When I started work on Redoable back in December my goal was to put together a theme that was “feature-packed”. I wanted it to incorporate a bunch of the really cool plugins that were available for Wordpress, and make them look like they should have always been there.
Starting with K2 was a good move, it already had a number of the features that I was interested in and gave me a good, well established base to work from. I went about redesiging the layout, changing the css, adding extra options, incorporating more plugins. A little over a month later Redoable was born.
Now Redoable is the sort of theme that I had always been looking for. There were a lot of great themes out there, both simple and complex, but none of them had “everything” that I wanted (I didn’t necessarily ‘need’ everything I put in…).
But in the last couple of weeks since released Redoable 1.1, and while I’ve been working on 1.2 (which will be mainly bug fixes) I have been thinking forward, and in a slightly different direction. Judging by the number of downloads that Redoable has had (way more than expected, trust me), I’m curious to what brought the people in….
Are they users that were after a feature packed theme, or did they just like the look of it, or even better was it a combination of the two. Just going on the comments on this site, and others which is has since been posted on, it would seem that it very much a mixture of the two.
Likewise there are the users who are using is straight out-of-the-box. Then there are those who are digging deeper. They are changing the colours, playing with the sidebar, and general page layouts. And best of all there those who are sharing what they find with other through the Support Forum.
So that takes me back to the initial question. Is less, more with a Wordpress theme? Having mountains of plugins isn’t for everyone. So what features would you look for in a ‘simple’ theme, and more specifically which exisiting feature from Redoable would you sacrifice for the sake of simplicity?
Once I’ve gotten Redoable to a point where I’m more than happy with it, and have the majority of bugs fixed, I will start work on my second theme. This time a much simpler one. So if you’ve got any suggestions, or requests, please share them.
