Am I making the right decision?

I am not sure what other child themes GD developers will provide and what enhancements the existing GDF and child theme will have in the future but I am worried that I might encounter time consuming and costly compatibility issues if I use a Non-GD theme.

I decided to stick with what GD provides and just use plugins for pricing tables, short codes, etc.

Do you have some suggestions on what I should use to integrate a job board on my GD site without having a separate sign up and login?

http://formidablepro.com/demos/job-listings/
http://www.s2member.com

You get a lot of bells and whistles with a purchased theme, light boxes, sliders, shortcodes etc etc, but there is a fair bit of work to get them to work with GD, and the updates to the compatibility packs can be slower in coming than you might like.

If there were shortcodes available for the GD functionality (I know, they’re coming, and so is Christmas!) the purchased themes would be the logical choice.

Personally, I’ve been blown away so far with Enfold, especially with the Avia advanced editor. Granted, the flexibility that page builders bring in being able to easily create a custom page layout without touching any code or CSS often comes with a huge price in page-code bloat. From what I’ve seen so far though, I think it is excellent, and not much more than one would expect with many of the frameworks that are out there.

I also think Enfold has a very clean and well organized UI, powerful but simple, which is rare. Most importantly, I think it will make it much easier for me to pull together a site that is visually unique…not exactly Enfold, not exactly GD.

The biggest challenge currently falls into two areas, that will hopefully not be an issue here soon (hopefully)…

– having a truly stable GD release candidate…not a knock against the team as I know they are doing a great job, but I think we are still very much alpha stage, hopefully bordering on beta here soon. Unfortunately though, themes and compatibility packs really aren’t of much use until the foundation is shored up.

– challenge of taking full advantage of what Enfold can do. The Avia builder is great, but I also have to rely on the AMR Shortcode Any Widget plugin to fully tap into the ability to create custom pages. And of course, that gets limited for GD beyond the homepage as well…but those limitations aren’t any or at least much different with GDF.

Ultimately though, as they say, your mileage may vary.

Cheers,
Brian

Of course this is just my personal opinion, but i think it is far better to spend more time planning what you actually want (and getting a lightweight theme that matches your requirements) than getting a bloated theme that caters for all use cases.

I’m not knocking Enfold by the way, as the developer of that theme is very good – it’s just that these types of themes cater for a huge audience and give lots of options to cover many different “looks”. In my eyes, if you have already planned what you want, you won’t actually need those options.

My process would be:
1) Get a clean simple theme which has an overall “look” that i want.
2) Create a child theme to make the design changes i want.
3) Get plugins for any other functionality i need (shortcodes / portfolio / ecommerce etc)