KLEO is a popular multi-purpose WordPress theme that includes full and unique integration with the BuddyPress social networking plugin.
While this theme can and has been used for several purposes, including online shops, business websites, creative portfolios, and membership sites to name but a few, if you are planning to build a website with a strong community or social element, then KLEO could be just what you are looking for.
In this review of the KLEO WordPress theme, we will explore the features on offer and how easy it is to use. By the end of this review, you will be able to decide if this the right choice for your next online project.
Features of the KLEO WordPress Theme
KLEO truly is a multi-purpose WordPress theme. This is evident from the range of home page configurations you can choose from when setting up your website. Of course you are free to create your own home page layout and design, and thanks to the included page builder tool, this shouldn’t pose too much of a challenge.
When it comes to setting up your website, the range of possibilities can offer is impressive. Thanks to the inclusion and support for the leading membership, ecommerce, social networking and community plugins, this is a very versatile theme that can be used for various purposes.
The theme also includes many promotional sliders that can be added to your website. These allow you to showcase your best deals, features, or content to your visitors as they arrive at your website. This includes some great Christmas and Black Friday templates to help you make the most of these busy shopping periods.
KLEO makes it easy to create a membership website, or add this component to your existing site. Thanks to the inclusion of the Paid Membership Memberships Pro plugin, setting up restricted areas on your website is very straightforward. This popular membership plugin integrates with Stripe and PayPal, so monetizing your website and collecting payments is easy.
With high levels of support for the BuddyPress social-network-in-a-box plugin, creating a community around your existing website or building your own social platform from scratch is straightforward. While this plugin will work with nearly all WordPress themes, not all of them include the full range of BuddyPress page templates required to create a consistent user experience throughout a website. Thankfully, KLEO includes all these templates and more. The newly released BuddyPress profile cover is very impressive and will help the social networking components of your website stand out.
As well as strong support for BuddyPress, this theme also integrates well with the bbPress plugin. This tool allows you to add discussion forums to your website with ease. Visitors can login to both the forums and social networking areas of your website, using their Facebook accounts for a seamless user experience.
Like your favourite social media sites, your website can also make use of live AJAX notifications to display new message icons without the pages needing to be refreshed. The theme also includes an AJAX powered live search tool that makes it easy for your visitors to find the content they are looking for on your website. The search box can be inserted into any of your content, simply by using the corresponding shortcode.
The demo content and layouts that can be imported in just a few clicks, KLEO includes the highly popular premium WPBakery Page Builder plugin. This tool gives you a back and front-end builder for creating custom responsive page layouts through a live, drag and drop user interface.
Another premium plugin included with this WordPress theme is Slider Revolution. This tool allows you to create highly engaging content sliders for your website. With this plugin, there are plenty of options to choose from, making it ideal for showcasing your images, posts, products, or anything else you want to share with your visitors.
As this multi-purpose theme includes support for the leading WooCommerce eCommerce plugin, creating an online shop with KLEO, or simply adding a few products to your website doesn’t require much effort. WooCommerce includes all the basic features you would need to sell online, including the ability to collect payments via PayPal.
To help your content go viral and bring more visitors back to your website, KLEO includes its own set of social media share buttons and icons. All the most popular social networks are covered, helping to increase the chances of your visitors spreading the word about your website.
When managing your content, this theme uses many custom post types. This helps keep your blog content separate from your client information, testimonials, and portfolio items.
Nearly all aspects of your website can be customized at the touch of a button. KLEO includes a detailed and powerful admin control panel. Through the theme options, you can customize the layout settings, choose a header design, enable a side menu, select fonts, and more.
The whole theme is mobile responsive. This means your website and its content will be fully accessible, no matter what device it is being viewed on. With Google now checking how mobile-friendly a website is when determining where it should be ranked in its search engine, it’s never been more important to ensure your website is optimized for smartphone and tablet users.
Awesome Website Examples Using KLEO
The KLEO demo on the ThemeForest website makes it easy to see just what this theme can do and how you could use it for your next project. However, by checking out some of the other websites that have built this theme, you can see how truly versatile this template is and get some inspiration for your website.
It doesn’t come much more high profile than having a potential 2016 US Presidential candidate choose your WordPress theme for their website. The Ted Cruz site puts KLEO to good use to create an online presence for his campaign. The website uses the full screen video home page configuration to connect with visitors as soon as they arrive at the site.
Philanthropist and humanitarian Jade Bryce has chosen the KLEO theme for her personal website. To prove the ecommerce credentials of this theme, the site includes an online shop where fans can purchase trinkets endorsed by the well-travelled model and actor. The website also integrates with the top social networks to display content from Twitter and Instagram in one central location.
If you want to see the integrated Revolution Slider in action, then see the website above. This premium mobile responsive, full width content slider is used to great effect on the home page of this website. The site also uses the theme’s extensive support for the BuddyPress plugin to create an online community.
Using the KLEO WordPress Theme
This multi-purpose WordPress theme requires three plugins: Revolution Slider, K Elements, and WPBakery Page Builder. All are included in the package and can be installed a just a few clicks after activating the theme. The theme also recommends a handful of other plugins, including WooCommerce and BuddyPress, and again they are included in the package for easy installation.
Once you’ve enabled the required and optional plugins, you can begin configuring the theme to work in the way you want.
One of the problems often associated with these multi-purpose WordPress themes is that it can be difficult to set them up to resemble the demo version. To overcome this, the developers of KLEO have decided to make it as easy as possible to import the demo content and get your site set up using one of the pre-built configurations.
Once you’ve chosen an option, you can sit back and wait for the demo data to be imported into your website.
After the optional demo data import has run, you can also import the Slider Revolution content. This takes place through the control panel for that plugin. As many of the demo configurations use the slider, this is a good idea. Importing the pre-built sliders also makes it easy to see how this powerful plugin can be used on your website if you are unfamiliar with it.
When you are ready, you can begin customizing the various aspects of your website. This all takes place through the extensive theme options control panel. The options and settings include uploading a logo and set of retina icons for selecting devices.
Through the theme options, you can also easily change the layout of the home page and layouts for the individual blog posts and website pages.
The header layout options are a nice feature. The included options cover all the most popular choices and make selecting the right header for your website very simple.
Other options include: enabling a sidebar menu, configuring the social share buttons, selecting colours for the individual page elements, choosing the fonts, and more.
As this theme includes the WPBakery Page Builder page builder plugin, you can do more than simply create standard WordPress posts and pages. Through the live editor of this plugin, you can create multi-column and row layouts. These custom layouts can then be populated with the many page elements of the plugin.
If you’ve chosen to use the supported WooCommerce, BuddyPress, Paid Memberships Pro, or bbPress plugins on your website, each of those tools can be configured independently to ensure your website works in the way you want.
Free Theme Support
KLEO Theme comes with free lifetime support and upgrades. Developer behind this theme always put their users first and try to solve every problem users might have. They go that extra mile that not many other theme developers does. Support for this theme is handled via SeventhQueen support center that you can find here.
Pricing
KLEO is available from the ThemeForest marketplace for $63. Considering it includes two premium plugins, in the form of WPBakery Page Builder and Revolution Slider, it’s a great value proposition for anyone looking for a WordPress theme for their website.
Conclusion
KLEO certainly is a multi-purpose theme. This means that whatever type of website you want to build, there is a good chance this theme will give you the tools to create it.
The strong support for BuddyPress means that this theme will appeal to those who want to add social networking features to their website, such as user profiles, relationships, content sharing, and other staples of sites like Facebook.
However, this isn’t the only set of users who will find KLEO a useful solution. Thanks to its support for the leading ecommerce, membership, and discussion forum plugins, there isn’t a lot this theme can’t do.
By including two of the most popular premium WordPress plugins in the form of WPBakery Page Builder and Revolution Slider, users of KLEO have some very useful tools at their disposal. Combining this powerful visual editor with an impressive content slider tool, not to mention all the theme customization options on offer, makes creating an attractive personalized website a very achievable goal.
Update(1): Since the KLEO 3.0 update theme integrates WordPress Theme Customizer, you can make all layout changes for this theme on a live preview. This functionality makes this theme even more user-friendly and easier to customize.
If you like any of the many online demo configurations of this theme, or the feature list appeals to you, then KLEO should be suitable for your project. Whether you want to use the BuddyPress features of this theme or not is up to you, but either way, this is a great-looking multi-purpose theme packed with customization options.