MyThemeShop has caught my eye lately because they boldly claim to have made the fastest loading WordPress theme ~ Schema ~ on their portfolio. I love robust, fast loading themes to build upon so I thought I’d give their newest addition ~ Authority ~ a try.
Features
Baseprice is 69$ but there usually is a discount code available. Unlike other Themes this involves unlimited usage with updates and support for one year only. Renewal is 19$ per year. If you want continous updates for the theme of your choice ~ and who wouldn’t ~ you should be prepared for a yearly subscription fee.
The theme features a Theme Options Panel like most premium themes. Unusual is the deployment of shortcodes which come as a plugin with the theme – WP Shortcode. Required plugins besides that one are MyThemeShop Theme/Plugin Updater from an external source, as well as WP Tab Widget and WP Review from the WordPress.org repository.
MyThemeShop utilizes a modular setup to throw together and market themes based on Schema. Those are fast, SEO optimized and reasonably stable. If you encounter a problem with one theme it is very likely though, that all of their themes will have it. You can not have the Facebook-Share without Facebook-Like in social buttons for example. Not with Authority, not with Schema (this theme) and not with socialMe as you can see in the footage below. If you follow closely, you will see that the facebook share is missing after reloading the page.
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More InformationSturdiness
My workflow in evaluating a themes solidity is as follows
- Installation and branding (no external plugins)
- Testing features and shortcodes
- Securing site (WP Security or WordFence)
- Accelerating site (caching and minifying CSS/JS/HTML)
With Authority, I did barely get to 2. before I had to contact support because of HTML breaking. Those guys really leaned into it though, requested a login to the site and tried fixing the issue. It turned out that enabling lazy-load on images broke HTML-rendering. They admitted a bug and offered a refund. Edit: the bugs were fixed with v1.0.4 which has been released on March 19th.
I had always used the wordpress’ native embed shortcode instead of the MyThemeShop YouTube Video shortcode because I like it better.
Support
Sadly, the theme isn’t that well documented. Support via the forums is responsive and non-shilly-shally even when it comes to admitting a bug. An update to the theme fixing said bug has been promised on 29.04.2016 via email.
The update will be out soon fixing both the issues you have mentioned.
I’m thrilled to learn what soon really means in this context. And now I know: bugs were fixed during one month.
Conclusion
It appears to me that MyThemeShop is marketing theme after theme very similar to each other. I’d rather have them focus on quality over quantity.
Unlike ElegantThemes MyThemeShop does not put effort into educational content and swallowing their overly aggressive marketing leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
