WPTavern: Checathlon: A Free WordPress Business Theme with Support for Easy Digital Downloads
Checathlon is new business theme on WordPress.org that was designed to seamlessly integrate with Easy Digital Downloads. The name is a combination of the words checkout and decathlon, according to its creator Sami Keijonen.
Checathlon combines elegant typography with a bold, pink accent color to showcase products and services on a business or e-commerce website. The theme was designed by Finnish designer Toni Suni and is Keijonen’s 13th theme to be listed in the directory.
“I had some kind of vision of what I wanted and Toni created a pixel perfect design based on our discussion,” Keijonen said. “I’m super happy about the end result. Unfortunately, the design and the theme was not good enough for WordPress.com and the theme was rejected from there.” Keijonen opted to create a Checathlon Plus plugin as an alternative way to monetize the theme.
Checathlon has an intuitive way of organizing the content featured on the front page. Unlike many other themes, the front page is not controlled by a custom page template. Once you set the front page as a static page, the Customizer will give access to the service/pricing, products, testimonial, and blog sections.
The theme includes support for a Pricing page template and a Team Page template. These features make Checathlon more flexible for use on a business, agency, non-profit, or e-commerce website.
The pricing template has a “Service and Pricing widget” area where users can drop in the custom widgets available in the Checathlon Plus plugin. The widgets make it easy for users to set an icon, title, content, price, and a link for each pricing tier, as well as the ability to highlight one tier as featured.
Checathlon was built to support several plugins, including Easy Digital Downloads, Custom Content Portfolio, and Jetpack (testimonials and portfolio). The theme includes styles for the Jetpack email subscription widget and EDD downloads and account pages. It’s also tagged as accessibility-ready, which means that it has successfully passed an accessibility audit. Check out the live demo to see Checathlon in action.
Keijonen is taking a unique approach by creating a Checathlon Plus plugin as an alternative to offering a “pro version” of the theme. It extends the theme to include more customizer capabilities, additional widgets, cart customization features for EDD, and two child themes. The free theme is available on WordPress.org and documentation can be found on the theme’s website.
Source: WordPress
