The7 Theme Review

Last updated on September 1st, 2017

The7 is a multi-purpose template developed in September 2013 by the Envato Power Elite author, Dream-Theme. This is a flexible theme using the finest design technology to help you create a beautiful website regardless of the subject.

Design

The7 is based on elegant lines and a high visual impact. The theme comes with over 20 demos ready to be installed on your website with the one-click import system. The7 gives you 21 skin templates to choose from and a lot of options to customize the site’s appearance such as setting up the layout as boxed or wide, using a color as the background, applying visual effects like ‘lazy loading,’ parallax, and much more.

With a global styling option, the portfolios and photo albums can use some slick visual effects like grayscale with color hovers, blurry or scaled. The theme has various portfolio styles to choose from, and a ‘Photo Albums’ template which automatically adds the lightbox effect to all your images. Built to give as much flexibility as possible, in this theme you can display all the media files in a slideshow, gallery, list, photo scroller or masonry grid mode.

The7 brings you six pre-built header layouts that can be easily combined with a logo and a menu position to create more distinct top page styles. You can also use one of the 25 background textures available in the Theme Options panel for the header and footer sections, sidebar areas and breadcrumbs. Also, the sidebar has three attractive templates ready to be used. The footer section comes with three pre built layouts, but you can decide how many columns you want to use for this area.

Nowadays, as users are connecting to the internet from different devices, it’s a must for all websites to be responsive and retina ready. The7 will make your site accessible from any device.

Functionality

The Theme Options panel is structured in 19 dedicated areas. Under the first section, called ‘Wizard’ you can find a special option that allows you to configure your theme quickly. In the ‘General’ tab, you can customize the website’s appearance, set up your layout, background, color schemes, loading animations, and lightbox effect. In the ‘Advanced’ section, you can add custom CSS and JavaScript code.

The theme is powered by the drag and drop page builder, Visual Composer, enhanced with backend and front end functionality. There are plenty of structure elements and over 70 pre-built page templates to choose from. The Dream-Theme authors included over 30 custom drag and drop blocks to help you use the Visual Composer on the front end of your website.

The7 comes with a search bar for easy navigation through the theme’s typography. This handy tool is a quick way to select the font you want to use on different sections of the site.

The template brings you eight layouts to choose from: image, video, aside, link, gallery, etc. Also, The7 comes with additional post options, which help you style the buttons, preview settings and gives you the freedom to decide what is the best suitable gallery or video layout (hover effect, slideshow & icons). You can build pages by selecting a template and using six different header options. Both posts and pages can be created using Visual Composer with back-end and front-end editing options.

The theme comes with the custom plugin called ‘The7 Elements’’and also with the premium Revolution Slider and Go Pricing plugins. The7 is compatible with the WooCommerce plugin, and it is ready to be transformed by using the customization options for product list, page, cart & checkout.

Dream-Theme provides an additional plugin that brings extra elements to your website, called ‘Ultimate Addons for Visual Composer.’ The theme is compatible with the premium WPML multi-language plugin and brings you a child theme .zip file in the installation package, so you do not have to create it from scratch.

Performance

We have tested The7 default demo on different page speed tests, and it loads the content at a high speed. It shows 85/100 on Google PageSpeed on the desktop.

Downsides

The7 Theme Options panel has no sub-sections. Every ‘sub-menu’ can be accessed from the dashboard as a new panel, by changing the URL and refreshing the page. This can be frustrating because it’s hard to work with a system that keeps on reloading.