Today, I was setting up a new WordPress website that is a forum.
I decided to use the bbPress plugin for the forums, and then began looking for a nice theme for the website, that has bbPress support.
The reason for this is that if a given theme doesn’t have bbPress support, the bbPress content won’t be styled up like the rest of the website, meaning the developer (in this case, me) will have to create custom CSS styling. Also, since I would be using a theme, I would have the task of implementing styles that fit that theme well. While this isn’t that tall of a task, it’s a waste of time in my book, because I can find a theme with bbPress support, and completely skip all of this extra work, and focus on the important part: making the forum as good as possible to provide valuable content to the visitors, and to also focus on building the forum community, and marketing the forums.
I stopped by Elegant Themes to see what they had to offer, but after looking through their 80+ themes, I was unable to find a single theme which looked like a forum, or was specifically tagged as a forum based theme. Also, there was no mention of bbPress support anywhere. I decided to contact Elegant Themes, and ask them directly if any of their themes had bbPress support. A few hours later, their reply came, and I was disappointed.
Elegant Themes does not have a single forum based theme, or any themes with bbPress, or other forum plugin, support.
This really blows my mind, since Elegant Themes doesn’t offer single purchases of their themes, and offers all 80+ themes for a yearly subscription price. I’m not saying that isn’t a good value, however, if you’re marketing a theme subscription to be a one stop shop for themes for any type of website, not having a single theme based on a forum site is really missing the mark, in my opinion.
Even if there was only one theme that was forum based, it shouldn’t be that big of a deal to a popular theme developer like Elegant Themes to build at least one theme with bbPress support, or create their own forum platform, or, if I was them, a theme with support for all of the most popular forum plugins, so that a customer wishing to setup a forum website could use the theme, and decide for themselves which forum plugin was best for them. I would even take it a step further and have at least one theme with support for BuddyPress, as it’s gained huge popularity, and social is very popular right now.
I don’t really mean to bad mouth Elegant Themes, but for instance, their affiliate program boasts that it pays out over $1,000,000 per year to 21,000+ affiliates. If your business is paying it’s affiliates over a million bucks a year, you would think you could spend the time and money to develop a few themes that support popular platforms like bbPress and BuddyPress.
Take into consideration the fact that standalone, one person development ventures on ThemeForest develop themes with bbPress and BuddyPress support. Some even specialize in these platforms, and virtually all of the themes they develop have support for these popular plugins, and more, built right in.
If I was the CEO of Elegant Themes, I would have my own premium forum plugin as part of the subscription plan that includes their premium plugins, along with their premium themes, and perhaps even a social platform plugin. At the very least, there would be support for bbPress and BuddyPress, if nothing else.
Think of how many people out there don’t purchase an Elegant Themes subscription because of this, or, have an Elegant Themes subscription, but then have to go elsewhere to purchase a premium WordPress theme or plugin, or both, to handle a forum based WordPress site.
Digi Purpose 