When you are browsing the Imagine Limburg website, hopefully you not only enjoy the photographs, but also the design and user experience of the website. Well, at least that’s one of the targets to aim for! In this article I set out pro’s and con’s of the Rife Free Theme for WordPress and how it works in practice on Imagine Limburg.
A theme for photography
When I started with Imagine Limburg (IL), I struggled to find a clean, future-proof setup that had to become the foundation of the website. As IL is destined to become an image-heavy website, content management systems specific for photography (like the Koken CMS) were evaluated first. However I struggled to find a nice (and free) base theme to go with that. Quickly it was decided to use the WordPress (WP) platform, as that gave plenty of theming options and I was already familiar with using WP.
Next on the list was to find a nice and clean – and preferably free – theme that could display full-size images in some sort of slideshow manner, because that would have to become the homepage. Turned out this wasn’t as straight-forward as you might think …
Rife Free Theme
The thing is that there are a countless number of (free) WP Themes available for photography / image related websites. Just search for “wp theme photography free” and you’ll find dozens of sites that list the x-best free photography wordpress themes. This article is not about listing all the themes that I have tried, it is sufficient to say that I didn’t find any that would fit. Not that there weren’t any candidates, and not because I expected a 100% fit, but somehow none of them felt suitable.
Anyway, one final search led me to apollo13themes.com and to their creative multi-purpose (hm, maybe that’s why I didn’t find it on any of the best-photography-themes-lists?) Rife Free WordPress Theme! The Cropps-demo that shows the Rife Free Theme in practice is what convinced me that this theme would be very suitable for Imagine Limburg!
The Good
This is by no means a full-review, but why does Rife Free suit this website more than any other (photography based) WordPress Theme? Well, simply because:
- There are many ways to display images, including full-sized on pages.
- Responsiveness is also very well under control.
- The design is actually quite simple, with a clean focus on images.
- Nice touch is the ability to create albums, to display image descriptions (as an overlay for example) and the ability to pan/zoom images (the famous Ken Burns effect).
- Templates for non-photography related pages (like an About or Contact page, or a Blog) are also easily implemented.
- It does well with plugins (for example Yoast SEO, WPForms, Leaflet Maps Marker)
- There’s plenty of documentation available!
There are also lots of customization options available – quite an impressive amount for a free theme! Actually, apart from a couple of different menu style options, Lightbox settings and header variations, I don’t know why I would need to upgrade to the (paid) Rife Pro Theme. I mean, I can always do some CSS-tweaking 😉 Nevertheless I do think Rife Pro is worth the money and I am considering it!
Rife Free also supports Page Builders and the installation comes with Elementor. Now, personally I’m not a big supporter of page builders (Shortcode hell!), but Elementor is at least a lot better than Visual Composer for example.
The Bad
Of course it’s not all great, but do note that the negatives are just minor things. However, to give a balanced view on how the Rife Free Theme feels in practice, here are some things that could be improved:
- Initially I found it confusing that some pages where created using Elementor (and elements like albums where inserted via shortcodes) and some (like Posts) with Rife’s own templates and styled with the WP Customize widget. Maybe the documentation pages could elaborate more on that.
- Because the difference in using Elementor and Rife’s own templates, pages and posts might not look 100% the same in terms of styling (see for example the title header of this article vs. the About / Contact page).
- Some WordPress elements like the read more-tag can cause an excessive white space in some circumstances (or maybe that’s a WP thing, or it’s just me and I need to do a bit of CSS-tweaking).
- The Blog post list options (for a blog overview page) can be a bit limited (however parameters can be tweaked in the shortcode options).
- Page loading times are a bit long (again, maybe that’s not because of the theme but simply because of large image files)
- Although the documentation is fine, it could be improved by explaining all the options in more detail.
- In the WP Customize option there’s a “Custom CSS” and “Additional CSS” option; I’m not really sure what the difference is.
The Ugly?
Nah, just kiddin! It’s beautiful, honestly 🙂
CSS Tweaks
There are a couple of CSS Tweaks applied to Rife Free on this website. Normally I would do this through a child theme, but because there are only just a few I simply added them to the Custom CSS tab in the WP Customize widget (hope this isn’t going to bite me in the future 😉. Tweaks are mainly text-size and alignment related and how the captions are displayed (mainly for the homepage).
Leave a comment or send a message if you would like to know the details.
Conclusion
I can be brief about that: the Rife Free Theme is a highly recommendable WordPress Theme. Not only for photography related websites, but seeing the other demo’s I guess for just about any subject. Give it a try!
The second part of the comment:
We are open to adding more options, but we need to know what you are missing 🙂
We try to do more inline documentation. By that I mean we add an extensive description to options that are more confusing, and reserve documentation for “really heavy” options 🙂 Still I would love to hear some examples that you are missing in the documentation, and we will work on it.
Most of our documentation was build on experience form our support forum, where we could find out issues that our users face.
Again, this is what we inherit from WordPress. The difference is explained in the documentation http://rifetheme.com/help/docs/modifications-of-theme/custom-css/
Thanks once again for your review.
With kind regards.
It’s fine for now, it’s just that it looks odd when you have posts with and without Featured Images listed in a Post-List. I worked around it by not using Featured Images. And it’s not like that section is most important for me 🙂
More like tutorials maybe, for example what I have described in the 1st part of your comment on how to use the shortcodes and settings in combination with Elementor. I mean it’s pretty much all there – you can do it, you just need to know how 😀 Maybe it’s an option to create (video) tutorials that describe how the various Demo sites have been setup?
Thanks again for all the work!
Cheers, Ronald
Tutorials – https://apollo13themes.com/rife/tutorials/
Do you know that for some time there is no need to use shortcode any longer, as everything is available as Elementor widger?
See here https://apollo13themes.com/rife-themes-shortcodes-available-as-elementor-widgets/
With kind regards.
Yes, I have seen these and the last couple of days I have been replacing the shortcodes with the Elementor Widgets! Works like a charm 🙂
Due to comment limit, I am breaking my comment to 2 comments.
Hey there:-)
Big thanks for your review! It was a pleasure to read it, and I am glad you like Rife Free theme so much.
I would like to address some point from your review:
I totally understand you and I agree that this is not totally intuitive. However, there is nothing that can be done with this currently(Elementor Pro tries to address some pain points).
WordPress is in a transition period where some options are available via editor and some via customizer. It seems that in 2019 it will all be changing due to the new vision of WordPress 5.
Rife is just theme, that tries to work on what is available 🙂
Yes, that could be a problem, but you can use theme title bar on every page to keep it consistent 🙂
Hi Air,
To get back to you on your comments:
No worries, now that I have worked more with Rife I have changed my workflow of creating pages in such way that I make more use of the shortcodes you provide. So, I create a page with Elementor and where I want to display an Album (
a13fe-galleryshortcode) or Album-post-list (a13fe-post-list type="album"), I just enter the appropriate shortcode there. Only thing I had to find out is the setting to change the links to the individual Albums from an Album-post-list, because by default the Album-post-list points to the Albums you create in the admin panel (and these pages lack the styling of Elementor). For those who want to know: in each Album you create, you can set a parameter calledAlternative Link. Here you can set the URL of the page (styled in Elementor) that contains the shortcode to that particular Album. So to recap: you create an Album and a separate Page that contains a shortcode to that album. Sounds a bit odd, but once you figure this out it makes sense 😉.Anyway, we’ll see what happens with WP in 2019. Hope it makes your life as a Theme Designer easier as well (but I doubt that ;))
Cheers!
Ronald