This is a lightning talk I did at the December PDX WordPress user group meeting about the WP-Remix theme I used for a project that had a very fast turn around. The project was for a company that makes wall calendars and I had 3 days to provide a screen shot of the homepage a calendar page and 1 text page. After searching for a template I thought this one would be perfect, but it is difficult to work with unless you know HTML, CSS and perhaps a bit of PHP.

1. WP Remix Theme www.wpremix.com Demo site at: http://wpremix.com/demo/home/home-1/

3. 20 inside layouts

4. 4 sidebar options

5. 5 gallery options

6. 5 product pages

7. Blog

9. Client Calendar site We used the Homepage 01 template to create this page header

10. But it was a pain in the butt! :(

11. This is what the editor of the homepage 01 template looked like when I first went in. Obviously, this is my first clue that this theme is not for the faint of heart, and definitely not for your typical client. “What the hell?”

12. I was so confused, I had to get the HTML into Dreamweaver just to see what was going on. It mades a bit more sense here

13. header Next, I needed to add a page showcasing the different images from one calendar

14. The calendar pages used the Product04 template header

15. Which looked like this in the back end…note I have to scroll to see the calendar images

16. Uh, and I have to scroll more

17. Crapola! I totally messed that up! Thank god for the revisions, right? So, I wanted to make some edits to the calendar page, but I screwed it up. I went back to my revisions and restored the last one from when I last visited this site (September).

18. And this is what I got. Erm..what is that sidebar doing here? Pretend that I’m the client right now ok? I am confused and really annoyed!

19. Wow, what are all those things to the left? That looks like fun! So, I recalled that I’d run into this before, but because I didn’t take notes in September (my bad)….I think I had to edit some php. But I couldn’t remember, so I thought I’d try that template thing over on the right. We used Product Template 04, remember? I’ll try that one.

20. #$@^$%*&$^&(#*)(@*@)(*!!!!!!! header Of course, that Page Attributes would be turned off in the admin before handing this over to a client, but the point is…..

21. WP-Remix is not really meantfor clients! It does have great flexibility, but if you use this theme, know that your client most likely will not be able to edit it. There’s not even an option to edit from the front. To handle this theme, you need to know HTML, CSS and even mess with some of the PHP. And, you need to handle it yourself. I ended up hating it. This simple site, took FOREVER.