What Forum plugin should I use with Crio?

Hi Kroy-

Just to be sure I understand what you need, you’re looking for a single front page that has:

• Links to your blog posts (internal news articles)
• wpForo forums
• Possibly other content suitable for a front page

Please correct me if I’m wrong about that. It sounds like your best bet will be to stick with the Crio Theme, but use dynamic block components to display the content on your front page.

That will give you the most control over how it looks, and allow you to accomplish the newspaper column-type layout in the site you mentioned.

First, you’ll use a Post List component to show your news articles. Here’s a quick video explaining how to use a Post List:

Notice that the Post List component includes the ability to add extra columns, like in the site you mentioned.

Then, you can also use the wpForo components to display your forum content. You’ll find several wpForo components in the same way you found the post list component in the video above:

Hi Kroy-

Needless to say, I’m a little biased toward Crio, but I’ll try to give you the best advice I can.

We describe Crio as a “SuperTheme.” What we mean by that is that we created it to be the most customizable, flexible theme available on the market today. You can use its advanced features to create just about any kind of website design you want. However, it may take some work on your part to achieve the look you’re going for.

Themeforest (for the most part) tends to focus on themes designed for a specific niche, like a “newspaper” design as you’ve picked out. That means that a theme you pick out from there may be faster or easier to set up to accomplish your goals, especially for folks who are new to WordPress website development, like you describe yourself. It’s very likely a more “out-of-the-box” experience than Crio would be.

There are some other factors to consider as well.

Crio’s core open-source version is available for free on the WordPress.org repo, while ThemeForest themes are proprietary. That means:

• If you choose Crio, you’ll always be able to get the latest updates to the theme, regardless of whether you keep your subscription after it expires.
• If you choose a ThemeForest theme, updates are tied to your subscription, so you won’t have access to updates if your subscription ever expires.
• Updates can include things like bugfixes to work with new versions of WordPress, fixes for security vulnerabilities, and even new features.

Also, please note that the link you mentioned is not a WordPress theme, but an HTML template. That means it might be a little more familiar to you as a self-described “90’s desktop” developer, but in the long run will be more difficult to maintain and update with fresh content.

Hopefully this gives you a better understanding of the choices, Kroy! In the end, you’ll need to decide what best suits your needs, and there are definite pros and cons to both. Please let us know if we can help you out further, we’re happy to help!

Hi Kroy!

Unfortunately BoldGrid does not offer web design services, but you might have some luck finding someone to help you replicate the ThemeForest design with Crio in our user community, Team Orange. Although if the newspaper theme from ThemeForest is the exact design you are going for then you might be best served by using it instead of attempting to imitate the design with Crio.

Hi Kroy!

Both Crio and the Post and Page Builder offer a tremendous amount of customization options that allow you to tailor your website’s look to achieve your design goals, and making major or minor changes in the future will definitely be easy if you choose to build your website with those tools. Integrating forums into the HTML template from ThemeForest also has the potential to be challenging if the developer of that theme does not have a solution for that functionality.

Please let us know if you have any other questions for us!