I have been very neglectful of this site lately. I wish I could say that will all change but. Na, it won’t.

Here’s a short enough post. It’s not the kind of post where I say “Hey, go look at my new site over here” but that is a very small part of it. I want to tell you about a WordPress theme called Divi. This is currently the latest offering from the Elegant themes provider and its well worth considering.

However, before you launch in there and spend money on it, let me make you aware of some of the problems I encountered.

Let me start by saying a huge thanks to Emma because without her regular visual perspective I wouldn’t have had a clue what was going wrong.

Sliders

• The placement of text in the slider is very hard to get right. A specific image dimension is probably required however this doesn’t seem to be noted anywhere in the documentation. To get around this, I had to assign a class to the text and set the top margin to a minus value.
• It isn’t possible to place the sections at specific points on the page and they aren’t always at the top or directly below another section. Therefore, again, I had no choice but to associate some sections with a class and then set a minus value for the top margin.
• When I tried instead to use an image as the background of a slide it seemed absolutely impossible to control the size of that slide.
• Be careful with other modules that you have installed. If you have a conflicting slider you may find some very strange behaviour.
• I also recommend that when making changes to the text within a slider that you copy it to notepad or another editor because a few times I wrote a fantastic slide description only for it to be lost because the page didn’t save properly.
• Adding a button a header to the slider spaces it out far too much. I wanted a compact and clean slider for the top of the page. Not a full length animation.
• Saving the biggest problem until last, the slider displays properly on tablets however not IOS or Android on phones.

Setting backgrounds.

• I was told at one stage that the site looked a little bland. To solve this, I decided to use a background gradient. Thanks to CSS3, this is well supported and with a few checks for specific browsers in the CSS it’s very easy to implement consistently. However, some modules support setting a background colour but some don’t. There doesn’t seem to be any generic configuration items for these modules. Again, I had to get around this by using a class and styling this class using CSS.
• There are no properties for setting the background in the Divi EPanel options so again, this had to be done using CSS.
• Instead of just having the ability to set text and background colours in some modules to either dark or light, I would rather an additional or advanced option that would allow someone to type the hex values.

The header.

• I wanted to do a few things with the header. A number of people commented that the logo is very small but there is no way of changing the dimensions of this. I looked in the CSS file but I really can’t find where it is specified.
• I would also like to add a role over but I don’t find the CSS very easy to read. The role over would define what menu item the mouse is hovering over.

The pricing table

• This is a fantastic idea but it’s not really a table. Its several tables. Each price you add is actually an additional table. I needed Emma’s help quite a bit to get this looking properly and even now I’m not entirely happy with it.
• Feedback that I have received has also been quite negative about this. Divi seems to grey or dim features that are unavailable for certain price plans but it’s not obvious to people what this dim or grey colour represents. A more graphical representation would be a lot better.

Divi is a great theme but what it claims to do isn’t quite delivered yet. I’m hoping it will vastly improve in the next year or two but if you are considering it today, be warned you will have no choice but to tweak a lot of CSS before you get it working properly.