Thread: Some Pre-Sales Questions

Some Pre-Sales Questions

I have been looking at a few different wordpress directories. I have a few questions before I make a final decision on which directory to purchase.

1) Is the design fully editable in css? Would it just require me to create a child theme similar to thematic? Or am I confined to only design changes within wordpress admin that you customized?

2) Why would you say your directory is better than directory press or wpmudev directory?

3) On the create listing page, is there a way before they can fill out the form that they can choose a free trial or paid account? All before they submit a listing? Or does that appear after the listing?

4) The other 2 directories above have been around longer. Do you plan to continue to roll out new updates & enhancements on your theme in the future?

5) Do you have any links of sites that are currently using vantage besides the demo?

Thank you for your time.

In addition to the questions I wrote, is there any plans to make the theme responsive or add in a mobile version? I tested it on my mobile device but it looked the same as the actual site.

In answer to your questions:

1) Yes you are free to customize as you wish, and we recommend the creation of a child theme when doing this to minimize the loss of modifications made in the process of an update. We also provide some documentation for developers who are looking to make changes to our themes.

2) Ultimately the decision about which directory product you prefer is yours, and I'm sure you've researched each product thoroughly to determine which has the features you're looking for in a directory theme/plugin and come up with some similarities in terms of what each offers. What you find behind each product though is equally as important, and AppThemes has an amazing development team who are dedicated to creating and continually developing these quality themes for our customers.

3) By default, the listing price plan options are not shown until the end of the listing process. Any changes to this would require customization on your part, but technically it could be done.

4) Definitely yes, we will continue to develop Vantage (as we do with all of our themes), and as well as that, there are additional enhancement opportunities available within the AppThemes marketplace where customers can find optional extras developed by AppThemes as well as other marketplace developers.

5) Yes we have some great examples of live Vantage sites in the AppThemes customer showcase.

6) Yes, we are already working on responsive changes to Vantage which are planned for implementation in the next major release (v1.2), with the estimated release date indicated on our theme release status page. Thanks.

Excellent thank you for the feedback. Just a few final questions before I ultimately make my design. As I have been doing a lot of research regarding the different directories over the past couple of weeks.

1) I have seen in posts that it looks like the new release with a responsive theme has been pushed back at least twice already. Is it possible that the next update could be pushed back another 6 months or more? The non-responsiveness of the theme is definitely a downer at this point.

2) Is there a built in slider at this point? Or is that something that needs to be added in?

3) Can you list businesses in unlimited amounts of categories? Not sure if I have just clicked in the wrong areas, but I have only seen places listed in 1 category.

4) All the sample sites I looked at have a similar look in that they only use categories. In theory can you break things down by having a search by category & a search by town or county? In theory if it was all in that 1 category box it would just become way too long. I would almost rather use the homepage body area to display the categories. I assume that would require custom modifications?

1) We originally estimated that the responsive design would be ready by the end of December 2012, however with the release of WordPress 3.5 around the same time, testing was instead focused on making sure there were no compatibility issues (which there wasn't). Aside from that, the responsive design was always planned for the next major release. We don't expect there to be further delays from the estimated target date currently indicated, however priority is given to releasing a quality product with as much testing as possible beforehand.

2) No there is currently no built in slide in Vantage so it would be a customization.

3) As listing prices are category based, listings are not currently able to be posted in multiple categories. This is a planned feature inclusion for version 1.2.

4) Yes the location based changes you describe would currently require modification. Thanks.

Thanks again for the quick replies. I think I have narrowed down my search to using your theme. However, I may have to wait until the new release. The fact that I can not add a listing to multiple categories right now would not allow me to use the program. So I need to wait to make sure this is in your next release that is about 2 months away. I will keep an eye on it. Will there be a new features added page? So we can see what was added on the new release?

Last question would be, when the ability to add a listing to multiple categories is included in the next release, will that also allow for that listing to be featured on multiple category pages? I noticed that in the admin demo which is a nice feature, just hope that option will be there to add the listing as a featured listing to as many categories as it appears in.

Look forward to seeing the new release.

You're welcome :) If you haven't already done so, you may like to subscribe to our blog, or follow us on Twitter or Facebook so you know when the official release is made. If there is no blog post announcing specific features beforehand, you will be able to see the release log information posted on the Vantage version history page once it's out.

The specific information about how the multiple category selection will work hasn't been confirmed as such, but currently in Vantage you can allow plans to feature a listing both on the homepage and by category, so this should continue to be the case even with multiple category selection. Thanks.

I saw that the theme is now responsive ahead of schedule so that sounds great.

Do you know if the listing businesses in unlimited amounts of categories was added in yet? Last we talked it was for v1.2 but I figured I would check. That would be the only thing holding me back from getting this theme at the moment.

The ability to add listings to multiple categories is still in the plan for inclusion in the v1.2 release, so no it hasn't been added yet. Thanks :)

Do you know if adding a listing to multiple categories was included in the v1.2 release that came out in May? That was the one thing holding me back from purchasing. I did check & saw v1.2 was released but it did not show in the notes what enhancements were made.