So after spending many hours re-writing and developing InBloom, I relaunched the site using WordPress as a CMS.  I also wanted to save myself the headache and purchase an out-of-the-box / “premium” theme for WordPress to save myself the time of developing a new theme from scratch.  I looked at various options including Thematic, Thesis, and others – ultimately deciding to settle upon using WPRemix 3 available at www.WPRemix.com

I did some quick research and shot from the hip thinking WPRemix was the way to go, I think I chose correctly, but it was not without headaches along the way.  Thus, I write this full and honest critique of the theme as an insight to other developers and users looking at it as an option.

The Pros:

1. Really cool template system that lets users use a myriad of different options to form interesting layouts from one theme
2. A LOT of templates to choose from.
3. The best support I have ever received for a product from support admin Randy West.
4. Clever CSS that manages a lot of things.
5. Nice support of drop-down menus, including the currently selected page

The Cons:

1. Somewhat weak documentation
2. Intricate CSS code that can get difficult to manage for those that like to tinker
3. The WP visual editor can mess up code easily, so you’re generally using it in Code view (WP shares some of the blame for this also)
4. Templates are somewhat generic and don’t give you quite the polish a custom template does (I’d like to think I have high standards)
5. The header template always resets to the default setting anytime you make an edit to a page or post.
6. Some small lingering widget bugs

The Neutrals:

1. I did find a number of CSS classes that were consistently misspelled.  It was good that they were consistent but it can be disconcerting to constantly stare at CSS and not know if display errors are due to your coding error or because of a misspelling.

The Evaluation
InBloomSoftware.com is the new site for InBloom and it runs WordPress 2.8.3 as of this writing on PHP 5 on a Linux box.  This is worth mentioning as some installations on IIS servers that mix PHP with WPRemix can have issues.

After receiving my purchase confirmation email, I downloaded a ZIP file and unzipped it to find the following:

I disregarded the Magazine module and dragged the wpremix3 folder to my WordPress themes folder.  A lot of first time users mistakenly install that whole folder which I find interesting from a usability standpoint (what would make them not do that?).  That’s about it for set up – nothing unusual.

Once the folder was FTPd to my site, I activated the theme and navigated to the new WPRemix Options panel under the Appearance group and you can play around with different settings to  automate Feedburner feeds, Flickr photos, Meta keywords,  the header default style for the site and the CSS theme to use for basic link colors, etc.

From there, if you want to really edit the look and feel of your site, you have to know CSS and you have to be comfortable manipulating it.  There’s no two ways around it.  This happened to be my case, so I did some basic rearranging and duplicated one of the header styles and customized it to have the navigation menu appear above the layout.  I also removed the generic banner, advertisement placeholder, and then I duplicated the WPRemix-specific mini-theme  I was using to better manipulate what was happening with fonts, link color, backgrounds and more.  This is where the CSS became both interesting, fun and baffling.

The main styles.css stylesheet required by WordPress imports 12 or so other stylesheets which is a clever way to engineer a kind of pyramid CSS architecture within the WPRemix world.  It gets confusing to track which stylesheets pertain to which features and the names help dropmenu.css, innerpages.css, header.css, sidebars.css, misc.css, and others.  The complexity begins there as a lot of overlapping in class names and styles across the stylesheets has you jumping around more than you expect.  Given that fact, it becomes difficult to do things like the site standard font.  So when I chose to change from Arial to Lucida Grande, it became a hassle to edit it in styles.css in addition to other stylesheets to make sure that it was applied consistently throughout the different pages.  This was a simple example, but an incident and process that occurred MANY times throughout my customization of WPRemix.

Using the WPRemix templates for product pages, testimonial pages and gallery pages is a nice process, when it works smoothly.  A custom Remix – Add Template file control panel appears under both the Add Page and Add Post screens.  Here you choose the layout you want to use as a base template, click the Send to Editor button, and a large snippet of formatted dummy text is inserted into the post/page content area.

The code that is auto-entered has lorem ipsum placeholder text so it’s straightforward to change the text to whatever you like.  If you want to change the styles of your design than you’ll need to fire up FireBugz or CSSedit on your Mac.  As soon as you do, you’ll the overlapping styles and will be tracking down most this way.  In this respect, I also find WPRemix’s adherence to a grid and grid spacing somewhat untidy.  Thus the typography can slightly suffer when you start customizing your CSS, most especially because of the inter-related nature of the CSS classes and how these classes are called by multiple style pages.

While you finish editing your post content, you can specify the header and sidebar (if any) to display on your page.  A personal gripe is that the theme doesn’t remember your settings from the previous header  choice.  Thus, if you choose different headers between different pages, you have to remember your choices to respecify them if you made any additional changes to the WP pages/posts.

The Conclusion
WPRemix 3 is a solid offering as a premium theme. I mentioned that the documentation is weak and it is worth noting that it is being entirely rewritten by Randy, the WPR support admin.  Randy also maintains epic quality support on the support forums (which are also being vastly overhauled) and shoulders much of getting users up to speed.  There are a number of repetitive questions on the support forums, which points to the fact that certain things could be ironed out or smoothed better in the implementation byWPRemix.

For those without little-to-no web experience, it is great to get off the ground nicely, but you’re probably using the visual editor in WordPress and WPR may mess things up for you in that respect.  I recommend WPRemix if you’re really uncomfortable with web-coding, fine with the default out of the box visual options, and just want something to get off the ground.  For more advanced users, other “premium” themes may be more  attractive.

UPDATE
I’ve had more time to use and digest my WPR experience and I’ve changed my mind.  You can read more about it here.