I have little doubt that most of you will have heard of WP Unlimited, David Peralty’s premium theme offering. David has chosen to brand it as ‘The ultimate WordPress theme’; I couldn’t let that one go, so I’ve spent the last few days playing around with it so I could give you my considered opinion of it.

Firstly, I think the choice of tag-line is brave. For me the tag-line conjures up images of some kind of complex behemoth, so it was with some trepidation that I installed it. The reality is, I am happy to report, quite the opposite. I found it really easy to get going with, more so than many of the premium themes I have tried in the past. On the surface this theme seems really simple and that is certainly one of my key criteria for ultimateness. I should however start from the start.

The first thing I found when I unzipped it was a really handy PDF instruction book. 20 pages of explanation later left me feeling pretty confident that I would be able to do what I wanted with this theme. Blogging isn’t rocket science but it was nice to have a simple explanation of the interface and the tools.

The first time I activated the theme though I found the the thing I like most; out of all the fancy layout, styling, and SEO tools, the thing I really like is how simple the base theme is. Themes, premium themes especially, have been getting glossier and more graphical, and while that is fine, it can make it hard to retune. David has turned his back on all that and presented a good solid, neutral, base from which to start customising. He assumes you want to change it. A lot.

I am genuinely tempted to add my header image in and use the base theme as is. Really.

My preference for white aside, I think the area that will most impress purchasers of this theme is that David seems to have given a significant amount of thought to what bloggers, rather than developers, actually want in a theme. Of all the themes I have used this really does feel the most focussed on the kinds of people I know that use WordPress within the community. Let me give some examples that stand out for me:

On the first page of the options is a box to enter code that will be displayed to visitors if they have arrived via a search engine, a feedburner url box, a box to add content to the end of your RSS feeds (i.e. copyright notices), and the option to include social networking links such as Digg, Sphinn, Facebook, and StumbleUpon.

On the second page you can turn on or off the blog title and tag-line independently of each other, select the content-sidebar configuration you want and, importantly, change the width of these.

The penultimate panel is something I haven’t seen before that I think will really go down well. In the theme they are called Hooks. They let you add content into certain pre-defined places. They sound like PHP enabled text widgets, but are actually more specific than that; for example, if you want to add specific content above or below the content of every post, or between each post, then these can do that for you. I really like this idea and I’m curious to see how it is used, so if you have used these then drop a note in the comments to your blog.

I can’t leave this section without mentioning the style customisation. The theme is designed with several core areas of colour. Using the design tab (which even has some preset colour and type schemes ), you can change things like the background colour, text colour, border colour, border size, padding, link colour and font family.

A lot of these things were previously available in plugin form. You can argue the merits of deciding to bundle the functionality within the theme, but having them all available as part of theme feels right and after trying this out I can’t help but feel that this is the right move, for this theme at least.

So far I haven’t really mentioned the code and I don’t really intend to. That isn’t the point of this theme. I should point out however, that the theme doesn’t really reinvent anything so if you want add HTML manually or change the HTML you can. The theme uses the standard plugin files (Which is a very good thing). You won’t get any surprises if you want to go digging.

Niggles

Of course I do have a few niggles; it is only natural. The first is that I made a lot of changes in the admin page, changing each set of options as I went. When I got to the option to upload an image I did so and the rest of my changes got lost at that point. It was forseable, in fact I knew it was going to happen, but a warning, or perhaps a javascript alert to ask if I want to save first might be useful.

The second is really a problem I have with every theme out there. I just don’t feel that anyone has fully engaged with menus and I don’t think much of the accepted method of selecting the pages you don’t want to appear in the menu. There is nothing wrong with that, but it isn’t the dynamic menu manager that I think is possible. There is scope for a revolution in menu’s and it hasn’t happened here. I can’t really blame that on this particular theme though.

Conclusion

This theme does a lot for you with very little effort. It is a really nice intermediate step between complex frameworks and glossy premium themes. I can’t say that this is the ultimate WordPress theme. I can say though that, in my opinion, the ultimate theme is yet to be built, and perhaps never will be. Perhaps the ultimate theme isn’t even a theme. All that aside though, don’t let that put you off trying this theme. I really like it, and I think you might as well.

What this theme does is get the basics right and then leave you alone. In my book this is a really good approach to themes and, in a year when everyone is predicting that child themes and frameworks will be the big thing, I applaud WP Unlimited for doing the opposite and keeping it real.

I feel quite happy recommending this theme so check out the full features page, demo, and video tutorials to find out more.