One Theme
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Loading ...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=-
2 Comments
August 13th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
I have to say, I think you are disguising your point with a lot of anger. I read the post.. I think its no wonder the developers were a little stand offish with you as, you were quite impolite and had obviously had no prior communication with the developers. I have always approached the Support team with the same courtesy I would wish to be treated with myself and they have been more than helpful with everything I have asked of them. They often exceed my expectations.
Your only real problem with this theme seems to be the content stripping on the home page. Which is fair, you should have the options of displaying full posts un-modified on the home page. With the MORE tags I can see both sides. But also a lot of people would rather the content was limited automatically (especially new sites).
I think ‘fraud’ is pushing it a lot. I’ve been using One Theme for two weeks on a few sites of mine and yes, the content limit is restricting. But the developers must have reviewed your comments extensively because shortly after your forum post they announced that they were allowing three new options, one of which is removing the content limit and HTML stripping completely.
Also from the conversations I’ve had with the support team, it seems like there are at least four people involved in One Theme and they are far from idiotic. I think you should give them a break, One Theme has only been around for around a month.
Roll on the 22nd of this month when the next version is released!
August 13th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
As a developer, I don’t NEED to ‘communicate with the developers’. I expect what I purchase to be USABLE, not completely trash out my own site. When I spend $100 on a theme, I expect to be able to plug that theme into my website, and not have it attempt to take it over.
As a consumer, I had no NEED to be ‘polite’, or ‘patient’, or anything. The fact is that these idiots ripped me off.
Oh yes, they refunded the money, I’m not even questioning that, but my time and my resources were spent on this, something FAR more expensive than the money spent on the theme, all because they couldn’t be forthcoming here. That’s not even counting the fact that paypal had $100 of mine locked for a week due to their idiocy.
That’s all well and good,but that’s STILL not the proper way to do things. There are STILL going to be limitations on things, it’s going to be follow THEIR standards, the way THEY want to do things. A perfect example of that is this site itself. There are 3 options, you choose one of the three, your posts MUST conform to that option. Well, maybe I don’t WANT to have that option applied across the board.
Let’s say I want to make a simple post from the arcade games. That’s all good, but then I have to use the option to ignore the strip html tags. The problem with that is that it ignores my more statements.
Let’s say that I want to use the more tags, inserting MY OWN pagebreaks here. Then, I have to have them ignore my html, and the built in features from WordPress.
Tell me, where do they place these problems with their themes publicly? They don’t. They attempt to cover them up. Thusly,they do not disclose this problem with their product. Even when they supposedly ‘fix’ this problem, there is still the limitation of you MUST choose one of the three options, and ONLY one of the three options.
This is classic bait and switch. You’re presented with a theme that DOES look beautiful, but you’re NOT presented with the problems of this theme, and this is a pretty big problem, ESPECIALLY for individuals using wordpress to handle content such as images and the like , as it is supposed to be able to.
Do they disclose the fact that they don’t use native wordpress functions for things? No.
Do they disclose the fact that they overwrite WordPress functions? No.
So, how is the typical wordpress author supposed to get this theme working? By rewriting their own website to conform to 1t standards.
Since they attempt to hide things like this, it is definitely fraudulent. Like I said, they refunded the cash, which is good, but by pulling what they did, they put my own funds on hold for damn near a week (longer if you consider the transfer BACK to my bank account).
Regardless of how long they’ve “been around”, this problem IS a problem, and how they handled it moreso.
Had they put out a public disclaimer stating that their theme did this, I wouldn’t have purchased it, and I certainly wouldn’t have been waiting for a week + to get money back where it belongs ! Hence, yes, that’s fraud.