Review Of Eventina 2.0 – jQuery Strikes Again

Since the launch of WordPress Tavern, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to promote/review commercial themes without joining their affiliate program. I think I’ve come up with an answer outside of telling those who want reviews to just purchase display advertising. If you expect me to review your commercial theme without paying me a dime, you must provide at least one copy of the theme to give away to my audience. I find this to be a win-win-win situation. Also, don’t expect me to provide a glowing review simply because you purchased advertising. These reviews are honest opinions and no one should put their integrity on the line because of a few bucks.

At A Glance:

With that said, I’d like to introduce Eventina 2.0 as the first commercial theme to be reviewed here on the Tavern. This theme was developed by ThemesCloset.com and is compatible with WordPress 2.7 with a single site license going for $39.00.

License:

If you’re going to be purchasing a theme, it’s important to know before hand what the license will and will not allow in terms of redistribution, modifcation, credit links, etc. If the theme itself is licensed under the GPL, you pretty much have free reign with what you can do with the theme.

In the case of Eventina, the license for the theme is not clearly visible on the product page. Here is the details regarding the single site license:

This license allows you to use EVENTINA on a single website. The copyright informations must remain in the footer.

However, located within the theme package is a file called license_agreement.txt which goes more in depth with regards to what you can and can’t do with this theme.

This license entitles you to use the theme on one domain / website, whilst also allowing you to remove any of our credit links within the theme. Themes released under this license include all theme files but not the PSD file. Themes released under this license is for personal usage only. You are free to modify the theme in any way you want.
This license does not apply to the Plugins that are included/compatible with the theme. All themes come compressed (“zipped”). All files within the Plugin folders are not governed by the above license, and instead, retain their respective licenses (as noted in the files themselves).

That information is in addition to the general terms found within this document. This document should be in plain view on the ThemesCloset website as it contains information which could influence a purchasing decision. It’s not right to find this stuff out AFTER you have spent the money considering ThemesCloset only offers refunds if there are major bugs or problems with the theme itself.

Installation:

Installation was a simple process however, for these types of reviews, I’ll be using the included readme file or instructions.txt file as my method for installation. Eventina 2.0 provides easy enough to understand instructions for installing and then activating the theme. There is one step you’ll have to perform after you upload the theme and that is to set file permissions 777 to /wp-content/themes/eventina/scripts and /wp-content/themes/eventina/scripts/cache/. Otherwise TimThumb images resize script will not work properly. After the theme is activated, it’s time to dive into the options panel to configure how this baby functions.

Configuration:

The nice thing about the configuration page for this theme is that all of the options are on one page. I don’t have to search throughout the backend for different menus containing different options. Eventina comes prepackaged with 13 different color schemes. Using one of these schemes is as simple as selecting it from the drop down menu and clicking the save button.

I know many themes for awhile now have allowed users to configure a feature post block to use a specified category. Eventina goes one step further allowing you to configure the featured content to be specified via a tag instead of a category. Just make sure you put the tag slug into the Featured Content Slug area so they match up.

Eventina offers two ways to display post thumbnails. Either by using custom fields or the built in TimThumb script. The choice is up to you. If you choose to go with custom fields, the options panel provides ways for you to specify a custom field name for photos and thumbnails.

I’m not going to cover every option in the panel but overall, I enjoyed the experience of staying within one panel to configure the theme. The save boxes for each section was a nice touch which saved me from using the mouse wheel too much.

Widgets:

This theme has three widget containers. A wide one with two narrow containers underneath. Not a lot of versatility when it comes to widgets but it gets the job done with this particular theme.

jQuery Strikes Again:

While reviewing Eventina 2.0, I discovered an incompatibility between the tabs in the sidebar and the CommentLuv plugin. Eventina is bundled with three different jquery files.

jquery-1.1.3.1.pack.js
jquery-ui-personalized-1.5.2.packed.js
jquery.tabs.pack.js

CommentLuv is bundled with a few javascript files of it’s own and so there in lies the problem. There is some sort of conflict between the two. Personally, I like the CommentLuv plugin so it’s a bit of a shame that I can’t use it with this theme out of the box. I’m not smart enough to know who gets the blame here, the plugin author or the theme author but based on my experience, using themes which are bundled with a specific version of jQuery usually leads to problems when it comes to plugins using jQuery.

I also discovered the same issue with the Contact Form 7 plugin. Considering this is a widely used plugin, this incompatibility could upset quite a few people if they find out about it after they’ve spent their money.

Support:

ThemesCloset provides a support forum specifically for this theme. This is where I went when I encountered a problem activating this theme on my local server which apparently doesn’t work. I had no problems activating the theme on a public site though. The forum doesn’t provide much in the way of an established base of threads but since this is a newly released theme, that is to be expected.

If the forum doesn’t provide the answer you need, there are four other methods of getting in touch with the theme author including email, Skype, ICQ, and Yahoo Messenger. As a side bonus, the author speaks three different languages, English, Romanian and Russian.

Final Thoughts:

For starters, this theme definitely looks different than most magazine themes, especially with the three headlines near the top of the page. Some folks may think the gradient between the three images looks weird but I find it to be a cool way to view at a glance which headlines were published first.

One of the best things about this theme is that it is FAST. By limiting the number of images down to three, this thing loads very quickly. The options panel was laid out nicely in discrete sections so I can certainly see how ThemesCloset claims this theme could be configured within 10 minutes.

Not bad for $39.00 but the plugin incompatibilities which I mentioned earlier in the review really need to be resolved for this theme to be taken seriously. Based on experience, themes which are bundled with their own jQuery stuff usually have compatibility problems with plugins. The last theme I used for Jeffro2pt0.com contained jQuery which broke many of my favorite plugins that also used jQuery. It’s a shame because the fancy tabs in themes are nice but if they break plugins, it’s not worth it.

Want This Theme?

The author of this theme will be monitoring the comments you folks leave and will choose one of you to become the recipient of a free single license copy of Eventina 2.0. Just leave a comment letting me know what you think about this review, the theme, or if you have any questions, maybe he’ll stop by and answer them for you.