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Loading ...Mimbo Pro released; no joy for me yet
Category: Themes and Tricks
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I met with awesome Darren Hoyt back in January, when he was down in Cape Town on vacation and I loved picking his mind on design & WordPress themes. We also got talking about doing a Premium News vs Mimbo collaboration theme, which we still intend on attempting in the near future. In the meantime though, Darren has just announced the release of Mimbo Pro - a super-slick WordPress theme that is absolutely jam-packed with features (online demo here).
Now in my mind, this theme is true competition to all the premium themes on the market at the moment - not just because of all the features / functions, but also considering Mimbo’s (the early free version) previous success - with about 10 000 odd downloads (Darren: Correct me if I’m way out). This theme spent about 3 months in development, which is both an indication of how busy Darren is, but also the level of detail that should be apparent in the features that has been included.
In my mind, these are the standout features of Mimbo Pro:
- The sexy secondary featured news scroller (just below the headline story). It looks sexy and feels great when using it! Really nice implementation and execution.
- The theme’s author archives are absolutely top-notch and something that I’ll be adding to future Premium News themes as well.
- If you have a look at any single post page, you’ll note that the comment form actually has some HTML controls (Bold, Italics etc.), which is something that I haven’t seen before. Now that’s what I call thinking outside of the box.
- The typography (even though it’s a bit small here and there) is incredible - it’s evident a lot of time and thought went into fine-tuning it!
- And lastly, the auto-resizing of images is also something that we’ve been talking about at Premium News HQ (we’ll implement something similar in the near future) and this feature will add immense value to users of the theme.
Clicking through the theme, I can really only spot on thing that bothers me (and which could possibly hamper the theme’s sales potential); and that’s the design / styling itself. I absolutely adore every single aspect of the design, as it’s really unique and shouts Darren Hoyte… BUT I’ve always tended to go a bit more minimalistic and generic with my own premium themes, because I’ve always felt the buyer should be able to easily customize and brand a premium theme to their needs. Darren mentions that there’s additional colour schemes available (through the theme’s backend in the WP admin panel) and even though this will overcome a big part of my concern, it doesn’t take it away completely.
That said though, this is an amazing theme and knowing Darren, no one will make a bad decision if they decide to purchase this theme. My biggest (other) gripe is the fact that I’ve purchased this theme about 2 hours ago (I wanted to play around under the hood), but I still haven’t received the theme files (Hehe… Hey Darren: get automated, get E-Junkie…). Aargh, I’m just saying that, because seeing the theme released got me so excited to play around in their code and now I’m left waiting for that.
Anyway, I can probably continue to wax lyrical about this theme, but then again I’d rather have you check it out yourself and let me know what you think. I should also get back to finishing up the 3 new themes we’re launching on Premium News this weekend… Oops, did I just let that slip…!?
