Kadence

The Feast Plugin is compatible with the Kadence framework and themes. We automatically hide settings that are not available in Kadence in order to prevent conflicting functionality.

Nothing is automatically done when installing the Feast Plugin on Kadence - you can enable just the features you want!

When opting to use Kadence, support for the Feast Plugin is restricted to features specifically provided by the Feast Plugin, and we do not offer support for problems arising from Kadence settings.

What the Feast Plugin offers to Kadence

Sites using Kadence can benefit from the following:

General

Categories

The categories are fully controlled by Kadence.

Advanced Jump to Links

•  Set your own "Jump To" text
•  Set a max height (in px) for the jump to
•  Check the box to load the "jump to" as closed, by default
•  Replace the recipe card h2 link with your own custom text
•  Add a link to the comments

Modern Thumbnails (Featured Images)

•  Add square thumbnails (recommended)
•  Add in-post thumbnails (recommended)
•  Add portrait / vertical thumbnails (recommended)
•  Add landscape / horizontal thumbnails (not recommended)
•  Remove theme thumbnails (recommended)
•  Default featured image size

Comments

•  Edit "Leave a Reply"
•  Move comment form above comments

Tools

•  Open Comments on all posts
•  Disable Pingbacks & Trackbacks on all posts
•  Delete old Pingbacks & Trackbacks on all posts

This may evolve over time as things are added/removed/updated by Feast, Kadence, WordPress or third party plugins.

Why people use Kadence

Kadence has a number of customizations and layout options available that let you customize your site in unique ways. This can be exciting for those who want to uniquely brand their site.

However, these customizations may or may not comply with best practices for pagespeed, accessibility, mobile optimization or in some cases, user experience. If none of these are important to you, or you want to hire a custom developer to fix these problems for you, Kadence is an option.

Feast can only offer support for our pre-made themes, not customized themes.

Why you might not want to use Kadence

The customizer lets you make design choices that may or may not cause issues with pagespeed, accessibility, mobile optimization and user experience.

This means that problems related to poorly designed or incomplete customizer options available through Kadence, are problems that you opt into supporting yourself when using Kadence.

Not all customizer options are poorly designed or incomplete, but the extreme number of combinations and configurations is not something that we're able to support at $249/year.

Customizations

Kadence uses the customizer to style and layout sites. There's a LOT of customization options in Kadence.

Using the customizer turns our theme into your own custom theme. Custom themes created through the customizer (or code snippets or custom CSS) are not supported by Feast.

We're only able to support our specific version of the configurations as a preset "theme".

Support

The Feast themes built on Kadence themes come with theme support.

Non-Feast themes built on Kadence are limited to Feast Plugin features. Your theme provider will offer support for their own themes.

Pagespeed

The Kadence themes come built for pagespeed within the scope of a theme. Additional plugins and services may be required to manage third party plugin and service pagespeed issues.

Common issues

Problems relating to the Kadence customizer options are not things that Feast can support. We intentionally avoid configurations that we've seen cause issues with SEO, pagespeed, accessibility or user experience.

If using the customizer, you'll need paid customization support from an advanced designer or developer for help with being compliant with SEO, pagespeed, accessibility or user experience requirements.

Issues that may arise due to using Kadence include:

• accessibility contrast errors
• unpredictable keyboard navigation
• poor default anchor text and internal linking
• font size too small
• content wider than screen
• missing fractions
• layout and spacing issues
• inconsistent styling between pages
• failing core web vitals including:
  • total blocking time (TBT)
  • largest contentful paint (LCP)
  • first contentful paint
  • cumulative layout shift (CLS)
  • interactive next paint
  • time to first byte (TTFB)
  • excessive DOM nodes
• Google Search Console issues such as:
  • thin content
  • crawlability issues
  • layout wider than screen
  • text too small

Not all of these issues will be present on all sites using Kadence, and what problems you experience will depend on which Kadence customizations/options you choose to use.

Kadence cost

Kadence themes from other companies advertise themselves as being a "one-time fee", but this can be misleading. Updates and/or support often aren't included beyond the first year, which means you might end up paying yearly for ongoing support.

Theme companies will often simply not update a theme, and choose instead to release a new theme every year or two so that you have to buy a new theme and install it. This can negatively impact your site as it falls behind best practices and changing requirements from search engines and more.

We assume that this is unintentionally misleading by theme creators, rather than intentionally lying.

The #1 complaint we heard from supporting thousands of sites is that updating or changing themes is difficult, stressful, and time-consuming. Choosing a one-time purchase is choosing to have to manually update themes every few years, along with the issues that come with that.

Warning about child themes

Kadence themes from Feast are built off of the Kadence parent theme, and do not use a child theme.

At this time, we do not sell independent Kadence child themes, and the Kadence themes are only available through the Feast Plugin.

The Feast Plugin and Feast+ are developed without relying on Genesis. The base themes and Genesis are used purely out of convenience for our users.

What's wrong with Genesis?

Nothing at all.

Genesis is stable, which means it doesn't break your site due to major updates and revisions and breaking backwards compatibility. This is extremely valuable to anybody that runs a content focused media business that needs to focus on content instead of re-inventing the wheel.

Kadence is a better choice for users who value customizations, don't mind more technical issues on their site, and are willing to put in the work and cost of supporting their customizations.