Observations

As a buyer and still currently a user, I have a couple of observations.

Plugins in one place please
There should be a file or page in your docs listing the contents of the plugins folder and saying what they’re for, and plugins should be kept in one directory, not two.

As all these plugins need to be updated manually, users need to remember that although they’ve updated all the plugins in the plugins folder, there are still two more plugins stored in the code directory. That’s not intuitive.

Speed booster?
I’m lost as to the point of the ‘speed booster’ plugin, which seems to get disabled by everything except sunshine.

I won’t list all the basic plugins I’ve found that disable the speed booster plugin, but it is a massive list including many of the default plugins I use on the majority of my sites (50+). However, I’m sure you’ll agree that website security is important. I have yet to find a security plugin that doesn’t disable your speed booster. Even ninjafirewall turns it off.

Author pages
Google have a list of strict requirements which sites must comply with before they can be included in Google’s news listings. One of those requirements is proper author attribution.

In this theme, as far as I can see, each post can show a user bio box, which contains the text copied from the author’s wp user page. The theme copies whatever is in the wp user box and pastes it into the bio field as unformatted text.

Okay, you can write your own plugin to force the bio field to accept basic html like line breaks and <p>, but this should be a basic theme feature, given the context.

If the author’s name in the bio box is clicked, the visitor is taken to an archive page which is topped by the same unformatted text field (yes, with social links below) and then a post listing below.

There should be an option to provide a condensed ‘bio’ for bio boxes below posts, with the option to show a proper, or full, author bio on the author’s archive page. The options might include not just social links/icons but things like address, phone number as well as bio. Not all sites need or want these, but some will.

Also, many articles are written by more than one author, so there should be a way of showing co-authors. And so on.

Given the importance of author bios and attribution to Google (this is important if you want your news website to get listed in google’s news listings) the author’s section needs to be considerably better thought out.

Just my observations.