’t. Why? Because I shouldn’t NEED to have more tags on a flash video, or a goofy image. You, as a reader don’t WANT to have to click on a page just to see that, right? I know I certainly wouldn’t.

With “One Theme”, you don’t GET an option. In fact, at this point, there is no option to even control how much text is displayed in the article itself. That’s right, so, you get FORCED to use some idiotic programmer’s “standard” of what is what, rather than showing what you, the author (you know, the person who BOUGHT the damn thing for $100 in the first place!) wants.

Oh, they say they’re fixing that, that’s all nice, but they say more:

And we plan to discount the the “more tags” in favor of a user specified content limit in version 1.1 because it is necessary.

HRRM, sooo, it’s all or nothing here. I must use the same tag on ALL of my posts (ie: cut them off in the same place) or nothing. Now, that’s just a bit ridiculous.. Oh, but wait, it gets more interesting!

we have to limit the content for excerpts manually and remove HTML in order to render the thumbnails properly.

So, not only do they tell you what you can and can’t put into your post (read it again if you don’t understand that), but they DON’T support the native wordpress features. Umm, that’s just total and utter rubbish. What do I mean here?

Well, take, for example this post . All it has is an image. That post, under “One Theme” would show up as absolutely BLANK on the front page, the category page, and anywhere EXCEPT for the post itself. All you’d see is the title, post date, post time, and that’s it, anywhere else.

Another problem? Plugins. You see that ‘addthis’ plugin after each post? Yeah, that gets stripped down to nothing too, because they want to tell you (ie: dictate) what you can put where, and how. They want you to conform to THEIR standards, which may not be your own.

This is a classic bait and switch here. You’re shown a beautiful theme when you go to their website, and it truly is absolutely beautiful, there’s no denying that. It’s NOT beautiful, however, when you get it home, unpack it, then realize it screws up your entire webpage.

Now, in all fairness, they DID refund the money, but that’s not the point here. They DIDN’T tell individuals that this was happening, up front. They DIDN’T disclose that they did certain things in order to screw with websites. That makes this 100% fraud.

Anyways, I’m out for the night, just thought I’d warn ya’ll about this ridiculous theme. Don’t waste the $100 they’re after, they can’t even provide proper support!

-=T=-