Last updated on September 6, 2017
Oshine is a creative multi-purpose theme released in December 2014 by Brand Exponents, an Envato Power Elite author. It is described as one of the most beautiful templates on this creative niche, with many features and pre-built demos, that will give you a starting point in developing an impressive and well-customized website.
Design
Do you like white spaces, minimal lines, and few visual elements, but with massive impact on your visitors? It’s hard to design something simple and elegant that will win your user’s hearts, but Oshine’s authors did it! This multi-purpose template is designed with creativity and fresh visual ingredients, all combined with a modern architecture.
The Brand Exponents developer enhanced Oshine with a responsive and retina ready layout, to provide the same visitor’s experience on all devices.
If you don’t want to build your website from scratch, you can easily install a demo. Select a premade layout from a list of 30 demos, then import the Options Panel, content, widgets, and slider data.
When you create a page, you get extra options for the header’s ‘Hero Section’. This section can be customized using predefined styles, colors, or become sticky. Also, you can modify the layout’s behavior, set an image or video as background, show widgets, and choose a sidebar. With nine page templates and many shortcode modules to choose from, your website will look elegant.
To customize the Above the fold area, you can choose one of the twelve header styles available. Also, you can use widgets on the header or Top Bar section. What if you don’t want to use a standard header? No problem, the theme’s developers give you the opportunity to choose a left side header with 7 predefined styles and other options to customize it.
One of the essential keys to a successful website is the content and its aesthetics. With Oshine you can use a gallery, image, quote, video, audio or link format to highlight your content. The template allows your visitors to open all the images and videos within a styled lightbox effect. This will give you the possibility to see pictures, galleries, and sliders in detail, as the theme’s layout is extensive and it offers high visibility. You can also showcase your content in pages using amazing portfolios and the ‘Portfolio carousel’ module. The collections come with lots of customization options, from the aspect ratio, slug, to navigation arrow style, taxonomy and everything in between.
Oshine brings you eight blog page styles, and you can adjust the layout to use a masonry design. The theme gives you the flexibility to customize the sidebar position, gutter, columns, widgets, buttons, and more.
You can add a final touch of style to your page using one of the two footer styles available, divided into 3 or 4 columns. Insert widgets, text or add a wrapped border to make the bottom section of your website enchanting.
Functionality
This beautiful template comes with the Oshine Options panel, where you can change global settings for background, typography, logo, header, footer, portfolio, shop, colors, etc. This panel comes with a well-structured system, where all you need is organized in sub-menus. For example, you can apply typography for headings, content area, mobile menu, sidebar, portfolio, header and footer sections, and observe them in a live preview.
Oshine has its own drag and drop page builder – Tatsu, based on a rows and columns system. This great tool allows you to make easy frontend site modifications. The Tatsu builder allows you to insert pre-styled content blocks, with various options that can be personalized according to your preferences. You can copy, duplicate, or delete each of these parts.
The Bubble Testimonial, Icons, Justified Gallery, Video, and the BE Slider with many animation types, are a few custom modules, ready to enhance your website. The builder also contains an element called ‘Tweets’ that allows you to add your Twitter account name, animation, text color, and font size. Furthermore, your content can be shared on other social networks like Facebook, Google +, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
For best results, Oshine requires the following plugins to be installed and activated: the custom Tatsu page builder, Oshine Core, BE Portfolio Post, Meta Box Conditional Logic, Meta Box Show Hide and Meta Box Tabs. The author recommends customers to use Contact Form 7, Master Slider and Slider Revolution.
| GENERAL | |
|---|---|
| Item name | Oshine |
| Category | Multi-purpose |
| Type | Premium |
| Author | Brand Exponents |
| Envato elite author | Yes |
| Tested version | 6.0 |
| COMPATIBILITY | |
| Content width | Full width |
| Browser compatibility | IE11+ / Chrome / FF / Opera / Safari |
| WooCommerce | Yes |
| bbPress | Yes |
| BuddyPress | Yes |
| WPML | Yes |
| FONTS AND TRANSLATION | |
| Integrated translation | - |
| Google fonts | Yes |
| Custom fonts | - |
| Typekit fonts | - |
| RTL support | - |
| POST FEATURES | |
| Video posts | Yes |
| Audio posts | Yes |
| Post templates | 1 |
| Post view counter | - |
| Smart lists | - |
| Social share | Yes |
| Custom image lightbox | Yes |
| Custom image galery | Yes |
| Link post | Yes |
| Lightbox skins | 1 |
| PAGE FEATURES | |
| Page templates | 9 |
| Blocks | 60 |
| Widgets | 1 |
| Header styles | 12 |
| Footer styles | 2 |
| Masonry layout | Yes |
| Mega menus | - |
| Sticky menu | Yes |
| Social networks | Yes |
| Social counter | - |
| Video playlists | - |
| Instagram widget | - |
| Custom Page Builder | Tatsu |
| Portfolio styles | 16 |
| Responsive layout | Breakpoints |
| Blog layouts | 8 |
| Menu styles | 3 |
| Dual Sidebars | - |
| Shortcodes | Yes |
| Video slider | Yes |
| OTHER FEATURES | |
| Demos included | 30 |
| SEO optimized | Yes |
| Custom Theme Updater | - |
| ADS | |
| Ad system | - |
| Adsense support | - |
| Custom ads | - |
| PERFORMANCE | |
| CSS file size | 328 kb |
| Overall speed | Slow |
| Performance documentation | Yes |
| USER EXPERIENCE | |
| Total ratings | 721 |
| User rating | |
| Learnability | Medium |
| DESIGN | |
| Responsive design | Yes |
| Retina ready | Yes |
| DOCUMENTATION | |
| Difficulty | Medium |
| Explanations | Detailed |
| Explicit screen shots | Yes |
| Video tutorials | Yes |
| Search option | Yes |
| Extra documentation | - |
| PREMIUM PLUGINS | |
| Plugins | Recolution Slider, Master Slider Pro, BE Portfolio Post, Tatsu |
| VALUE | |
| Price | $49 |
| Value for the money | Good |
Performance
We have tested Oshine’s default demo on different page speed tests, and the content is loaded with a slow page speed.
Downsides
Oshine doesn’t come with options to add custom or Typekit fonts. Also, there are no built-in translations, and the theme has no RTL support.
Oshine doesn’t allow you to show dual sidebars simultaneously.
Hi Lisa, I am a photographer/videographer and am building a new site, I need a portfolio page and then an online store to sell digital prints via woo-commerce, would you recommend Oshine or TheGem or is their something else you can recommend, much appreciated! I’ve read so many pages looked at so many examples and just feel overwhelmed.
Hi Marcel,
Thanks for commenting. Both themes you’ve mentioned are multipurpose and could be your choice. Being a photographer/videographer means you need a theme which can beautifully display your images and videos. Perhaps you should take a look at Newspaper theme, as it comes with pre-made demos, awesome already built design templates, and an intuitive page builder for the frontend. Here’s the full demos’ list. I hope this helps :).