Theme makers for products like Blocksy, Astra, and Go use this approach to help users implement different types of websites by importing the content from a pre-built demo site. It joins four other free starter sites designed specifically for blogs, apps, travel, and e-commerce. This makes it very easy to navigate between the different settings. Astra, by comparsion, does have better performance than Blocksy, so if speed is one of your top priorities thats worth considering. Astras free version is a bit more generous than GeneratePress. All three themes have similar pricing, but Blocksy Pro is the least generous. You can also customize each item in the post loop itself, switching between simple or boxed (card-style) designs. The import is smooth - Blocksy shows you the steps and just . Blocksy: An Innovative WooCommerce Theme with a Near-Perfect User On the plus side, Genesis Framework is now available completely free. BlockySite allows you to create websites easily with a block-type editor. Posts are automatically updated with the new data from your spreadsheet, leaving the rest of your data untouched. We plan to add more features in the premium version, more demos, and also offer better and faster support, Radu said. This is the fundamental nature of Blocksy. The following steps walk you through the steps of setting up the theme. No matter what you choose, it will look great! Loads a beautiful popup for your products right from the shop page. Newsflash: almost every WordPress/WooCommerce theme claims to be super fast. These are the shared features offered by all three themes: Importable starter templates are a great way to get your hands dirty and start building. We can tell you firsthand that you dont get these kinds of ratings and support compliments without earning them. Blocksy isn't exactly new. Gadgets is the perfect showcase for your technology e-commerce site. This is a recurring theme with Blocksy, pardon the pun. Starter Sites Extensions Free Extensions Pro Extensions Features Support Pros: Cons: Blocksy Pricing Final Thoughts Overview The Blocksy Theme is the best free WordPress theme that is most innovative, fast, and supercharged your WordPress website. In all honesty, its hard to appreciate how incredible the free version of Blocksy is until youve tried it. Here, for example, are the first 8 reviews on WordPress.org/plugins for Blocksy at the time of writing this article: Notice all the times that people mention the great support? Lets see who comes out on top! Mega Menus: Go beyond simple text-based menus and built out 2D mega menus complete with images, and other visual blocks. The design is as futuristic as it gets, so setting up your own e-shop and turning heads around is extremely easy. Its that good. Even more exciting, however, is the integrated self-hosted fonts option. Spoiler: Blocksy is awesome and Im already building a new WordPress site with it. Easily install a starter site with just a few clicks via our simple demo importer module. Simply drag over the data you want to bulk edit and rearrange the columns however you like. Blocksy keeps the button visible the entire time while the user explores the product. After you're done editing just hand your spreadsheet back over to WP All Import. Finally, if you dont want to buy pro theme, OceanWPs free version is above-average. Youll find a suitable template for nearly any type of WordPress site. I would much prefer to have fewer designs of higher quality. These child themes are called Starter Sites and provide a fully fleshed out WordPress site with plugins and graphics that you can simply modify for your needs. The demos use the same base theme but vary widely in how they are customized. It works with Gutenberg, HTML, PHP or virtually any page builder (including free ones). There are also free helper plugins available for each of these themes, which enable more functionality in the base theme. Like Astra, Blocksy has a hook-system that lets you inject content almost anywhere in your theme. This means the right theme will depend on the type of site your building, level of experience, and specific features you need. If you look at your WordPress Administrator Dashboard, you will see a notification asking you to load it. These themes all let you control the layout of your blog and archive pages, though Astra and GeneratePress restrict most of the functionality to the pro version. Some of them simply arent production ready, especially when it comes to being mobile-ready. Create custom code snippets in CSS or JavaScript and load them either globally or only where theyre needed based on the contextual options within page/post meta boxes. And thirdly, Astras site library is the best in the business, with more than 120 different templates available (free + pro). Each of these themes has built out custom integrations for better cooperation with one or more plugins. When it comes to single blog posts, Blocksy lets you design a post hero section and re-order post template elements like your image, post title and meta. Menu: Astra includes a mega-menu module (pro) for visually designing beautiful, user-friendly menus. Again, make your footer as professional-looking as possible! Theres not even a grid layout for your blog archive, but you can create a grid archive layout with CSS if you want. After all, its designers didnt just whip up all these features for the fun of it. Importing Demos: Starter sites arent built into the core theme. Also, each template is available for multiple page builders. You do need a separate plugin to import the demo sites, but its relatively lightweight and there are multiple demos for Elementor, Gutenberg & Beaver Builder sites. Header: Like Astra, Blocksy includes a visual header builder. Heres a quick overview of the licensing and pricing for each theme. We run GeneratePress here at BTW and Ive used Astra on several projects as well. If it's in WordPress, you can migrate it with WP All Export and WP All Import. One of the Blocksy creators is a decent UI designer, and the other one is an experienced React developer resulting in a more coherent experience compared to other themes outsourcing a lot of the work. Its almost like a minimalist page builder and supports widgets, blocks and custom HTML. Blocksy: After installing Blocksy theme, youll be prompted to add the Blocksy companion plugin which adds several additional models and allows you to import demo templates. Without it you will not be able to easily install the Charity child theme. Once you have the Blocksy Companion loaded you will get a Blocksy option in the main menu of your WordPress Dashboard. All of these themes use the Customizer for controlling color, typography, spacing, and layout. Thats because Blocksy combines the best elements of themes like Astra and GeneratePress, wraps them in an intuitive UI and adds some bonus features for good measure. Astra is a bit easier for beginners, includes a mega-menu, has a better free version and larger site library. Like the Hooks modules from Astra and GeneratePress, this pro extension lets you automatically inject content blocks anywhere on your site using the Blocksys hook locations. Regular readers of our blog already know what were about to say: when there is both a free and premium version of something, we tend to focus on the premium version. Astra currently offers just under 240 importable demos, and fully half of them are free. No renewal fees. hi, I like blocksy theme, thats awesome.. i try modern shop starter site and works fine.. but when I install Homi starter site.. its got stuck at 40% when import content. Blocksy Pro comes with Starter Sites and Pro Extensions that are quite useful. All of these themes offer fine grained control over important settings like typography, layout, and global colors. There is no way to achieve a boxed card design like Blocksy without using custom CSS as in this tutorial. These themes all use the Customizer for controlling the overall look and feel of your website. But it is only about 10 % slower than the WordPress default themes (i.e. See screenshot - https://www.screencast.com/t/ec5auHenOYv I am able to import other starter sites like 'news'. As with everything with Blocksy, we especially like how theyve organized their documentation, with a great category layout, a good documentation tree, and an all-import incremental search capability. You will then see the option to install Blocksy. Not 100% happy? Zakra 6. As of the writing of this article, Blocksy has 8,000+ active installs and every single one of the almost 300 reviews are 5 stars. Brainstorm Force gives you their entire plugin bundle plus Astra Pro for around the same cost. Blocksys base version is better, it has slightly stronger WooCommerce support, and is easier to customize from scratch. They have been built using the cleanest design guidelines possible and will give you a massive head start in your online journey. Free users still can access hooks, but need to use PHP to access them or a theme builder like Elementor Pro. But did you notice the clean, logical interface? Blocksy has more integrations than its competitors, despite the fact that it only launched in 2019. Comparing Astra, Blocksy & GeneratePress: which theme wins? Also Read: Astra vs. GeneratePress vs. Blocksy. The pro version also lets you host Google fonts locally and automatically preload your fonts for better performance. Updated January 4, 2023 Back to Blog At WP All Import, we love discovering new WordPress and WooCommerce technologies that share our passion for high quality and complete customer satisfaction. Amazingly, OceanWP has even more 5-star reviews than Astra, despite having over 400,000 fewer installs. Note: Blocksy is built with the latest web technologies in order to bring you the smoothest experience, that told, old browsers like IE 11 and below may not work as expected. It works as Blocksys Pro version. Blocksy Pro adds a hooks module for even more fine-grained control. Discover the best WordPresswebsites and creators, everyday. You can also check websites with a custom WordPress theme. Neve 4. Once you do something using their interface, you seldom have to re-learn it because it is so intuitive. GeneratePresss free version is a little too limiting for non-coders. Find a template that you love, then make it your own. Charity starter site import not working | WordPress.org It was built with the Gutenberg editor in mind and has a lot of options that makes it extendable and customizable. There are full color controls for each loop element and you can rearrange elements such as the post meta, post title and featured image. Heres an overview of what you get with teach theme: As you can see, Astra is the standout here. For example, you might want a special sidebar just for your WooCommerce product pages, or your reviews post type. Im using Blocksy Theme since almost a year for my blog. Its also a good choice for simple WooCommerce sites. But I think Blocksys version is even better than Astras because it has a few extra features. The 6 Best Astra Theme Alternatives (including free options) Price Customer Support 4.2 Summary Blocksy theme is a first-rate choice for users who want to create business websites, online stores, and blog sites. GeneratePress. OceanWPs Woocommerce functionality is similar to Astra, and both are excellent choices for e-commerce websites. Theres custom (unlimited) sidebars, Adobe Typkit support and locally-hosted Google fonts (for speed). Control your blog layout, typography and theme colors. You can also rearrange and customize the post loop itself. Free Gutenberg and WooCommerce WordPress Theme - Blocksy Blocksy vs GeneratePress - Which Theme is Better? - BloggingIdol Variable products, SEO meta, repeater fields, custom user meta, image galleries, term meta - WP All Import does it all. Header and Footer Builder 2. Color: Blocksy has global color settings and local color settings for every theme element. However, if you click the preceding image to open the starter-site web page, and then launch some of the sites to have a closer look, you will find that the level of finish and detail are exceptional. Heres just a sampling of what you get for free. Incredible support (active forum and devs will even write code snippets for you). There are a few areas where GeneratePress excels compared to Astra. What we especially like about this import process is that it will import everything you need to make the starter site work. You will never lack the ability to select the perfect font in Blocksy. You can use one of our Starter Sites to get started quickly with Blocksy. GeneratPress is really in a category of its own for people who want to built entire templates using the block editor. Your eyes are not deceiving you. CreativeThemes, the Romania-based company behind the theme, released an update to Blocksy this week, along with a new starter site for charities. display a banner on a specific category). Basically, Blocksy is what we call a check-check-check WooCommerce theme, meaning it checks all the important boxes for running a modern WooCommerce store. I strongly believe in the if it aint broke dont fix it maxim, and all three of these themes take a similar approach to some core features. The ability to customize a website to such a high degree definitely has its advantages, but most of us do not want to build everything from scratch even if someone gives us great tools to do so. Support Theme: Blocksy Stuck at Import content 40% when install Homi starter site. Gutenberg Ready Built from scratch to be 100% compatible with the Gutenberg editor and blocks. It was built with the Gutenberg editor in mind and has a lot of options that makes it extendable and customizable. Heres a slightly more involved video dealing with transparent and sticky states for the header: See the subtle details Blocksy exposes as simple settings? But if youre a non-coder and/or building websites on your own, Astra is the better option. You can easily create any type of website, such as business agency, shop, corporate, education, restaurant, blog, portfolio, landing page and so on. Learn More: Dynamic content templates with Generateblocks. Customize everything from text to plugin/theme authors to screenshots to emphasize your companys brand. Two themes really stand out for their blog customization. Blocksy has a bunch of unique features that Astra simply cant match (and some that are very similar). 8 Best Photography Plugins for WooCommerce. GeneratePress has been there for the past 6 years. A lifetime subscription is available as well, but the agency version (50 sites) is quite expensive at $580. The design is as futuristic as it gets, so setting up your own e-shop and turning heads around is extremely easy. Yogi , the latest release, is based on the block editor and was designed to showcase Blocksy's capabilities for customizing and managing custom post types. Astra gives you three basic templates for your blog layout, image-top, image-left and image-right. Since it is responsive and adaptive, translation ready, SEO optimized and has WooCommerce built-in, you will experience an easy build and even an increase in conversions. But there are differences too. Commentdocument.getElementById("comment").setAttribute( "id", "a9acf735aedfd70a548cacc2422abae7" );document.getElementById("d59ff8d329").setAttribute( "id", "comment" ); Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Its not bad but noticeably slower than GP and Astra. Display the filters on your shop page in an offcanvas component for ease of access on mobile devices. In all honesty, its hard to go wrong with any one of them. thanks, Please make sure that PHP time limit and Max input time are set to at least 300 seconds. Check out 10+ Blocksy Websites Examples - BeautifulPress The concept of starter sites is an interesting new twist on starter templates, which essentially allow users to import the content from a demo. High tech meets high everything. All you have to do is to contact your hosting provider and ask them to white list our demo server address. Blocksy, Astra and GeneratePress all have pre-built sites with multiple page builders. Visually select any of Astras hook locations, customize it with conditions (like a specific category) and inject any type of content you want, including: PHP, HTML, Gutenberg Blocks or a page builder template. It is currently maintained by a team of two Sergiu Radu and Andrei Glingeanu. We have you covered. Similar to Astra, Blocksy Pro includes an mega menu builder. Blocksy is fast but its not the fastest theme on the market. Like Astra, OceanWP comes with a starter site library of pre-built demo sites and many of the designs are quite good. Instead, theyre imported using the Starter Sites addon plugin (free). Finally, they also released two new starter sites: Homi is a Gutenberg based WooCommerce starter site and Tasty is a foog blog starter site that allows you to share your favourite recipes - powered by Recipe Card Blocks. Click on the image to view details about the starter template & a demo. Two standouts are the Blocksy News and Product Reviews templates, which are perfect for building WordPress news sites with magazine-style layouts. Again, this functionality is completely free. Check out Blocksy WordPress theme, and Qubely addons for the Gutenberg . Assuming you plan on buying the pro upgrade, the two best themes are GeneratePress and Blocksy. Import to WordPress from any XML, CSV, or spreadsheet. Click on the, Once the theme is installed, the install button will turn into an, The final part of the child theme installation is. What is GeneratePress? You may unsubscribe at any time. Works just like manually adding data to your import site. When we first reviewed the theme in January 2020, it had 1,000 active installs and 58 five-star reviews. Starter Sites Demos - Blocksy Qubely Starter Site to Blocksy | Killer Combination for Quick starts Blocksy has adopted a similar system, with multiple well-documented hook locations for every page and post template. This article will be focusing on one of those themes in particular - the Charity theme. Theme makers for products like Blocksy, Astra, and Go use this approach to help users implement different types of websites by importing the content from a pre-built demo site. This is perfect for building landing pages or squeeze pages where you want to restrict the visitors navigation options. , Heres an example how it should look like https://ibb.co/XbHDMmg. All of the templates are pro-only, but this has the benefit of allowing them all to showcase the site-builder features using the GenerateBlocks integration with the GeneratePress Elements premium module. Import large files with hundreds of megabytes of data, even on shared hosting. Which WordPress Themes Are Best For VPS Accounts? At the time of writing, Blocksy comes with four starter site designs to choose from. Blocksy itself is a free WordPress/WooCommerce theme that comes with a free plugin called the Blocksy Companion for added functionality. It was released in February 2020 by a couple of veteran software engineers with more than a decade of experience in WordPress. Hooks were first popularized by the Genesis framework and are now widely used in ultra-flexible themes like these. This lets you upload custom fonts or self-host Google fonts for faster load times and better scores on your Core Web Vitals. The typography settings are a bit restrictive, but at least they give you some demo font pairings to choose from. I hope after we release the premium version we will be able to take on a few more people in our team to help us, at least with support so we can concentrate better on development.. The Charity theme is a beautifully designed theme. Auto-detect custom fields, taxonomies, image galleries, location fields, and everything else in your WordPress site. Blocksy is the best rated WordPress theme; 5.0 out of 5 from the 600+ users who left a review! But thats just table stakes. It could not be any easier. You get global colors, detailed typography controls, multiple sidebar layouts and basic control over your post templates and blog design. Display certain blocks for a limited amount of time, or based on page, post, or user role conditions (we really love all Blocksy's conditional stuff!). There are several key features that separate Genesis from Astra: Genesis is still very much geared towards developers, and is much less beginner friendly than Astra. If you wish to quickly get started with creating your brand new websites, look no further than our gallery of starter sites! Create Gutenberg-Ready WordPress Sites Without Coding Skills Now that you understand what Blocksy is, lets talk about its purpose. After the import is complete, you can poke around to see how the starter site achieves its look and functionality. Blocksy offers built-in mega menus with the ability to add icons to your menu items, style each item individually, and even replace the mega menu-overlay column with a content block, which opens up an entirely new world of possibilities for dynamic content. Themes dont exist in a bubble. Complete, granular control of your data with an easy to use drag & drop interface. Includes galleries, prices, and an add-to-cart button. Best Astra Theme Alternatives in 2022. WooCommerce comes pre-installed, so it is super easy to get started. At WP All Import, we love discovering new WordPress and WooCommerce technologies that share our passion for high quality and complete customer satisfaction. Pricing: 1-year license is $59 for 500 sites. Blocksy, on the other hand, has better blog layout options in their free version than you get in Astra or GPs pro version. Regardless of which theme you choose, you can dramatically speed up your WordPress website by using an all-in-one optimization plugin like WP-Rocket. Instead, Genesis has to be customized with PHP, CSS, or 3rd-party plugins (of which there are several). You also get a block-based header & footer builder, advanced menu (mega menu), language switcher, slide-out panel and white-label ability (Astra offers most of these). This theme is free but offers additional paid commercial upgrades or support. Code Splitting You can customize your blog & archive loops or even design entire post templates using Gutenberg blocks. To exercise your right of access, rectification or deletion, please seeour Privacy Policy. Kadence is especially good for LMS, Course or e-learning sites because is fully integrated with several popular LMS plugins like: Learndash, LifterLMS and TutorLMS. We are a company that writes great data import/export plugins. Tons of docs, support for custom PHP functions, and a powerful API. Open your spreadsheet in Excel or Google Docs and make bulk edits to your WordPress data. [This thread is closed.] Every element can be modified with ease. Out of 569 reviews at the time of writing this article, the Blocksy theme has 568 5-star reviews and 1 4-star review. Learn more about the power of WordPress Themes and how they can simplify your website building and maintenance. This is easily done by getting the free theme from the WordPress Themes website page. You will learn how to get the Blocksy theme, then how to import the Charity child theme Charity, and everything thats installed with the theme. also i got this error in my web log: [Tue Aug 31 16:05:44.489398 2021] [proxy_fcgi:error] [pid 20987:tid 140176156243712] (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client 111.111.111.111:0] AH01075: Error dispatching request to : (polling), already try to expand the timeout exceution on apache2 and php but not solve the problem. But there are plenty of people who have used Blocksys support, and they seem to have nothing but great things to say about it. The topic Stuck at Import content 40% when install Homi starter site is closed to new replies. Unlike GeneratePress, youre not limited to a single sidebar for your entire site. To get started with Blocksy, you can either design your site from scratch or import one of Blocksy's 25+ pre-built demo sites. The quality of their pre-built designs is a step above Astras, and they really do look professional. Pricing: Kadence Pro starts at $59/year for unlimited sites. Blocksy is one of the best free themes available for the block editor right now and is rapidly growing in popularity. You can basic typography & color controls and a few options for customizing the layout of your site. You can create completely custom layouts without touching a line of code. Avada comes with 86+ prebuilt demo sites for a wide variety of WordPress websites. We strongly recommend you to update/switch to a modern browser. Both can be used with Gutenberg and Brizy. This puts all the blocks in the right place so the user needs only to customize the demo, instead of trying to find the right settings to match the demo. There is very little in the way of styling controls and even spacing is inherited from the single post template. Powerful drag & drop for even the most complex imports and exports. Starter sites that support multiple page builders Lightning fast Customize everything Pros and cons of Blocksy Pros of Blocksy Cons of Blocksy Key features of Blocksy 1. So, this review is really about two components: A Gutenberg theme suitable for any type of website but with built-in compatibility with WooCommerce. Yes, it works perfectly not only with Elementor, but also with other popular WordPress page builders like Beaver Builder, Visual Composer and Brizy. Colibri WP 8. Is Blocksy WordPress Theme a Good Choice in 2023? - WPGIZ Critical CSS generation (usually requires a paid plugin like WP-Rocket). Built with the latest web technologies, it includes user-friendly designs, professional-looking templates, a range of enhancing features, and reliable customer support. If you wish to follow this process visually, theres a quick video just for you. WooCommerce comes pre-installed, so it is super easy to get started. You can check this inside the WordPress Dashboard -> Tools -> Site Health -> Info, The error youre receiving is a timeout, meaning the script did not have enough time to do its job. They support the most page builders (4) and their library is enormous. They have a good variety of site styles and layouts, so you should be able to find a good match regardless of the type of site youre building. Blocksy lets your visitors search products by SKU (stock-keeping unit). Kadence Theme. Blocksy Theme Review: Honest Thoughts (2023) - WPKube But the average website has plenty of other needs that we cant fulfill ourselves, so we're committed to finding WordPress themes and plugins that fill those needs. Which WordPress Themes are Best for Reseller Accounts? At this point, Blocksy Theme has almost 200 reviews, all FIVE STARS! These child themes are called Starter Sites and provide a fully fleshed out WordPress site with plugins and graphics that you can simply modify for your needs. OceanWPs free extensions include sticky navigation and a posts slider, which Astra only offers in the premium version. We cover news and events, write plugin and theme reviews, and talk about key issues within the WordPress ecosystem, All Rights Reserved. In real-world situations, the difference wont be nearly as noticeable because your plugin stack and image optimization are the main contributors to load time. Authority Pro 2.7 7. Starter Templates - Kadence Theme This is especially noticeable in the core theme, which has several free extensions available. Global Color and Typography Customization 3. Blocksy: An Innovative WooCommerce Theme with a Near-Perfect User Rating, LThemes 300+ Responsive WordPress Themes. Dynamic content templates with Generateblocks, How to add a Table of Contents (TOC) to WordPress, How to change the background color of a specific page or post in WordPress, How to Load CSS Asynchronously in WordPress, The Best Gutenberg Block Plugins (I cant live without), The Best Alternatives to Advanced Custom Fields (for non-coders), Best WordPress Books from Beginner to Expert, Beaver Builder, Brizy, Elementor, Gutenberg, Visually design your mega menu with blocks, Hook custom content blocks into the menu using dynamic conditions, Custom style settings for individual menu items, Limited color controls and global color palette, Multiple blog layouts (including grid, masonry and even card designs for your blog posts), Drag and drop builder for headers & footers, Image lazy-loading and aspect ratio controls, You want a better price for unlimited websites, Youre considering the entire BrainstormForce bundle (all plugins + Astra), You want to use Adobe fonts or custom fonts, You dont know CSS and want the most design options, You want the best site-building features & Gutenberg block integration, You know a little CSS (GeneratePress has the fewest design options).