We’ve received a lot of inquiries, tweets, and messages on what’s coming next in our theme store and after a few month hiatus, I’m happy to report we have a new theme released and ready for usage.
Our latest theme, Caroline, is now available and it’s full of lots of functional goodness.
Instead of integrating our theme into one or two major plugins, we decided we’d go full out crazy and style it to support four very popular plugins. When you purchase Caroline, you’ll receive a premium Genesis child theme that is pre-styled for LearnDash, WooCommerce, bbPress, and BuddyPress. We’ve also added in The Events Calendar, so you can round out this theme with a plentiful amount of options.
While our demo of Caroline uses a university as the sample user, it really be used for any website that would include forums, a social network, a learning management system, or an e-commerce storefront.
And we didn’t stop there with features and options. Caroline also supports my two favorite plugins, Gravity Forms and Soliloquy.
Caroline Comes Packed With Features and Options
- Text or image based logo
- Two navigation menus
- Hero image or rotator
- Call to actions
- Email subscription option
- Social media integration
- Integrated blog
- Online store with shopping cart
- Social profiles for users or website members
- Members list
- Groups
- Forums
- Learning management software
- Professional looking inquiry forms
- Events calendar or list
- Mobile responsiveness
- HTML5 coding
- Schema support
If that all feels a bit like functional overkill, don’t worry. You only need to install the plugins you want to use and you can ignore any features that don’t fit into your website.
Who is the Real Caroline?
Caroline is named after the friend and fellow Genesis developer, Carrie Dils. Wait just minute, isn’t Carrie Dils a competitor of Web Savvy? Well yes and no.
We both work with the Genesis framework and we both sell stock Genesis themes, but we really service very different types of customers. And honestly, I wouldn’t care anyway. Carrie is my WordPress BFF and I like her more than I can articulate in a blog post.
If you are not familiar with Ms. Dils, let me tell you a little bit about her. If I used one word to describe her, it would be “amazing” but that simply doesn’t tell you enough.
She is extremely funny – so funny my stomach hurts from laughing when I’m with her. She sings and plays the guitar and can create some very humorous lyrics. She likes the penny slots but only if bubbling fish are involved. She can ride a mechanical bull, but cannot stay on it very long which made me laugh even harder since she is a Texan.
But Carrie isn’t all fun and games. She also has a very professional side to her and I like this side as much as I like the personal side of Carrie. She is generous with her time and gives a lot of support and wisdom to the Genesis community. She teaches courses at Lynda.com and does so because she is wicked smart. She is very well respected within our Genesis community, has an active podcast called OfficeHours.fm, and takes giving back even further by speaking at WordCamps around the country.
I first met Carrie at WordCamp Las Vegas in 2013. My first comment to her was stupid beyond belief and while she could have completely dismissed me, she did not. She laughed and let me recover from my social snafu. I have very fond memories of her that trip and I left thinking I needed to spend more time with her. Which I did.
I next connected with Carrie on my way to CaboPress is 2014. She did not go to this event, but I spent the day with her on route to the conference. I literally flew through Dallas and spent the night so we could reconnect. Our next adventures took place at WordCamp Las Vegas 2014, PressNomics 2015, and WordCamp San Fransisco 2015.
Let me just say this – you can pack a whole lot of work, fun, and great memories into a weekend conference. Carrie and I have proven this over and over again.
Since I always name our stock themes after people I care for, Carrie Dils was a natural choice for our newest release.
Grab a Copy of Caroline and Start Digging Into Great Plugins Like bbPress and BuddyPress
If you’ve never worked with BuddyPress or bbPress, now is the time to jump in. Our Caroline theme is perfect for getting started with these advanced plugins, because we’ve done all integration for you.
Learn more about our theme by visiting the online demo or product page:
Visit the Caroline demo site ->
Purchase the Caroline theme ->
If you’ve purchased our Developer Pro Pack, Caroline is already waiting in your account and is ready for download. Please note this license is no longer for sale, but we do add new themes to the license as they are release.
This looks great, so many features! FYI – the demo site link above goes to “Alexandra” instead of Caroline. It works on the purchase page though.
Thanks for the heads up Jodi. I’ve fixed it.
AWESOME! This may have just answered the question of from which child theme I might start the redesign for http://alliedwomenentrepreneurs.org. Our current theme just is not working.
I’m curious – did you find a solution for keeping WooCommerce customers out of BuddyPress? We were using the WooCommerce add-on for the event calendar to sell event tickets, but had to stop doing that because every customer was then given BuddyPress access and profiles. I couldn’t figure out a way to get BuddyPress to recognize roles and capabilities. Does this theme do this?
Thanks!
(FYI – the theme demo link above goes to the wrong theme.)
Amber I’m not sure about the group control over BuddyPress, as it would not be something we would manage via the child theme. We would let the plugins manage that functionality. That said, I am willing to bet a plugin could be written to augment the existing functionality and address this issue.
David Bisset is a very good WordPress developer who is well versed in Buddy and bbPress. You could check with him to see if you could contract him to write something. Or if he is unavailable, he might have another recommended developer that could do it.
Thanks! I might check him out!
I was wondering what your team was cooking up next. It’s been a while and now, I know why! Lots of work must have gone into developing and fine tuning this theme.
I still would like for you to develop my brainchild Rebecca. I’m retiring in September and need something to work on and bring in some coin too. Heck you could even call my theme ‘Marcus’! – LOL!
I too find Carrie hilarious and because of her light heartedness enjoy her blogs and podcasts.
Nice work on the Caroline theme and love the extra wide layout – looks great on my iMac 27″ retina display! Just curious though – why you didn’t name it Carrie vs Caroline?
Great question!
Caroline takes up more space in the header and thus allows it to be more usable for real users. Shorter names look cool, but rarely work for real world usage. We found that our the hard way.
And an even bigger reason is if you Google “carrie wordpress theme” the front page is covered with content for Carrie Dils. If I named it Carrie, then I would compete with that and that would be competing against my friend – the real life Carrie – and that would not be nice.
In Rebeccaland, everything always comes back to SEO and organic search. =)
Hmmm… never thought about that! Both are excellent subtle points. It sure is easy to screw things up out there in SEOland 😉
Yes yes it is. I wish more people realized the dangers.
You know Rebecca, I think you are on to something here.
Most theme shops just crank them out. Then you wind up having to maintain something that wasn’t quite baked.
You’ve taken a different approach by taking more time but carefully integrating popular plugins as one into a new cohesive theme.
It takes longer but Caroline and your new approach is a higher quality product.
Another subject. Here’s what I like and don’t like about this theme:
1.) Modern 32px genericons used only on the top level menu and not going crazy with them on both menus – nice reserved touch
2.) 2 rows of menus provide enough room for more advanced sites and offer consistent navigation – both menus appear and behave well on the iPhone (which seems too often to be an issue)!
3.) Extra-wide layout – seems to be the trend these days and I like it
4.) Slider grabs attention immediately and focuses the eye on the overlying call-to-action
5.) The Site Title font is sexy
6.) Not so sure about the content font as it appears a little jagged on my retina display but I’ll re-look this
7.) Widgetized home page offers lots of flexibility
8.) Bigger selection of colors – most theme shops offer 2 to 4 and say just use the customizer
9.) Blog 2-column layout is nice and great for large blogs (not sure how its going to handle portrait images though?
10.) No landing page
11.) Thorough instructions for setting up our theme similar to the Demo
All in all, I like this theme and I’m going to test it out! Thank you.
Appreciate all the feedback Marcus. I will take it all into consideration for Caroline updates and for future theme builds.
Loved the theme. I will be starting a small project for a university, and I would be happy to use this theme, it gets all ticks for my requirements.
Would you also be providing updates to the theme ? Or Does Support cost extra ?
Our current license model is one time purchase that includes future theme upgrades and forum support for one domain.
Great looking theme. Thanks to your team. I am looking to purchase this theme to work with LearnDash so I can port my Udemy course. Can the BBpress and BuddyPress components be turned off and turned on as needed.
Also does Disquss work with this theme as an alternate commenting engine to the default WordPress commenter.
Thanks for your time
Val
bbPress and BuddyPress are optional. If you do not need that functionality, you can simply not install and activate the plugins. There are no known plugin conflicts, so Disqus presents no issues.