Uncode — The Best Premium WordPress Theme of 2015
It’s our first post of the new year so I thought I’d start off with a theme that is sure to be a winner in 2016. Uncode is a new WordPress theme that lives up to its name. With a simple, easy to navigate theme options panel and Visual Composer page builder baked in, it’s easy for anyone to use. This is a multi-purpose theme that has been available on Themeforest since November 4th, 2015 and has been selling steadily ever since.
It’s perfect for any WordPress user who wants to put up a blog or portfolio. There are some rich options for typography that I haven’t seen in other themes and enhanced media library options. We all know that WordPress was built for blogging, yet has evolved into one of the finest an all-purpose CMS solutions around.
Uncode was created for anyone who wants to build a modern, stylish theme with WordPress without having to touch the code. This theme can take your site to the next level. It’s got a clean, minimal vibe and it looks current. Build a modern blog, showcase your work with a portfolio site or be use it to build a variety of other websites.
About Uncode
If you are looking for innovative yet easy to use WordPress theme, Uncode is a good choice. This theme performs and looks just the way you’d expect from a top notch WordPress theme in today’s web. It’s fully responsive so it looks good on all devices, has some nice options to adapt to mobile and there are plenty of layout variations.
As of now there are 24 demo styles, so you can create sites for a number of uses. Build WordPress websites for agencies, blogs, corporations, creative subject matter, freelancers, magazines, online shops, magazines etc. Right in the theme options you’ll find everything you need to tweak to start building. It integrates perfectly with Visual Composer so you can build with ease. Use VC’s drag and drop user interface to create layouts, add templates, add elements and save your own custom templates.
The developers are committed to making Uncode awesome. The documentation is helpful and comprehensive. They are also taking requests when it comes to adding functionality to the theme. For complete beginners, start here to get a full run down on getting started. Get the scoop on setting up the PHP configurations, installing the theme, installing demo content, using FTP, using a child theme and more.
Baked in plugins
Some other handy plugins that are recommended with Uncode are LayerSlider, Revolution Slider, WooCommerce, Uncode Core and Contact Form 7. Another interesting feature is the media library. Uncode enables you to insert multimedia into your library by URL, which is pretty cool. There are 6 menu styles to choose from and dozens of options for customizing your content.
The theme options are let you make some advanced changes to your website and developers can take things even further with custom CSS. As always, it’s best practice to use a child theme for custom coding and Uncode’s developers recommend doing so. But, you can also add some quick CSS or Javascript code from the theme options area.
Navigating the Backend
Uncode’s theme options panel is easy enough to understand. This is where you’ll be making all your changes whether you are building from scratch as I am or you are using demo content. Changing the options is intuitive and beginner friendly. Click on tabs from the Welcome screen to access different options or choose from your WordPress dashboard menu on the left.
The documentation for theme options is very thorough. Here you will find everything you need to get started for changing the Logo, Menu, Layout, Hierarchy, Font, Colors, Customization Options, and Footer. The page options within the theme options panel will allow you to adjust the layout, header and portfolio configurations. You can output some very nice pages as seen below. 
Features List
- Easy to use
- 1-Click demo installation
- Drag and drop functionality
- Interactive Tabs
- Lightbox
- Accordians
- Enhanced Visual Composer
- Fully Responsive
- Infinite design possibilities
- Load custom fonts from options panel
- Over 6 menu types
- CSS3 animations
- SEO friendly
- Typography options
- 24 demos
- Comprehensive documentation
- Retina ready
- Sticky menu
- Modern, polished design
- 1000+ icons
- Infinite sidebars
- Clean admin
- WMPL ready
- Social network integration
- Recommended post likes
- Integrates flawlessly with WooCommerce
Uncode’s Requirements
The theme works just fine without fulfilling these requirements, but if you want to upload large files like videos, it’s a good idea to do this. You need to make sure you have your server settings configured to use Uncode to it’s full potential. Look at the Undsgn site to view the requirements. After install had some warnings letting me know which settings I needed to alter to run Uncode smoothly.
First I needed to increase my PHP memory allocation. See the WordPress Codex page on editing the wp-config.php file for more information. All you have to do is modify the wp-includes/default-constants.php file in your domain directory. There are some other things you need to do to optimize your settings, which are on the server side. I use Bluehost, so I referenced this page on .htaccess files to fulfill the requirements. You can also create a custom .htaccess file via FTP if you want.
There are links located directly in the theme options panel that will guide you in the right direction if you need to change any settings. I may just end up making a companion post for creating an .htaccess file since it’s something useful anyhow. For now you can follow the links provided and check the documentation.
Install Recommeded Plugins — There are a couple more things I want to do before I am ready to have some fun and add content to my site. First I’ll install the recommended plugins which include:
- WooCommerce
- I Recommend this
- Visual Composer
- Contact Form 7 Revolution Slider
- Layer Slider
If you navigate to Uncode>Install Plugins from the dashboard menu you will see a list of plugins to install if you don’t have them already. Click on the name to get a modal window to pop up with more information on the plugin. I didn’t install WooCommerce because I am not going to build an eCommerce site, but I included most of the other plugins listed.
Create Static Front page — I want a static front page and let people access my blog posts from the menu if I even add a blog to this site. From the dashboard menu navigate to Appearance>Customize and you’ll be taken to the screen below.
From there you can choose the Static Front Page menu item and select which page you’d like to be your front page. I chose a page I created called Home.
Uncode’s Rich Options
The theme options for Uncode are awesome, with over 70 different fields to modify and customize as seen above. For some more tips on getting started with this theme. Check out the post on Common Mistakes to Avoid in WordPress; there are some tips on getting started including fixing the permalinks.
This theme has lots to offer and I really like the feel of the backend. One unique feature is the font options. I like how easily Uncode makes it to add lots of different types of fonts straight from the theme options. One of the best things about the theme options is that there are so many to choose from so you get a chance to create something unique by playing with all the options.
Uncode has Visual Composer and the documentation even gives you a primer on using it to create pages. The menu options have everything I’ve seen in other mega themes like different menu layouts, menu styling options, behavior options for menus, content width adjustments and more. One of the other features that really stood out is the custom color palette options. There you can create custom colors for things like dividers, backgrounds or anything else.
Uncode is a solid template that is perfect for building creative sites. This theme is a dream for someone who loves to create. With a combination of images, videos, typography and colors you can let your imagination run wild. Let us know what you liked or didn’t like about Uncode. For other multi-purpose themes that have a current feel, see our list of Popular Themes of 2015.
Live Demo Get Uncode
Do you know of any tutorials or anything to design a wordpress site using Uncode? I have Uncode and have NO IDEA how to design it like they do on their demos. I’m so lost, all the advice helps!
Yes, like jon says, you can load up their demo content and just replace the pics. I didn’t have any demo content included in my promotional copy so I couldn’t do the one-click demo install. This link will show you how.
load up their demo content then edit it.
Love this theme. It is initially different to lots of others in how you use it but once you get used to it then it becomes easier. The options are only really limited by your imagination.
The two guy’s developing it took 18 months to do so and it shows. The theme is here to stay, they listen to their customers about future upgrades and support is very good.
Well worth the purchase price.
I like the way Uncode tries to think, but I think it trips on its own fancyness. Certain settings seem to fall back on defaults after touching something else (not sure, but sure feels like it). Not being able to change font colours, line-spacing (only available on certain Visual Editor blocks), it removes heading formats from the WP Default Visual editing tool and so forth. I can’t seem to be able to have the normal post index list with summaries (not excerpts) and feature images.
The videos say I wouldn’t have to do code, but apparently I do to get a nicely working machine of which updating is easy. It would be better if one could create a publication-template (be it a post or page) with multiple menu/header/content/sidebar/footer content-blocks in any random order and amount. How that would then translate into post-edit, I don’t know. Hopefully just one editable piece with just a normal WP-out-of-box UI.
For a person who want’s each and every page / post be laid out differently (“a count down timer here, a features star shape icon there etc) and having only pictures as index pages, this must be heaven.
But, for the price of it, I’m still going to try to get it hacked into way I like it to be. Feels stupid tho, to pay money for a theme that you need to customize with coding. That’s what freebie themes are for 🙂
Thanks for your input 🙂 I know what you mean about the “fancyness.” I think the settings can be a bit confusing since there are so many options. As far as automatic updates, you can set them up with the Envato WordPress Toolkit plugin.
You really don’t need to any coding unless you want to do some custom PHP. I like to add custom CSS for things like contact forms and small changes for mobile layouts just because it’s easier for me that way.