I came across YummThemes the other day, and I’ll be honest with you, I actually thought it was a joke. No theme demos or screenshots, just a big bag of money, a promise of getting a “shit load of money” shot at me with a “very big gun” and an email newsletter signup form. Reluctantly, I signed up to the newsletter out of curiosity.

A couple days later, they sent everyone a free theme to everyone on their newsletter. I was impressed by the screenshot of the theme, and with some questions surrounding their legitimacy, I decided to give this theme a try and post the results in a review post.

And now onto the rest of the review…

Setting It Up

After installing and activating the theme, you should get something like this.

The first thing I noticed was there was a fat footer that was noticeably empty. Same thing with the blue sidebar are below the “Join Our RSS” button. Good thing is, these are widgetized areas, and you can add to them later.

Widget Areas

There are three widgetized areas in this theme. One in the sidebar, and two in the footer (left and right). You will probably need to add at least one widget to each of the three widget areas so the theme won’t look “empty.”

I added the following widgets to the widget areas in the screenshot below.

To get an idea of what they look like and where they show up on a live site, here’s what I got below.

As you can see, it’s pretty easy to fill up the widget areas with appropriate widgets in this theme, especially in WordPress 2.8. This doesn’t make the theme “broken” although it may be nice to have some defaults assigned if there are no widgets active.

Theme Options

This theme options page is pretty sad, although there’s really not much you would need to configure with a standard blog-style theme like this anyway.

Basically this page lets you input specific page ID’s to include in the navigation menus. There is a small typo though. The “Top Menu” (where it has a link to Uncategorized in the screenshot above) is for categories, not pages. Instead of page IDs, you would input the category IDs you’d want to include instead.

Unless you have an insane amount of pages and/or categories, you probably won’t need to use this theme options page at all. I think if anything, it would probably make more sense to have an option to exclude links, rather than include them.

Conclusion

If you want this theme, I would suggest signing up to their newsletter ASAP. Not sure if they are nearing the cap or not. It’s free to join and they might share the download link again. It is supposed to be a paid theme, although I guess this is just one of the pre-launch goodies for subscribers. It really can’t hurt to sign up to their newsletter.

I know these new kids on the block caused quite a stir on the interwebs with their silly marketing tactics, although in the end, who cares? If they can get people talking, and provide quality themes that people are willing to pay for, I’d say that’s a job well done.

Will you be signing up to their newsletter (if you haven’t already) or has this “debacle” completely turned you off to any future YummThemes? Do you think this whole “debacle” is ridiculously overblown? Remember people, we’re talking about WordPress themes.