Sentinel WordPress Theme Review

Depends on what kind of features you need, somehow this theme is working, but there is definitely lots of room to improve.

The first problem that I encountered is “The image could not be loaded”. When I insert an image, instead of pointing to the local image file, I would prefer my visitors click and redirect to a custom URL, now visitor clicks and gets that error message “The image could not be loaded”, and visitor needs to click the text link “The image” to get to that URL. And also, the first paragraph right after the image is not working, it is wrapping around the image.

Maybe magnific-popup is not initiated properly or something, I decided to disable magnific-popup in js/global.js for now, the above problem is solved, and once again the paragraph tag is working. Sometimes, I think cool features are great only if those cool features do not affect the basic WordPress functionalities.

sentinel-portfolio-sample

Next I want to specify a page for my blog frontpage. In the page editor, there is an option for choosing a sidebar for the page, but somehow the template file in templates/home does not have any sidebar code. Take a look at those files in templates/page, and modify templates/home, you will get a sidebar working.

The Visual Composer looks really cool. But unfortunately, some of the items are not working. For example, I tried to specify a category with the “Recent Posts List” element, but it just pulls content from “All”. Similarly, “Posts Grid”, masonry etc etc also don’t seem to work. Some ThemeForest member suggests that certain CSS files are missing, not sure. Hopefully, future updates will solve all these issues.

Then there are a few bugs here and there. If I don’t specify a menu on the top or at the footer, an orange error message would appear and remind my visitors about that. Come on, must I use a navigation bar on the top? 🙂 Many optional contents / items are hard coded into the theme, so if you don’t want this or want that, the most effective way is to dig into the code yourself, you could probably fix it sooner than waiting for the next update.