As of today we will not just offer you our free Magazine themes and corresponding Pro Version plugins, but also our new Add-ons.
Add-ons are standalone plugins, which can be used in combination with all of our themes. They will add theme-independent features and functionality, which are better suited for a plugin rather than the theme. Our new add-on plugins will be specifically designed for ThemeZee WordPress themes but will also work with any other theme.
About our new Add-ons
As result we now offer two kind of plugins. Let’s take a short look on the difference between those two:
1. Pro Version Plugins
Only work in combination with one, corresponding theme (Merlin theme > Merlin Pro plugin). They include theme-dependent features like custom colors, custom fonts or footer widgets.
2. Add-on Plugins
Work with every one of our WordPress themes, as well as other themes. They include theme-independent features and functionality – as normal plugins do.
Reasons for our new Add-ons
There are three reasons why we are expanding our product offering to add-on plugins:
1. To satisfy many of your great feature requests
We are getting a lot of great feature requests from you and have a long list of ideas what we could offer. However, it does not make sense to add every feature to our themes. A lot of features are functionality- rather than design-related, and therefore belong into a plugin.
If all themes are using the same piece of code it is way better to have it in a single plugin rather than copied it across 10 themes. Adding plugin-territorial features to themes is just bad for maintenance, bug fixes and security.
Therefore our add-on plugins will often be the better way to introduce new awesome features.
2. To fullfill our claim “Easy to use Themes”
The second reason is tied to the first one. Adding every request to our themes would soon lead to feature-bloated themes, which is bad for usability. We have a strong focus on creating easy-to-use themes and one way to ensure that is by avoiding huge and overwhelming theme option panels with hundreds of settings.
Most users only need a small amount of theme settings and features, not all of them. By offering add-on plugins for our themes you have the choice which features you want to use – by simply installing the add-on plugins you’d like to have.
3. To offer a complete Magazine website solution
One problem we often see is with plugins which generate some output on the frontend. Common issues are that the plugin styling does not match the theme or that the plugin’s output is breaking the design. As a matter of fact we are answering many support questions about such compatibility issues.
Another problem is that some plugins require to edit the theme template files and add extra code to display the plugin output, or add some code to the functions.php. That is difficult for most users and often leads to broken themes. It also requires to create a child theme to avoid losing the modifications with every update.
By offering our own plugins which are specifically designed to be used with our themes we hope to provide you with a much easier solution. No compatibility issues. No theme file editing. No child themes. No styling customizations. Just plugins that work perfectly out of the box.
Add-on Pricing
The pricing of our new add-ons will depend on each plugin, its complexity and cost of development. We will release some plugins for free, while some will cost a small fee.
We really hope you will like our new add-ons. You can find a new menu item Add-ons on our navigation to check them out. We will release our first two add-ons the next days.