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Soledad WordPress Theme
Last updated on August 22, 2017

Penci Design, one of Themeforest.net’s elite authors, developed Soledad, his first premium news theme. It is a nice looking template for magazines and blog websites, easy to customize with interesting project portfolios. This theme comes packed with numerous pre-made demos and is good for building magazines and blog websites.

Design

Soledad comes with two mega menu styles, three sidebar layouts, sliders and templates allowing you to create beautiful pages & posts with distinctive typography.

You can easily customize your homepage, by choosing one of the 25 Homepage Layout models. Also, there is an option to customize the looks of the Category, Tag, Search, and Archive Layout. This theme is fully responsive, so it looks good on all devices, no matter the screen size.

If you want to get an idea of how content will display on your website, you can import one of the 40 beautiful pre-made demos. To do that, you will need to install a free plugin called the Penci Soledad Demo Importer that comes bundled in the theme’s files, along with other dedicated plugins. It only takes a few clicks, and you can preview your site.

Soledad provides an attractive option: you can set a featured video with sound as your website’s background. Also, it has a feature called Portfolio content type, allowing you to create beautiful image galleries and to organize your projects using a masonry or grid layout. To create portfolios, you have to activate the Penci Portfolio plugin. You can illustrate your work using different page layouts.

This template has three sidebar styles – left, right, or no sidebar – and you can add widgets on them using the drag and drop functionality. Soledad comes with two magazine homepage layouts and for the articles, you can choose between masonry or grid style. Also, you can choose the category and the order they will be displayed in.

You get four distinct gallery lightbox styles to display photos. A justified gallery can showcase plenty of images, structured in columns while the single slider gallery loads images one by one using an elegant lightbox effect. The Masonry and Grid options can display your photos in up to 9 columns.

Soledad has 30 Featured Slider types, and two custom Penci slider styles, powered by the Penci Slider plugin, you can use to catch the visitor’s eye. The author also designed four content body templates and a mega menu option that makes a higher visual impact on your audience while containing a small website posts summary.

Functionality

Soledad allows you to enable or disable your options in real time, through the Theme Customizer, and all your adjustments can be seen live on the page’s right side. The customizer has 34 tabs with different customization options, from General Options, social media, colors, footer options, and everything in between.

This template brings you a bundled free license for the Visual Composer page builder plugin. After you install it, you create pages on the backend or frontend of your website with ease. Visual Composer has 72 different elements that can be inserted into rows and columns on your page.

You can help your visitors reach the most relevant articles while displaying custom widgets on the sidebar. Soledad comes with 11 widgets that include Popular Posts, Social Media, Quote, Slider, and others.

The theme comes with eight free optional plugins recommended by the PenciDesign developer. Some of them are Penci Recipe, Portfolio, Slider, and they bring additional functionality to this theme. The Demo importer plugin is a useful tool, as it allows you to import one of the 40 theme’s demos and create a website for your personal needs.

If you want to create an online shop, you’ll be glad to know that Soledad is compatible with WooCommerce, so you can start selling your products. The template is also compatible with popular WordPress plugins like Contact Form 7, MailChimp and WPML. It is Search Engine optimized as well.

GENERAL
Item name Soledad
Category News / Blog / Magazine / Personal
Type Premium
Author Penci Design
Envato elite author Yes
Tested version 4.0
COMPATIBILITY
Content width 1170px
Browser compatibility IE8+ / Chrome / FF / Opera / Safari / Edge
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 7
Review system Yes
Post view counter Yes
Smart lists -
Social share Yes
Custom image lightbox Yes
Custom image galery Yes
PAGE FEATURES
Page templates 6
Blocks 1
Widgets 11
Header styles 9
Footer styles 1
Category layouts 1
Masonry layout Yes
Mega menus Yes
Sticky menu Yes
Sticky sidebars Yes
Social networks Yes
Social counter -
Video playlists -
Instagram widget Yes
Currency widget -
Pinterest widget Yes
Weather widget -
OTHER FEATURES
Mobile theme -
Demos included 40
SEO optimized Yes
ADS
Ad system Yes
Adsense support Yes
Background image ad Yes
Custom ads Yes
PERFORMANCE
CSS file size 295kb
Overall speed Medium
Performance documentation -
USER EXPERIENCE
Total ratings 321
User rating
Learnability Medium
DESIGN
Responsive design Yes
Retina ready -
DOCUMENTATION
Difficulty Beginner
Explanations Less Detailed
Explicit screen shots Yes
Video tutorials Yes
Search option -
Extra documentation -
PREMIUM PLUGINS
Plugins Penci Portfolio, Penci Shortcodes, Penci Slider
VALUE
Price $49
Value for the money Good

Performance

We have tested the Soledad theme’s default demo on different page speed tests, and it loads the content with good speed.

Soledad Theme – Page Speed

Downsides

Soledad is a magazine theme designed to behave like a multipurpose one. The theme has a huge number of different layouts and settings, but it isn’t well optimised for blogging and this may cause a beginner some headaches.
The template comes with a documentation, but it lacks the Search Option to help you find the information quickly.

Soledad Theme Review
Category: News
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Price: $49
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Conclusion
Launched in November 2015, Soledad theme lets your news ideas creatively color your website. It's relatively easy to use even for beginners and doesn't require coding skills. In time, as the author will improve it, Soledad may become a very popular theme for blogs with stunning image galleries and sliders.
Good for
  • Nice looking theme
  • Featured video as background
  • Portfolio content type
  • Documentation quite detailed
  • RTL Support
Not so good for
  • Limited footer style:1
  • Documentation less detailed
  • No Ad System
Overall score:
74%
Awards:
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Lisa Jones
Editor-in-chief of WPion. 100% passionate about WordPress, Lisa is part time web developer and part time front-end designer. With a master's degree in computer science, she is specialized in CSS, HTML, JavaScript, MySQL and PHP. Lisa uses her knowledge and experience to offer you a complete analysis of WordPress most popular themes and plugins.

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