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Introducing Aviator

Aviator is available on the WordPress theme directory. Download it now, then help Aviator take flight by giving your input.

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When we create a new theme, we have two main considerations. What will the theme look like, and who we’re creating it for?

The audience we’re creating the theme for as the biggest influence on how we build it – everything from theme settings to plugin integration.

aviator-main

With Aviator, we’re taking a different approach. We created a theme that looks great. Now, we’re asking you what you want to be able to do with it. Based on your feedback, we’ll flesh out Aviator – integrating with plugins, adding theme settings, writing documentation and recording a promo video.

To start, Aviator is very light weight. We’ve integrated with Page Builder ( because we can’t imagine a type of site that wouldn’t need Page Builder integration) and with Jetpack’s site logo feature so you can add your site logo. Apart from that, it’s a standard blog theme with posts, pages, comments, menus and widget areas.

Aviator is ready for prime time, but with your ideas we’ll create a theme with a clear identity and feature set. Please leave your ideas and feedback in the comments below.

What kind site would you like to build with Aviator? What kind of theme settings do you need? What are your favorite plugins that you’d like us to support?

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Comments

  1. 9 years, 1 month ago Christian Thibault

    Hi,

    All projects are different. I prefer when a theme comes as light as possible. Especially since the loading time is important.
    Keep up the good work.

    Christian Thibault

    • 9 years, 1 month ago Greg Priday
      Hi, I Work Here

      That ties in perfectly with our new approach towards themes. Keep them light and let plugins do all the hard work. Themes should just be a fashion accessory that dresses up plugins functionality.

  2. 9 years, 1 month ago Art Schobey

    Getting error 502 Bad Gateway when trying to view the demo.

    • 9 years, 1 month ago Greg Priday
      Hi, I Work Here

      Seems like there was a temporary issue on WordPress.org, but they’ve managed to resolve.

  3. 9 years, 1 month ago Christian Svalander

    Hi guys, just wanted to say you’ve read my mind when it comes to themes. So sick of testing, trying and buying bloated themes pumped with features. I will definitely try this in my next project, as I have been using Page builder for some time and am very happy with it. Will be back with some rating for it :) Great initiative!

    • 9 years, 1 month ago Greg Priday
      Hi, I Work Here

      I agree. In my opinion, once you’ve take the time to figure out which plugins you like, you should be able to jump between themes with little to no learning curve. That’s the WordPress future we’d like to help create, anyway :)

  4. 9 years, 1 month ago Vicki

    – Mobile responsive, of course.
    – full -page wide screen option.
    – Built-in customizations in theme or the custom CSS dashboard tool so no child theme needed if no other theme code alterations.
    -Nice for portfolio site for less technical users. Or small business owners who know thir product but not how to begin to build a website. User friendly for the uninitiated.
    – Make it easy to creat a page or post and start adding content using a bigger variety of standard page layouts.
    – Name sidebar areas according to location instead of generic “make user figure it out” by trial and error.
    – More header options for logo and name placement. Header sidebar area left or right for content like mission, tagline, call-to-action.
    – The flexibility of Headway or Genisis without the bulk and the frustrating learning curve. Don’t need the WYSIWYG template because that’s just too many choices. But flexible layout frames that can be easily customized.
    – Figure out way give option to modify list indents to customize instead of a standard indent which is usually too big.
    – I’m still learning so these are of course from a novice perspective.

    • 9 years, 1 month ago Greg Priday
      Hi, I Work Here

      Thanks for the ideas Vicki. There’s some gold there. I’ll definitely be incorporating them into the final release of Aviator.

      • 8 years, 1 month ago ashleymeneely

        Hi Greg,

        I have opened a support thread but it’s been Pending for the last few days now and I need help asap.

        I am using the aviator theme with the Home page add on, but none of my ICONS seem to be displaying.

        Any ideas why that is happening?

        Thanks,

        Ashley.

  5. 9 years, 1 month ago Jason Hall

    Beautiful. Almost exactly what I need. Now, I’d like the option to put a lot of text in the footer as well.

    • 9 years, 1 month ago Greg Priday
      Hi, I Work Here

      Thanks Jason! And with the Layout widget (which is part of Page Builder) and the Visual Editor widget, you can build very complex footers – even in the current version of Aviator.

  6. 9 years, 1 month ago ATW

    As a small artisan-business owner who is not WP code savvy, I appreciate having something on the lean side, but I need to know what to plug in where to get the desired results. Will Aviator play nice with Woocommerce and other e-commerce options? How will my website – using the Vantage theme – flow into this one if I choose to go that route?
    I like Vantage and looked at a lot of themes before choosing it, but I’ve yet to completely master the slideshow thing. At the end of the day, I would rather be playing in clay than playing code. Thanks for listening!

    • 9 years, 1 month ago Greg Priday
      Hi, I Work Here

      We’ll definitely be supporting WooCommerce in the 1.0 release of Aviator. This has been a very popular feature of Vantage.

      It’s our goal to make all our themes fairly interchangeable. So once you setup your site in Vantage, it should be fairly easy to switch to Aviator.

  7. 9 years, 1 month ago Žiga

    Hi i would like to suggest a couple of features to add to this new theme as per requested by email.

    1.) Make the theme extremely SEO friendly.
    2.) Edit header/footer simple editor to add anything in to the head or footer
    3.) CSS editor would be nice.
    4.) Responsive menus and if possible make it so we can just click on settings menu and have options like align right/left/center.
    5.) Make it so the the background can be changed but when scroling the picture goes down like in the DIVI theme.
    6. Cookie controls would be awesome .
    7.) Option to have a custom favicon

    I agree that the theme should be lightweight as possible but dont forget the less functions a theme has the more plugins you need to make it look the way you want and u have to update allot of plugins instead of just the theme. And it will not matter if the theme is lightweight if we have to have 20+ plugins to make it to our needs when the plugins make the site slow and big.

    I would make another sudgestion that u make 2 themes from Aviator one light version that is extremely fast and lightweight and a All in one Aviator theme that would include basic and semi-basic/advanced features. I cant tell you i cant find a good cookie control but all EU sites need it to be legal.

    Thank you for making awesome themes and plugins, SiteOrigin is the best

    • 9 years, 1 month ago Greg Priday
      Hi, I Work Here

      Thanks for all the great ideas Žiga. I also do agree with you – we don’t want users to have to install a plugin for every little feature. We’ll try strike the balance between having a theme that’s feature rich, fast and supports some great plugins.

  8. 9 years, 1 month ago Christopher P. Johnson

    Would love to do more with the featured posts in the sidebar.

  9. 9 years, 1 month ago Nasim

    Hi ,

    The themes looks nice, i like it.
    I am agree with Žiga … those features would be cool.

    Thanks.

    • 9 years, 1 month ago Greg Priday
      Hi, I Work Here

      Thanks Nasim – and yeah, I like Žiga’s ideas too.

  10. 9 years, 1 month ago Sergio

    Greg, the new web builder is fantastic.
    I’m more and more convinced, you are a genious !
    (I bought 3 or 4 themes last year)

    Sergio

    • 9 years, 1 month ago Greg Priday
      Hi, I Work Here

      You are far too kind Sergio. And thank you for all the support!

  11. 9 years, 1 month ago jakureyri

    Love the clean theme. I’m a big fan of Vantage. For me the priorites would be to ..
    1 – make the main menu bar stick to the top of the screen when scrolling down
    2 – provide for 4 or so columns in the footer
    3 – free up the image format in page builder, so not restricted to circles or specific shapes

    I agree with Vicki’s thoughts too. Keep up the good work!

    • 9 years, 1 month ago Greg Priday
      Hi, I Work Here

      Glad to hear you like it.

      1 – This is something I’d really like to add.
      2 – This is currently possible using the Layout widget – which comes with Page Builder.
      3 – We’ll see what we can do here, at the moment, circles and squares/rectangles are the easiest because of the way CSS3 works.

  12. 9 years, 1 month ago Steffen

    Hi!

    I like your approach!

    My feature wishlist:
    – WOOCOMMERCE INTEGRATION!!
    – full width layout
    – clean code for high plugin compatibility

    • 9 years, 1 month ago Greg Priday
      Hi, I Work Here

      I think we’ll be checking off everything on your wishlist by the time we get out a 1.0 release.

  13. 9 years, 1 month ago Jasper

    How to adjust the fontsize of the text in the widhgets?

  14. 9 years, 1 month ago Bill Byrd

    Your new site is very clean. Is there control of all titles color, font etc. Also like a lot of control of background color the different sections.

    • 9 years, 1 month ago Greg Priday
      Hi, I Work Here

      Thanks Bill – it’s great to hear what you’d like to be able to customize. We’ll use this when we get around to integrating customizer support in the 1.0 release.

  15. 9 years, 1 month ago Owen Trembath

    I don’t think you need the menu bar right at the very top – especially if the main menu goes sticky (which is a great feature). I like the clean simple design and use of the KIS principle. Great work.

  16. 9 years, 1 month ago Luca

    Looks great again, well done Greg + team!

    Is it possible to have the homepage slider sidewide and as background of the menu + header as an option?

    like this theme for example: http://themenectar.com/demo/salient-frostwave/

    That would awesome, but maybe too heavy?

    Cheers

  17. 9 years, 1 month ago Emily

    Good job. I really like this theme.

  18. 9 years, 1 month ago Andre

    Hi Greg
    Any theme you can use for ANY TYPE of website with the ability to change it that is not easily recognizable. That is a great theme. This seem to be one of those.
    Can’t wait for the first version.
    Since you released the latest redesign of your page builder I promote sitorigin everywhere.
    Great work… and from Cape Town!!
    Thanks Greg!

    • 9 years, 1 month ago Greg Priday
      Hi, I Work Here

      We are lucky these days with WordPress. There are so many great plugins out there that you really can create just about any site with any theme. It’s really just up to the theme to ensure it supports all the major ones.

      And thanks for all the support! Cape Town really is an amazing place to call home.

  19. 9 years, 1 month ago Andre

    Just to add to my post earlier… I bought the Vantage theme after that post and only realised that there is no TAB or Accordian widgets in the page builder or widget pack.
    I Would like to know if it is your future plans to add these features to ? If so… when? I am sure I am not the only one looking for this.
    Great work from SITEORIGIN though.

    • 9 years, 1 month ago Greg Priday
      Hi, I Work Here

      I’ll chat to Braam, our lead dev on the Widget Bundle project. We’ve been throwing around the idea for a while now, but we want to be able to do it right.

  20. 9 years, 1 month ago Andre

    Great, can’t wait!

  21. 9 years, 1 month ago Wayne

    Very nice!
    Several are requesting for a full width option – I agree, but it looks like it can already do that.

    There is only one big one for me – STICKY MENU.
    Preferably with the logo remaining visible too.

    cheers!
    -w

    • 9 years, 1 month ago Greg Priday
      Hi, I Work Here

      I’ve just finished adding a basic sticky menu in our development version and full-width layouts are a definite too.

  22. 9 years, 1 month ago Christian

    Speaking of sticky header and logo; I’d really like to get a ‘progressive logo’ option, which basically means you get three upload fields for the logo. One for mobile, one for talet one for desktop.

  23. 9 years, 1 month ago Gassbass

    Hi! I really enjoy all news from Siteorigin!
    Happy user, here.
    And sorry for my bad english.

    Wishlist for a perfect theme:
    A: styled resume on top of posts (introductory text), just before the excerpt, below the Featured image. Good for novelists and personal/contents blogging. An alluring text to hook people. Turn off/on in post lists or full posts.
    B: choice of featured image style for each individual post: full, thumbnail, at side. Something like.
    C: different BG styles for different kind of posts (text style accordingly).
    D: Retina logo upload (i suppose future premium releases will do that).
    E: The chance to add a widget in the header area (for socials or other stuff).

    However, I like it as clean as possible, to focus more on contents (we blog to be read by people, right? XD).
    Keep up the good work!

  24. 9 years, 1 month ago Ahangbaz

    Hi Greg , I Tried To contact u but i could’t , greg i have installed the simple proxy plugin on my website with this address subtitle.fdmusic.net , i’m from IRAN and i can’t open the subscene because of filtering in iran , maybe you know about it , i wanna give my users a chance to download and enjoy subtitles on the subscene , but i have a problem with the plugin , how can i add some codes to the section and section ? is that possible ? please help greg , your help will free 50.000 users in iran to use internet freely , thank you so much

  25. 9 years, 1 month ago robhob

    Any idea when v1 is going to be released?

  26. 9 years, 1 month ago Aleta

    I’m playing with this now.

    I think everyone’s already mentioned the amendments I would make, I’ll just plug ‘fixed header!’ one more time.

    Also custom css, because futzing with a child theme is just one more chore when one is in a rush.

    Easily change header and footer, easy to find header logo and image options. And it would be nice to have a favicon uploader.

  27. 9 years, 1 month ago Lynda Swafford

    I have designed a few websites using the Vantage Premium theme and I have been pretty happy with it. I like the new Aviator theme as well, and I think previous comments have covered everything I would think to consider. I have one comment about mobile-responsive (mobile vs responsive?). In discussing a prospective client’s website a comment was made that I should build a “mobile” website and not a “responsive” website. After reading up on it I think I understand the difference to some degree and that there are WP plugins to add a mobile feature to a WP website. I would like to see the theme’s responsive/mobile feature have the capability of allowing a user to switch from mobile to desktop, if that makes any sense. I would like to understand how important it is for a website to be mobile friendly where they can push a button to call the company, images and content are condensed for mobile readability, etc.

  28. 9 years, 1 month ago Dirk

    Sticky Footer

  29. 8 years, 11 months ago Dave

    Amazing themes!

  30. 8 years, 11 months ago endrest

    Agreed, @Dirk, Sticky Footer would be awesome!

  31. 8 years, 11 months ago mail box

    many options have been added already but i think a search option in the menu would be nice to have

  32. 8 years, 10 months ago Dave LeBlanc

    Just note to everyone who is wishing for a favicon or retina feature: JetPack has a very good one. I have been using the logo feature on a number of sites, including sites built with Vantage, and it works very well. Typical JetPack – simple, no frills, works well.

    Using this and other JetPack modules would keep with the spirit of this theme, light and lean, creating a site that is not theme dependent for it’s functionality, which seems to be growing trend in WP design now.

  33. 8 years, 10 months ago Elena Gabrici

    In the Aviator demo I see in the home a slide show. Can I do the same in my home page? I must use a widget? Thanks. Elena

  34. 8 years, 8 months ago Steve Gossett

    You had me at simplicity. Nice theme with just enough to satisfy anyone looking for a nice clean theme.

  35. 8 years, 7 months ago Beck

    This is a great theme. Thank you for all the hard work you do.

    Looks and works great with extra plugins.

  36. 8 years, 6 months ago Dávid Lévai

    Hello!

    FOA, you are awesome guys! I like my two Vantage premiums! (Y)

    I think you have to create a designer friendly theme. Like Genesis framework.

    1.) Make the theme extremely SEO friendly.
    2.) Responsive
    3.) CSS editor
    4.) More mobile menu options. I don’t like this one.
    5.) Full-width page option
    6.) More options for the header and footer. Like logo positioning and text next to logo, parallax, 100% width etc.
    7.) HTML head tag options.
    8.) Woocommerce integration
    9.) LayerSlider pro in the premium version if I want to install it.
    10.) Stickyheader, stickyfooter, stickymenu
    11.) Transparencity options(like transparent header/menu)
    12.) Parallax options, and/or animation options
    13.) Clean code, simple CSS.
    14.) Contact form 7 integration

  37. 8 years, 6 months ago Bruce

    How can I get Aviator to always open in full screen mode. The half screen mode is annoying having to open all the time.
    Other than that great job thank you

  38. 8 years, 22 days ago Herbert Unterlechner

    I love this theme Aviator, because it is reduced to the basics header, navigation and (maybe) footer. All other we can make with Page Builder by Site Origin! The only thing i want to suggest is the navigation menu, it should work fine on smartphones, especially if more than three menu points are required for a project. Thank you.

  39. 7 years, 11 months ago Christophe

    Hi,

    I feel stupid for asking, but how do you remove the site navigation in the wordpress admin bar?
    I now have 2 menus and only 1 is saved in the menu dashboard.

    Great theme nevertheless! Didn’t know page Builder, handy!

    Kind regards

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