Themeco Pro Review (with Cornerstone builder, After 11 Years)

This review was originally published on January 15th 2020. It has been updated for each new version and it is relevant for Themeco’s Pro version 6.9.0, X theme v. 10.9.0 and Cornerstone builder v. 7.9.0, all released on August 3^th 2026.

Cornerstone Forms (with Facets) are out! Check out yet another incredible tech made by Themeco.

Time flies. Wow.

It has been 11 years since I have bought my first X theme license from Themeco. I have built all my websites with their tech ever since. Including this one, of course.

My very first website built on X ended up on a list of WordPress influencers, along with Mercedes Benz, Katy Perry, Bloomberg, NASA and others.

It’s time to do a concise but detailed review of the X theme, Pro theme and Cornerstone Builder. A review is needed because many of the resources on the Internet are outdated. It is unfortunate that many of the reviews available are several years old, even though their automatically generated headlines display latest dates.

Pro is one of the best website builders in the world and I will more than prove it in this overview, twice. :)

TL;DR: Themeco Pro (Cornerstone) is a powerful, fast, safe and reliable tool worth mastering

With time, this article has grown beyond the point where it can cover all the important points within our average attention span. The following is a brief overview of the main points:

X Theme and Pro are both themes made by Themeco. X was released in 2013. and quickly became Envato’s fastest selling product of all times. Pro was released in 2017. Both include a powerful Page builder called Cornerstone. Cornerstone is powered by Flexbox, written in Ember & React and PHP 8x compatible. Pro also has CSS Grid and the Header/Footer/Layout Builder. From now on, we will mostly discuss Pro and Cornerstone.

Performance-wise, Pro is one of the fastest themes on the market, both in the backend and in the frontend. This is thanks to the modern lean architecture. Themeco made sure it was as SEO friendly as possible. To this day, it never had a single security breach!

Pro has tools like Dynamic content, Dynamic components, Template Manager, TWIG renderer, Calculations, Undo/Redo capabilities, Role manager, Custom Attributes, Archive and Single Layout builder, Conditions, Responsive styling with custom breakpoints, preview scaling, External and internal APIs, buildable sliders, Lottie animations support, native AI, and much more.

Pro can hook into any external Website, Sheet, RSS feed, Document or anything else, and display (loop) the content form it. It can also query with GraphQL and natively set and get cookies. We don’t have to buy tons of plugins when we can recreate most of them quickly with Pro, and keep the unified design.

Pro has advanced concept of components and parameters, allowing users to utilize their design systems throughout the website, like having a Figma-like tool that is an actual website.

The Themeco Customer support is outstanding, and many would argue that its Facebook community is one of the best found, always ready to help in minutes.

Pro Theme’s price used to be lifetime, but it was a matter of time when they would switch to sustainable recurring payments. Price is now yearly per one, ten, or unlimited websites, but it is still well worth it and justified. There are other pricing models involving the platform called MAX that includes AI, Courses, and various themeco-made plugins. Massive discounts are going on right now, and they are not for the first year only, but for life.

Font Awesome 7 Pro with svg & Duotone icons, and various other plugins are all bundled with Pro for free. The latest addition to Pro (with the Max subscription) is Cornerstone Forms. Solving native advanced forms and filtering.

Ok, so I have now spoiled some of the fun, but it is still worth reading on if you have time. If not, here’s the link to check out Themeco’s website:

Disclosure: Themeco had no referral program announced when this article was originally written. With the launch of the new website, they have also created this program. As of May 26. I have added the referral links to the Themeco Pro theme, but it doesn’t change a thing about what I have to say.

For starters, the word “Theme” often used in the name of this product makes it sound somehow cheap. Less experienced people immediately think of some template that imposes its own design, and very often the whole layout. That is far from reality. Pro is a powerful site building tool, or even a platform. With it, it is possible to start from the blank canvas and build the website exactly the way we want it.

If you are building a website based on someone’s mockup, you will be able to recreate it 100%. Even those “impossible” Photoshop mockups often showcased on Bēhance, are a breeze to recreate in Pro and to make them responsive. If you, on the other hand want pre-made templates, sure. They are available in the Themeco’s Design Cloud.

The History

The initial release of X-theme was on October 24. 2013. We can see the whole update history in their official changelog.  Soon after that it got the Visual Composer integration. Very quickly it became the fastest-growing and best selling theme on the Envato Market.

On May 28th, 2015, X-theme 4.0. came out and introduced its own page builder—Cornerstone.

On April 10th, 2017, Themeco released its second theme called Pro. The main difference at the time was that unlike the X, it had the Header, Footer and the Layout builder. Also it was not sold on the Envato market, but directly from Themeco.

Throughout the years, Themeco was adding its own plugins called extensions. For example, there is a QR Code builder, Smooth scroll, White label, and others. There is also a premium Cornerstone elements plugin called “Cornerstone Charts”, for building amazing visualizations and custom dashboards.

Bundled with Pro is also a powerful native Schema (Structured data) plugin called “Snippet”. This plugin supports many various Schema types, outputted as JSON-LD.

Pro has been through several cycles of complete refactoring and modernization. The technology we see today is based on the latest development standards.

The Concept

Themeco’s X and Pro themes are based on design sets called stacks. Although this may change in the future, it isn’t a bad idea at all. Integrity, Renew, Icon, and Ethos are the four stacks. Every design is unique, and it is a good place to start for those who want ready-made designs within a short time frame. The theme is fully customizable, so you may end up not even noticing the stacks. We also have Blank and the Starter stack for those who want to fully control the design of the website, or those who want to start with barebones only.

The difference between X, Pro theme and Cornerstone Builder from Themeco

The key difference is that X is simpler, and Pro offers advanced Header/Footer/Layout Builders, as well as CSS Grid capabilities and advanced conditions. X is available at Envato, and Pro is sold directly by Themeco.

Cornerstone builder is part of both X and Pro, and is the core feature of the themes. The key to understand is that Cornerstone comes as a separate plugin in X, while it is fully integrated into Pro. Cornerstone can also be purchased as a standalone builder, but I would strongly recommend utilizing its full power inside Pro, which is its natural environment.

Performance (It is fast. Very fast)

Ember, React, storing all data into JSON, Pure HTML storage (instead of shorcodes), Themeco’s crazy-geek engineers… A few things came together to create one of the fastest themes on the Internet. The barebone install is able to load in 0.3 seconds with additional optimization, and in 0.5 seconds without it. An empty Pro page with no plugins installed loads in 110 ms on a shared hosting account, without CDN. An optimized website such as this one can load anywhere between 0.5 to 1.2 seconds.

As a digital marketing consultant, I had a chance to work with all major themes on the market, and some less known ones. I can tell you one thing for sure: no theme/builder is fast as X and Pro theme. There are a few that are a match on the front end. Oxygen would be one, and there are some others, mostly block-based builders. But on the backend… That’s crazy. Let me take a stopwatch and measure the time the Homepage of this website becomes editable in the Cornerstone Page builder:

Ready? Set… Go…………………4 seconds!

Dev time is money. If you have to wait an extra 10 or 20 seconds for every change to take effect, and to be able to edit a page, that sums up to A LOT of money burned for nothing.

Shall we try to measure saving changes on the page? Let’s go: ……..1 second!

Pro’s backend is snappy and reacts instantly. That’s a massive refresher when coming from many large page builders and even some smaller ones that spend too much time while working. There is no need for local development.

Disclaimer: make sure you have fast Internet speed, and that the site is hosted on a decent Hosting. Otherwise, the theme is as fast as the narrowest bottleneck.

Here’s a GTMetrics example of a simple homepage:

It doesn’t get much faster than that, unless we speed up the speed of light. ;)

Here are the Mobile PageSpeed Insights results for a blank page:

You must have heard people complaining about getting very low mobile pagespeed results even on blank pages, with many popular themes and page builders. Pro is as clean as a whistle right out of the box. The web designer is responsible for the Core Web Vitals, but it is essential that the Theme itself provides us with a clean canvas. In 2021, Web Vitals got included in ranking factor.

Pro from Themeco is extremely optimized for performance out of the box. Treat it right, build your site with performance in mind, and you’ll get a hyper fast website even on a shared hosting.

The WP Builders Fight Club project

I was invited to represent Pro in this interesting performance competition. The idea was that each participant has to recreate a certain homepage the best they can using their page builder, with no Performance plugins used and with least plugins possible.

Parameters that were measured were the design accuracy, DOM size, page size, GTMetrix score and PageSpeed Insights score.

Design accuracy was marked as “High”. That’s nothing special because Pro can recreate literally anything. One thing was really interesting though: Pro was the only builder that answered all the challenges with a single plugin: ACF. In contrast, other competitors installed up to 7 plugins!

Everyone was rebuilding the same page. When it comes to the DOM size, I did it with 694 DOM elements. For comparison, Elementor had 1123 and Brizy 1893 elements. Kadence was at 777 and Oxygen at 644. Only the small block builders were able to keep it much lower than Pro, but they had to install more plugins.

GTMetrix scores as I got them can be seen on this screenshot. As per the competition rules, this is without any cashing or optimization plugins.

Mobile Pagespeed insights scores (also no caching plugins used) are as follows:

The above results are Mobile PageSpeed insights scores for a real homepage. Accessibility is lower because the template we had to copy for the competition was not compliant and the SEO score is lower because the template was noindexed. It would have easily been 99, 100, 100, 100 without any optimization plugins!

Page size was 604 Kb but that’s because I self-hosted two font-weights needed for the project, using the native Font manager. The actual theme’s files were JavaScript measuring 64,3 Kb and CSS with only 32.1 Kb. If we select the Blank stack and take care of our own design (which is mostly the case anyway), the CSS file is just 13 Kb! Pro is temporarily loading jQuery to support some legacy plugins but anyone who is not using those plugins can disable it.

The “Best practices” score is 100 without putting any efforts into it; it is just an awesomely built piece of technology.

After participating in the competition and getting those results, my conclusion is this: Pro belongs to the category of old, big and powerful site builders, but it beats all of them. It stacks up more with small, block-based builders. Those are performant (just like Pro) but not as nearly as powerful as Pro, so Pro is giving us the best of both worlds!

Are X and Pro Bloated themes, and do they slow down with new versions?

What is bloat anyway? It is something taking up resources even if not needed. X and Pro are packed with features. Especially Pro. But they are lean-based. Nothing is used if not needed, so there is no sign of bloat at all. This goes down as far as to individual CSS rules: Can images have border radius? Yes. Is the rule there if it is zero or empty? No, it is not even outputted. There is a toggle to turn it on if needed. This goes to all controls in the builder.

Can we have JS to control responsive text? Sure. It needs to be enabled for the particular page first. Can we Have Lightbox on the images? Sure. Only if it is added to them. If not, that script is not being run. And so on.

On top of that, as mentioned above, The “Blank stack” removes all the theme stylings, so we can build our own. We mostly do that anyway, so the theme (unused) CSS is not in the way.

Another cool thing is that Pro is splitting its CSS files. For example, if we don’t use the Slider builder, none of its CSS would be loaded, despite the fact that Slider is just another element inside Cornerstone. If we choose to use it, we then get a separate CSS file for it. It is the same with some other parts of the builder as well.

If that wasn’t enough, and if we want even more, Themeco has TSS (Themeco Stylesheets). This is a native solution for generating dynamic styles to keep the code base as minimal as it gets. I won’t get too deeply here, you can check it out in Themeco Docs. TSS has Variables, Math, Nesting, Tags, Mixins, Loop & Conditionals… Expand the Details block below for examples. If you are a beginner, don’t get intimidated by what you see – you don’t need any of it to use Pro :)

/* Variables */
$primary: #ff6600;
$spacing: 1.5rem;

.button {
  background: $primary;
  padding: $spacing;
}

/* Math */
.container {
  width: calc(100% - (2 * 1rem));
}

.box {
  width: (100% / 3); // Compiles to 33.3333%
}

/* Nesting */
.card {
  background: #fff;

  h2 {
    color: $primary;
  }

  &:hover {
    box-shadow: 0 2px 5px rgba(0,0,0,.2);
  }
}

/* Tags */
@tco-breakpoint sm {
  .text { font-size: 1.2rem; }
}

@tco-selector .x-btn {
  border-radius: 8px;
}

/* Mixins */
@mixin button-base {
  display: inline-block;
  padding: 1rem 2rem;
  border-radius: 4px;
}

/* Loops & Conditions */
.button {
  @include button-base;
  background: $primary;
}

@for $i from 1 through 5 {
  .m-$i { margin: #{$i}rem; }
}

As for the second question about slowing down over time, that is a normal thing to ask. We have all seen great systems that slowed down as new features have been added. Not Pro. As a matter of fact, each version got faster. For example, Pro 4.0 released on December 2020 got the Layout builder, Effects and dozens of new features. Guess what: JS dependencies were reduced by 30% compared to the previous, already fast version! After that, Pro 6.0 released in December 2022. completely removed JQuery hard dependency! Pro 6.5 from August 2024. got even more major performance improvements, followed by Pro 6.6 which abandoned the standard shortcodes system used in WordPress, transiting to pure HTML storage. In Themeco’s own words, We can rest assured that they’ll continue to keep performance front of mind as always. With each new version they reduce dependencies, find new ways of doing things, or leverage new development standards.

Performance Optimization Tolerance

Not all themes work when heavily optimized for performance. With X and Pro, a good thing is that you can go all the way in and combine all of its assets, (CSS, JS), it will still work just perfectly. If you are minifying, Pro is already minified so just make sure to exclude its assets from that. Double-minification is never a good thing. Under HTTP/2, you may test if concatenation (combining assets) is even needed. More small parallel requests may be better than a fewer big ones. That will depend more on your plugins setup.

Also, I have tested WP Rocket’s lazy loading for images, and all image elements in the theme support it and work perfectly. There are no issues if Webp file formats are served instead of the original images as well.

All in all, an already lean and fast X and Pro theme doesn’t mind to be additionally optimized at all. No resistance there.

SEO friendliness

There is hardly any other theme I’d rely on when it comes to SEO. There are multiple reasons for that, including great architecture, speed and security. A good proof for that is that an Pro-based website is ranking many top financial keywords #1 in Croatian language, above all Credit card companies, banks and financial institutions. This is of course a result of my SEO strategy, but obviously Google had no objection about the theme. :)

There is one more strong reason for my claims. And the most important one: Themeco. I had several SEO related discussions with them on forums and one thing I can tell you is that the dev team is very interested in making sure the Theme is as SEO friendly as possible. They also possess a lot of knowledge in this area.

An example of SEO friendliness is the fact that all background images set on containers are ARIA hidden and set with a proper background-image CSS. This of course means that they won’t be indexed by Search engines. However, sometimes in design we need the advantage of background images, and still having the ability for them to be indexed on Google. Themeco has made a unique option to change the tag of the background image into an <img> element, and still simulating background image behavior by utilizing object-fit rules. That’s very neat.

One more thing would be the option to change the html tag of any Section, Row or Column. They can be <section> <div> <article> <aside> and many others. Even the <a> tag can be used, making containers instantly clickable.

Now, to illustrate how professional and thorough theme this is, imagine adding an <a> tag to make an entire column clickable. What people usually do when they make clickable columns? They often have boxes with a picture, some text and a button. What is a button? it is often an Anchor element (another <a> tag), or a <button> tag. Can we nest anchors in HTML? No! Do common folks know that? No way. This is a Site builder, why would people know HTML semantics to use it? However, Themeco has anticipated this: if a button ends up inside a clickable column, its anchor tag will automatically be replaced by a <span> tag. (it will of course still be clickable, because all elements in the column will inherit its clickability). I have simulated this scenario in two of the major competitor themes and guess what? They don’t care about unintentionally invalid semantics. :)

To continue on SEO friendliness, the theme has a Schema powered Breadcrumbs element as well as Ratings and Testimonial elements with Schema. Even the Accordion element can generate FAQ schema, because Accordions are perfect elements for displaying FAQs. There is also a Snippet addon that can be enabled, allowing setting up Structured data types per each post type. Add WAI-ARIA roles in all templates that allows full accessibility with an ability to add our own when needed, and the SEO picture is complete.

If you have a WooCommerce shop, then the important aspect of SEO is an ability to have content on Taxonomy pages where and how you want it, and to be able to design product pages in the most optimized way. You may have encountered themes that don’t even output Category descriptions, let alone giving you the opportunity to make your custom design. All this is a breeze with Pro.

Lastly, many themes have issues with SEO plugins that are unable to read the content and perform analysis. That’s because they use the shortcode storage system. Thanks to Pro’s pure HTML storage, all the content can be recognized and read.

Themeco Pro is possibly the most SEO friendly WordPress theme on the market.

Accessibility

Accessible content has always been important, but not always easy to achieve. With WAI-ARIA roles built into each and every template file, Pro ensures our site conforms to the latest standards set forth by the W3C.

In practice, this means that the main hurdle has been overcome. The rest of it is about making sure we design accessible content by considering contrast, Alt text, empty links etc. We can also use custom attributes on any element or even individual parts of the elements, and add custom aria labels to easily get 100% on the Pagespeed accessibility score.

When it comes to choosing an accessible WordPress theme, Pro from Themeco is an obvious choice. It is an ideal option for building complex and demanding government websites, for example.

External API – Display (loop) any external source, right inside Pro

What do we do if we want to display a weather widget, a social media feed, reviews, externals website RSS feeds, loop through documents, sheets, etc?

Well, 99% of “mortals” buy and install plugins. 1% of developers use complex knowledge to connect the website through an API, hook into external data and display it on the website.

If we look at pros and cons of installing plugins, the pros are the fact that it is relatively fast to do it. The con is that it costs money (usually a subscription), it opens security and performance week points, and the result usually doesn’t look the way we want it, so we end up adding tons of CSS to match the website’s design.

The pros and cons of coding are obvious: pros are that there is no cost other than investing time (which is a cost by itself), and it is kind of a native solution. It still has to be styled to match the website’s design. The cons are the fact that rarely anybody knows how to do it, plus it takes quite some time.

So how ’bout Pro solving all that, for both “mortals” and “developers?

Enter external API support.

Most sources have either free APIs, or they have generous 1000 or so request for free per month. That is more than enough for what we need.

Pro has a user-friendly interface where we can enter API details and list the parameters we are going to use. For example, an external post feed could have a title, image and an excerpt. We can use the Looper we already have designed for displaying our own posts, and simply change the looper source to the external API and that’s it!

During beta, a user called @raye built a quick weather app, completely using the native Cornerstone builder:

That’s nothing short of insane. Event the wind direction arrows work! Pro can layout anything to look anyhow thanks to responsive CSS Grid and Flexbox. With external API, the source of the data can come from anywhere, including a CSV file, an external website, RSS feed, spreadsheet etc. Plus we haven’t even scratched the surface of possibilities when it comes to OpenAI or other API integration.

External API documentation will tell us the parameters we need to use, so even if we have no clue what request types are, it doesn’t matter.

Pro can request attributes, JSON, GraphQL, Raw… It can return JSON, File, XML, CSV, Raw…
We can set cache time so we don’t go over the API limitations. For example, we can keep the requests within the 1000 free ones per month. It is still within a 1hr refresh rate.

External loopers are not only working in a traditional manner, displaying post feeds and fancy widgets; they are also working in Cornerstone charts! So building a complete backend analytics dashboard that combines internal data and statics with external data is a non-issue.

There are also some less expected loopers, such as the Breadcrumbs looper. I used this to conditionally replace the last breadcrumb item to make it non-clickable and differently styled, too improve the UX. Such things are super easy with Pro.

Imagine being a web agency that has a single builder that covers almost all front-end and backend plugins. Imagine having that as a starter website that has tons of various pre-made components ready to be instantly redesigned, to match the needs as well as the look and feel of the new client’s website?

That, my friend, is a million-dollar business.

Themeco says that being able to connect with ANY 3rd party API and bring that data directly into Cornerstone is more than just a new frontier, it’s a new paradigm. I fully agree with them.

Cornerstone Page Builder

The real power reveals itself once you fire-up Cornerstone. Cornerstone is a full front-end live Page builder integrated with the X and the Pro theme. In X, it needs to be installed as a plugin, while Pro users have it integrated into the theme. Themeco’s philosophy is that everything is a document, being it a page, post, header, footer, Archive or a component (we’ll talk about components later).

At the top of the builder we have tabs:

This means that we can have as many documents as we want and work on all of them at the same time. For example, we can have the homepage and the Header, like in the image above. If we are working on a header for example, we can load any page into the preview to see how it goes with it.

the Layout provides the structure based on basic building blocks:

• Sections
• Rows
• Columns
• DIVs
• CSS Grid Cells
• Components

Sections are the top building blocks. They accept Rows. Rows are Flexbox powered, so we can place Columns inside them in any order, size and reflowing rules. We can nest rows inside columns, which allows more complex layouts. We can also insert standalone DIV elements, allowing locally laying out other elements. But, that is just the beginning: we can turn-on Flexbox layout inside Columns and DIVs, activate the masonrly layout style, and if that is not enough we can use CSS Grid! We’ll talk about Components a bit later.

Now watch this: we can also move a Div way up under the Section and delete the Row and the Column. We could even bypass the section altogether and build the entire page on elements alone, should we choose so. For example, if we are building a website’s Hero section with a heading, text and a button, why would we place it inside a container that is inside a container which is inside a container? We can use the Div element, change its tag to <section>, turn on Flexbox on it and now we have all the elements inside a single container. The excess of containers is popularly called “divception”, and there is no such thing with Pro. Best practices still need to be followed, of course. One can end up using wrong elements for wrong purposes, increasing the DOM. I lazily used the section-Row-Column layout for the author box below and now it has a much greater depth that it should. I promise I will fix that one day. ;)

Pro is modular enough that its containers are not mutually dependent, and even not required. This is a feature you won’t find a lot with other page builders. This means we can control the number of DOM elements the way we want, if we want to take that route.

So the layout options are:

• Standard Layout
• Flexbox Layout
• CSS Grid layout
• Masonry Layout

When it comes to design, Cornerstone has 50 various elements plus 24 Dynamic elements and 29 WooCommerce element (if you have WC installed). It can also have unlimited number of custom pre-fabbed components built by the user. Many of these elements are multipurpose.

Some of them would be:

• Accordion with dynamic loop support and Schema
• Audio/Video
• Breadcrumbs with Schema
• Buttons with advanced interactions
• Flipping cards
• Comment forms, lists and paginations
• Buildable Dropdowns/Modals/Fly-ins
• Countdown
• Tables
• Counter
• Div Container
• Image galeries
• Headline with graphics and subheadings
• Icons/Image/Line
• Lists (Both static and looped)
• Maps with loopers to display multiple locations from any source
• Pre-fabbed buildable Megamenus
• Various navigations
• Quote
• Ratings with Schema
• Fully customizable and buildable sliders
• Various search options (Inline, modal, dropdown)
• Tabs with dynamic loop support
• Testimonials with Schema…

Some of the Dynamic elements are:

• Featured Image
• Posts element (List, Minimal, Titles, Magazine)
• Site Links, Tagline, Title, Author, Meta line, Excerpt…

Fantastic thing about Cornerstone is that everything is fully customizable. Also, the fact that many elements are multi-purpose, creates less clutter and removes bloat. For example, a Headline element can have any of the H tags, but it can also get a span tag. So if we turn the graphic on (image or icon), it becomes a simple text item with a graphic. A Button element has also various design options. It can be a clickable element that doesn’t look like a button at all. Like the three boxes below the Hero image on the Homepage of this website. Nobody could guess that those are actually buttons.

Accordions and Tabs can receive other elements as well and even better: they can dynamically loop. This means that we can easily activate ACF and create the FAQ post type with the Question/Answer fields. Then we can design FAQ accordions and display them at relevant places throughout the website, and even geneerate the FAQ Schema!

Maps can loop map markers from any source, so building a listing websites is a breeze.

Another interesting thing is that all content elements, like dropdowns, modals and fly-ins, are fully customizable and buildable as well. This means we can drop a simple dropdown menu element and build its content anyway we see fit, up to fully responsive megamenus.

Cornerstone’s Gradient builder is at a whole different level! We can apply gradients to surfaces, borders, text, and store them as reusable global colours. It outputs and accepts JSON, which is cool because gradients can be easily copy/pasted between elements, and even used as global colors.

If there is no element that works exactly the way we want, we can simply create a new component and equip it with exactly the controls we want. Controls can manipulate native settings, or they could hook into code such as custom CSS. Even standard elements can benefit from their custom counterparts, where we can remove all settings and leave only the ones the users would need. A heading could have an option to enter the text, to position it, and to choose the heading level (which would affect the heading size automatically). Everything else is not needed for the end user. We can go as far as setting and getting cookies natively with Cornerstone, further circumventing various plugins that would be required for things like gating content.

If you would like to try Cornerstone, Themeco has a Demo Playground where you can fire it up and try it right now!

CSAI – Cornerstone AI

CSAI comes with the MAX subscription model. This is part of Themeco’s ongoing efforts to keep the builder at the bleeding edge of technology. Right now, it can generate contextually-aware copy, images, speech, code, audio and video. Many models can be connected, such as OpenAI, Claude, Hugging Face and even various ways to locally host AI. Themeco is working on training its own model that will soon be able to generate layouts and advanced components!

CSS Grid – Making Impossible Layouts Possible

Pro is the first theme on the Market that has CSS Grid Layout integrated, with a native visual editor. It has a native draggable interface like no other.

The power of CSS Grid is the ability to arrange elements in two dimensions, (unlike one-dimensional Flexbox). By doing that, we can overlap elements if we like, and we can rearrange them by breakpoints. This allows layouts that are beyond the reach of most page-builders.

If that is not enough, we can add the fact that any of those CSS Grid containers can dynamically load a list of posts, products or basically any post types with fully custom design, dynamically pulling anything into text, buttons, images… Just freakin’ wow.

I have used it for example on this one-page website:

Sliders Reinvented

Designers and UX professionals know that sliders can be pretty awful for users. However, they can also be fantastic if used correctly. This is especially true when it comes to mobile devices. Instead of scrolling vertically, people prefer to scroll sideways to see related content.

Themeco didn’t just make a regular slider element and throw it into the theme. Oh no… What we have here are fundamental building blocks of a slider, such as the container, pagination and navigation. With that, we can design and arrange our sliders however we wish. If we want, we can let them loop through WooCommerce products or anything. They support carousels, click and/or drag, Flexbox, CSS Grid, any type of in/out transitions, ability to change the design of any slide position left/right from the active one… It would take an article like this one to cover all slider possibilities, so just take my word: there is nothing like this on the market. Period.

Combining Technologies

We just discussed a powerful CSS grid, as well as unique, fully buildable sliders. How awesome would it be to combine the two?

We can!

Since everything in Pro is made from the same components, we can combine them in an infinite number of ways. Here is an example of a responsive CSS Grid Slider:

Wanna check this slider out live? It is pretty impressive. Just go ahead, this CSS Grid slider link will open it in a new window. You can come back and continue reading after that.

The animations and the entire layout were built using only Pro features. Additionally, each of those images comes from the looper. That’s right! This image gallery can be dynamic, fed from a custom post type, ACF repeater, JSON feed, Google sheet, external website, whatever you like! Even more impressive is the fact that this is a nested looper. One is looping the slider, and the other is looping the CSS Grid gallery inside each. Check it out both on desktop and mobile, to see the power of responsive adaptation.

With Pro, we don’t need Grid, Slider, or Gallery plugins to build cool elements of the website. Even if we sacrificed performance and installed them, they still couldn’t do such complex and amazing stuff as native Themeco Pro can.

And btw, if after all this we still want Grid, Gallery or Slider plugins, we don’t have to buy them, as Essential Grid, Slider Revolution, Layer Slider and many more, all come free with Pro. :)

Data Tables

When Themeco picks a tech to make it native to Cornerstone, it not only makes it native, it completely reinvents it and takes the lead on the market – again and again.

This addon lets us search, sort, filter, and paginate our data, use AJAX to handle large datasets and so much other stuff that it would take half of this already long article to go through it. We can put ANY element into tables and design them however we like, we can turn WordPress into fast, searchable database. This for example means tons of various WooCommerce plugins going out of window. Again and again.

Dynamic Content and TWIG

Dynamic Content supports ACF fields, WordPress content or just about anything else. For example, the header of this blog post has the Article title, Published and Last modified dates, all dynamic. This makes creating Templates easy as a pie. Paired with the Components builder, it truly has lots of use cases.

There is also support for inner Dynamic Content. We can reference dynamic data within dynamic data for significantly extended functionality.

Another possible use is pulling the UTM or other parameters from the url. If visitors came from a certain marketing message, Pro can know that and personalize the content of the page for that specific case, increasing conversion rates and optimizing funnels in no-time.

If that’s not enough, Themeco has the dynamic content API documented and by using it, we can build anything. Check out the Estimated reading time widget at the top of this page: that’s not an external plugin. It’s Pro’s custom dynamic content. Did I wrote the function for it? Absolutely not. I just fired up my custom GPT trained on Pro’s dynamic content and it did it in seconds. A community member Josh Donnelly did a similar thing and even recorded a video of the process!

TWIG renderer (Dynamic content 2.0)

TWIG is fast, secure and flexible templating engine, included with Pro from version 6.5. If we peek into TWIG documentation, it may appear as something overwhelming. Themeco made sure to include it in the UI and well cover it with documentation and examples, so even a new user can be up and running with it pretty quickly.

Once adopted, TWIG opens a whole host of possibilities, such as advanced math, filtering and various functionalities that would normally require external plugins to be installed. In addition, this further improves Pro’s already sleek and optimized performance. I will redo all the speed test with it, so stay tuned for some new scores!

ACF Pro Integration

Pro from Themeco has a first-class integration with ACF and ACF Pro.

Pro can for example Loop the content of the the ACF Repeater field, or the Gallery field, or anything. It can access all ACF fields natively and directly: event the labels, along with the actual fields. I used to use the ACF Options page and throw all the global stuff there, such ac the company SVG logo, address, phone, working hours etc. Then I simply call them wherever I need them dynamically, and I can change them instantly from one place. I said “used to”, because Pro has Theme parameters as of the version 6.3, which means any global dynamic variable can sit right inside the theme, without the need of any third party plugins.

Pro theme comes with a premium Grid plugin bundled: The Grid. However, we actually don’t need it: literally any of its skins can be recreated with native Pro elements and interactions. Not only that, they can be semantically correct. For example they can be wrapped inside an <article> tag. Also, a WordPress loop can be turned on, on their parent container, so it can output any data from any post type. It can be a WooCommerce product or our own Custom Post type, paired with Advanced Custom Fields Pro, or anything else.

ACF is tempting for practically all WordPress web designers, but many get deterred by its complexity and the fact that it requires PHP and lots of coding. Pro lets us work on types of work only experienced developers would be able to do, and produce super fancy stuff, letting Pro handle all the heavy lifting on our behalf. At the same time, we do not pay for that luxury with a poorer performance. Think of the sheer power of this fact.

Components and Parameters

I could write a whole book about components and parameters. I will try to stay as short and concise as possible here.

Let’s start simple: imagine your website has a set of 5 different button designs. You are going to use them everywhere on the website, but you would like to control their design from a single place. The same is with the headings, standard section layouts, etc.

In Pro, we can create a new document and call it, for example, Buttons set. This will open a regular page in Cornerstone to build on. We can then design all those buttons in there and lay them out any way we want. We can put them into the real context of a simulated page, to see how well they play. We can then create another components set for typography and build an entire simulated document with all heading sizes. As a matter of fact, the entire design system is right inside the builder, without the need of an external tool like Figma, and it is live.

The trick is that we are going to make available as components only the buttons or only the headings from those documents. Everything else in the document will be ignored.

Now that we have our five buttons, we can decide which controls (parameters) we want to give to the users. We can go as simple as letting them change the text and the link, or as complex as allowing users to choose the colors, margins, paddings, effects, the icon… anything.

With that, we export those five buttons and they become custom elements in our library. The user can drop them on pages just like any other element and change anything we allowed to be changed.

The design control over those buttons is still from the Buttons set document. We can change the colors, sizes or anything else and it will update globally, all over the website! The titles, links or any content users changed will remain intact!

We could take an even more advanced path, and combine all the five buttons into the single button element, and let users choose the design from a dropdown.

Imagine also that you have a standard section layout that has an image on the left, and text and the button on the right. We can create it as a component in a document that holds all our sections, and allow users to drop other elements into its dropzone area. then we can instantly update its appearance on the entire website, should we choose so.

A design agency can have their own basic sets of everything and just import them into a new build, adjust what is needed to match the website’s appearance and they are good to go.

We can go as far as designing our own elements. For years I used to write feature requests on Themeco’s forums, including proposing new elements. Now I don’t have to do that anymore: Themeco gave us the control of the very core of the builder, so I can create a custom element of my choice, without knowing anything about the API!

Handing over a website to an inexperienced user is also easy, because we can control and simplify every aspect of their experience. Pro is massively powerful and it can be incredibly complex, but all that can be abstracted away easily for the end users.

As I said, this is a massive topic, but I simply must stop here and go on with other stuff in the review.

Components builder was influenced by Atomic Design System written by Brad Frost. Pro was designed in a way that it can follow the principle of Atoms, Molecules and other elements proposed by the book—only it has a GUI for it. No more coding.

Element Animation Effects

Any Container or Element can be animated based on page scroll or hover interactions. If used moderately, this can add fantastic visual appeal in the design. We even have Photoshop stuff such as blending modes, and for example, if we know how to sharpen images using blur, invert, contrast and overlay in PSD, we can actually perfectly sharpen them inside Cornerstone using the same technique! Additionally, one of the effects are CSS masks, allowing us to do all kinds of cool things natively, using simple controls. Photoshop in the browser in one of the things Themeco’s lead dev is super passionate about!

Lottie Animations Support

Pro is among just a few WordPress builders that support Lottie natively.

Lottie is the name for the vector graphics animation format. It is a small JSON-based files that can carry simple or complex animations. It can scale up and down without pixelation. We can create our own or edit and download premade ones from Lottie Files.

The native Lottie player in Pro supports SVG, Canvas or HTML animations. It has all the bells and whistles like the loop amount, animation delay, cutting frames, set animation speed. and others.

The triggering part is exciting: animations can start on entering viewport with an offset, on hover, scroll, click etc. The full Lottie packaged is right inside Pro and we love it.

Conditions

The conditions can be assigned to any Container, Element, Page, Header, etc. In other words, how they are shown can depend on whatever criteria are in place. A section can be hidden before a certain date, for example. An Image element can be active if a Featured image is assigned to a post, or only if a certain category is assigned. There are countless options, combinations, and use cases available. I can’t even list all the options available.

On top of that, Conditions are working with expressions. This means you can do things like [IF Comment count is > 10 THEN show THIS element, ELSE, show THAT element]. Conditions can be assigned to, well, practically anything. For example, I like to set the site-wide notice above the header, in case the website has to broadcast an important message. I place its content and link fields on the ACF Options page, and add a toggle to turn it on/off. Pro’s conditions are then displaying it when needed. It is important to note that there is no hidden content that still loads and taking up resources while not being used: they are not being loaded. There is no bloat.

Another way to use conditions is to assign Single and Archive layouts to certain URLs. This could be different languages or anything else. We could also include the random variable, set it up and effectively get an A/B testing system. This is just scratching the surfaces.

And finally, if by some chance there is no condition for our needs, Themeco has the Conditions API. Claude Code or any other AI can easily create exactly the one we need.

Cornerstone’s UI

The page builder’s experience is very similar to Photoshop. The Tools can be left, right on both sides or floating, depending on what works for us, and also there are tons of preferences to enable or disable various things. I like the fact that the custom CSS window can be resized and moved anywhere on the screen, and it switches between page and global CSS. Oh, and it supports linting. The same is with the text input fields. We can double-click and write anywhere, but we can also open a separate text window for that.

Speaking of the UI, lots of options can quickly become overwhelming and cluttered. For example, if you want to add a text-shadow to a headline, it has lots of setting to play with. But if you don’t need it, the convenient on/off switch will hide and disable the entire set of options related to it. That’s smart. There is even a copy/paste options between browser tabs. We can copy the state of an element in one tab, and paste it in another tab, without the need to save the template, reload, and then load the state.

Dev Console

This one is turned off by default. Many won’t touch it, especially the beginners. However, it is a God-mode radially available: this little draggable and resizable window has all the options of anything currently selected, along with a search bar to quickly find stuff. It isn’t as cool as the main Inspector, but it can provide fast workflow. Try it out. It even allows us to edit theme’s JSON files directly, altering anything directly. A powerful little thing. In Pro, we can assign keyboard shortcuts to many actions, and if you want it quickly accessible, simply assign a shortcut to call it.

Template Manager

With X and Pro, you can turn anything into a template. A whole page, a section, a column with all the elements, any element, anything. Once created, it becomes a Preset element. That means that you can simply drag & drop it anywhere and that’s it. You can also download templates and upload them into other websites. This is a simpler version of previously mentioned Components, because sometimes we just want to quickly save something to reuse later.

Some users are saving Page templates to re-use them when they create new pages. While that can certainly be done, there is a far better way to do it for this particular purpose: Page templates tend to be different than what we have on a newer page, making the need to constantly update the templates and never be sure if we are actually loading the latest one.

Instead, we can go to our documents, find the latest version of the page we want to build upon, and simply duplicate it, which means we can be sure we are using the latest version of the page. We are offered the same thing right at the creation on a new page. Page templates are more suitable to re-use on different websites or to move them between builders. For example from the Content builder to the Layout builder.

Alternatively, if we just want to quickly copy an element, section, or anything else from one page to another, we can simply copy/paste it between browser tabs. It works not only between multiple pages but even between different Pro websites! Plus we can export any document and just drag/drop it anywhere into Cornerstone builder on another website, which would instantly place it right into the Templates library.

What is being copied is just a JSON instruction of building the element. I could send it by email as text or post it on Social media, and someone could paste it and get the full element.

Another great thing is that we can have, for example 6 columns with icons, buttons and text, side by side. If we are not using a looper, we would have to design each separately to match their appearance. Instead, we can simply copy one of them, go one level up and paste styles only. All the rest will instantly look like the first one. We could also paste styles of a single element like buttons, leaving the rest of the column content intact. A massive time saver thanks to the fact that everything in Pro is JSON.

Responsive styling

We don’t need to write tons of custom CSS to change styles for different breakpoints. Here’s how it works:

Our first step is to generally decide whether we want a mobile-first or desktop-first design approach. Or anything in between. CSS styles can flow (cascade) in any direction we prefer. This is done by choosing our base breakpoint in the Theme options. Then we can decide exactly where our breakpoints are and how many will we use, up to 5 of them!

Secondly, We don’t need to change styles for each and every breakpoint. Let me explain in the following example.

Imagine we want a heading element to be big on desktop, but smaller on mobile and tablet devices. To accomplish this, we simply need to click the heading size label and open the following window:

Let’s call the largest breakpoint as LG (shown at the bottom of the picture) and move all the way to the XS breakpoint representing the smallest mobile device at 360px width.

As you can see, the LG and XL breakpoints both have values of 3em. When I changed the value to 2em on the MD breakpoint, the value cascaded down to SM and XS breakpoints automatically. Yellow means the value was overwritten, while blue means it was inherited downwards. The reason for this is because my base breakpoint was set to the LG breakpoint (indicated by the dot), so everything flows down. (And also up to the XL breakpoint, but we’ll get to that).

The arrows indicate which direction the styles are flowing. This is brilliant and it feels effortless and natural. The best UX I have ever seen in a Site builder, with massively reduced workflow.

Perhaps you are wondering why my base breakpoint isn’t set at the largest one, so it flows down from there. The answer is because I am on my laptop now. This is my natural breakpoint in the builder, and it is easier to work that way. If I was using a large monitor, I would change it. Any time we want, we can change the base breakpoint without affecting the design in any way. Themeco knows what they are doing. :)

Another brilliant thing is that we can set the preview to the largest breakpoint, or even beyond. I could set the preview of a large 24” monitor on my 15.6” laptop. The builder will automatically scale down everything and allow me to see how the design looks like on that size. Or I could preview it at 100% scale, but then I would have to scroll around.

We can also resize the preview window manually by dragging its side and preview any size in-between breakpoints. We also have a neat ruler that shows us the pixel value of the current width we are working on. All in all, the responsive UX is as good as it gets.

Post type Layout builder

Custom Archive Pages

The Layout builder allows designing Blog, WooCommerce or any other index page, as well as any kind of Single template like Blog posts or WooCommerce products.

The beauty of this tool is that it uses exactly the same Container elements and UI powered by Flexbox or even CSS grid, like the ones inside the Content builder.

Custom List of Posts on Pages

Let’s say we want to output three of the latest posts on our Homepage, or the list of Products currently on sale. Or any post types under any condition.

We can drag in various pre-fabbed recent posts elements, configure the post type and the conditions, and call it done. If we want full control, we can also redo those pre-fabbed elements the way we like them, because they are made of standard Pro Theme’s elements.

That being said, we can build our list manually from scratch. All we have to do is turn on the WordPress loop on the parent container (A Row for example) and have our Columns “Consume” the loop. Any element we drop in will display the proper Dynamic data. If we drop a Headline in such column, it will display the Product’s name. If we drop a Text element and set the dynamic content to “WooCommerce Price”, it will output the price for the product. That simple. That Powerful.

There are several ways to output Posts: Query builder is the easy one: configure the post type, filters and rules from the drop-down lists, and that’s it. It also accepts meta queries so we can filter loops by meta query fields. For those who want full control and advanced stuff, they can write any WP Query. As a matter of fact, I trained a custom GPT on Themeco Pro Queries and can write any custom query. It understands the inner workings of Pro and it will know when it can write a query, and when it has to write a custom function first. This sounds like scary stuff for non-developers, but it is super easy because AI does all of it for us.

For those who don’t want to create post types to output loops, they can even drop a JSON list directly to the page and the elements will loop through them! Finally, the entire thing can be fed from an external API, or even Google Sheets or uploaded CSVs!

Custom Single Templates

A Blog post, a WooCommerce product, or any custom post type: they can all be built by the Layout builder. We can assign the layout to anything, including the Custom 404 page. In other words, We can pick any page from WP template hierarchy and customize it with the page builder, and also set the proper inheritance flow.

Pro Theme WooCommerce Integration

The Layout builder allowes building a full custom WooCommerce Shop layout, as well as Taxonomies and Single product pages.

To be able to output all the WooCommerce elements, Themeco made a library of them. They can be easily drag & dropped anywhere on the page and configured.

When we say “Configured”, it means a bit more than what we might expect. For example, we can drop a “Cart Dropdown” element to the page and it is actually made of the basic dropdown element containing the Headline, the Mini cart and anything else we want to add to it. The design is not “locked”, so we can make it our own by adding stuff. For example a free shipping warning. There are also things like native Upsells, Crossells and related products loopers. In addition, since we have native Twig in Cornerstone, We can easily do various real-time calculations on the front-end, like comparing the cart total to minimum free shipping amount. (For this, we need to change the ‘return_type’ to ‘float’ in the Cart total, so it returns the raw number without the currency). Yet another example how we don’t need extra plugins in Pro, either vibe-coded or purchased.

Bundled Premium Plugins

X and Pro are coming with a great financial value in premium plugins. Those are:

• Convert Plus
• Essential Grid
• WP Cost Estimation & Payment Forms Builder
• Layer Slider
• Modern Events Calendar
• Slider Revolution
• Soliloquy
• Superfly Menus
• Ubermenu
• Woo Checkout Editor

With Pro Max subscription that packs a lot of value, there are also Themeco extensions like Cornerstone Charts, SiteDrive, CS Forms and Filters, CSAI etc. (More on these elsewhere in the article).

Header/Footer Builder

No, this is not another attempt to drag-drop some pre-made elements into preset positions. This is a whole content builder for the Header and the Footer. You can make it look whatever you like. There is hardly any known website that you couldn’t emulate with Pro.

Please note that you may have run into some reviews on the Internet (old but claiming that are latest from this year). They say that Pro Header has different UI and separate learning curve than with the Content builder. This was true long time ago. Both builders are Flexbox powered and utilize the same controls. We can use the same Sections and Rows, or we can use special containers called Bars that have some additional tricks in their sleeves, like being sticky, to create sticky headers.

Role Manager

Fear of client ruining the website by clicking what they shouldn’t? No problemos. All individual theme parts, individual elements or user settings can be assigned to specific user roles.

Undo/Redo

We don’t have to say anything more about this. It works like a charm.

Custom Attributes

Have you found a cool animation library that hooks into HTML with custom attributes? Would you like to apply it to the X/Pro elements? No problem. Add as many custom attributes to any element. Zoooom zoooom. (You most probably don’t need it, btw, because Pro has its own great animation controls). The use cases of custom attributes are wast. From adding custom ARIA-labels, to giving individual elements new properties. For example, we can create two arrow icons and have it control the slider, or whatever.

Themeco MAX – Extra power that justifies it value

Themeco made a premium learning platform with pretty powerful and advanced training that is accessible right inside the Pro builder. It consists of courses such as CSAI (Cornerstone AI, Modern Sliders (Building powerful sliders inside the theme), Gridorama (Building advanced CSS Grid solutions), Web Design Magic (Design system techniques), and Super Loopers (Utilizing loopers on the next level). All the courses are accompanied with templates that can be installed with a single click, right inside the builder.

In addition to the videos, MAX also includes a premium plugin called Cornerstone Charts, a powerful data visualization addon utilizing Cornerstone, SiteDrive – Cloud Library and file sharing system, Forms – Fully native and powerful forms and filtering system. It also comes with Personify, professionally built Websites for Coaches, Consultants and Personal Brands.

I went through the entire MAX training and it can tell you that it is definitely worth it. Most of the currently available training is carried out by Kory Wakefield, Themeco’s lead developer. Apart from being a truly exceptional developer, Kory is also a web design star with a deep understanding of UX and design systems. He is definitely the best person to show us the magic of what is possible and demonstrate some very advanced use cases. Examples would be adopting the Atomic design system right inside the builder, or creating a dynamic typography scale to keep consistency on the entire website. Switching from the Major Third to the Perfect Fourth or Golden Ratio can be done in a single click!

Cornerstone AI functionalities are coming later this year, and they will be part of MAX as well.

Cornerstone MCP server (Pro Extended)

this is not a product by Themeco, but it is worth mentioning.

Pro Extended Extends Pro Theme and Cornerstone page builder with an MCP Server, developer tools, and CLI commands, enabling AI agents to read, create, and manage Cornerstone layouts programmatically.

I’m already using it on some projects, inside my own Claude Code setup. It is very handy and powerful.

Price

When it comes to price, Themeco has a few options. They are all available on Themeco’s website directly.

While there are subscriptions with no MAX included, I won’t even list them because MAX is currently discounted to match their price. It makes perfect sense to go with MAX.

Pro Max single for one website is $99_/yr or $249/lifetime.

Pro Max Unlimited for unlimited websites is $299_/yr or $979/lifetime.

A simple math says that this is a huge deal to go with Max Pro unlimited for anyone who is planning to build more than 2 websites.

Any agency or freelancer should have this powerful weapon in their arsenal. Another thing to know is that whatever is purchased with a discount from Themeco, that discount stays for life. It is not like with hosting companies that sell discounts for the first year only.

Another thing we must not forget is that Font Awesome Pro is $99_/yr. Write off this cost as well, because FA6 is integrated into Pro for free, with SVG fonts support.

I am not a Themeco representative, so I can openly say this as well: if we count the new Themeco Forms (and Facets) in, we could argue that unlimited Gravity Forms license is $259 alone, and FacetWP is $249 (for 20 website). The insane value Themeco packs into the $249_/yr or $877/lifetime license is unmatched.

At WPU, we are in the process of phasing out both Gravity Forms and FacetWP from all existing projects, and Themeco Forms is the standard going forward.

Unlimited websites Pro MAX license is currently discounted and available for $249_/yr for life! It is well worth it if you are planning to build more than 2 websites.

APIs

We already mentioned the external API that hooks into any external source. Here are some more.

As a result of Pro’s low-level modular architecture, a lot of things can be built by combining the basic elements. With Components, we can natively build even more complex elements. But if you have any special requirements, Pro has a fully documented APIs. This allows developers to extend Pro and Cornerstone with custom functionalities.

That’s fantastic news for long-term planning. API is something most website owners probably won’t think about for a long time, and if one day they need it, there won’t be a panic-change of the theme: Pro has it and it is generally one of the most robust base technologies WordPress can offer. It can start small and then grow in whatever direction is necessary.

The apis are:

• External API (Hook into any external website, File, CSV, JSON, Sheets and build native solutions that completely remove most plugins)
• Looper API (Create a custom looper provider and its own controls)
• Element API (Create custom elements)
• Dynamic content API (Create custom dynamic content. For example, we can easily create a custom reading time widget just like the one at the top of this page, all in Cornerstone.)
• Stack API (Create whole predefined design stacks, minimal or complex)
• Templates API (A way to create and import .tco files
• And many more, such as Conditions API, Document API, Parameters API, Preferences API, Preview API, TWIG API, etc.

Those things do not stand in the way of regular users while the developers are thrilled with the openness of Pro and the possibilities offered by this performant and versatile framework.

Cornerstone Forms

The excuses to stay with the regular subscription vanished once Themeco added CS Forms. We all know the price of the licensees for the best Forms and Filtering plugins. And once we pay so much for them, we still need to handle separate systems and make them look and works seamlessly with the websites we build.

With forms, we have native control over all our Forms, Web Apps, Filters and Facets in one tool.

Go with Max, the math is simple.

Cornerstone Charts

Cornerstone Charts is a premium data visualization plugin that can be purchased standalone (Works with X, Pro, and Cornerstone Standalone), or getting it as part of the MAX subscription.

This amazing addon builds up upon Cornerstone’s data sources such as the loopers, dynamic data or anything else. If it is in the database—it can be visualized through bar charts, pie charts, line charts, radars, bubble, scatter etc.

It can also hook into Gravity forms custom formulas and display the calculations (and event better, into Themeco’s own Cornerstone forms), or display a dashboard for the logged-in users, or whatever. This is very powerful and a great additional selling point for MAX.

SiteDrive

Sitedrive is a plugin that manages cloud-based libraries in WordPress, and it is directly integrated into Pro with Max subscription. SiteDrive is working seamlessly in Pro, leveraging all of its features. We are talking about components or any other type of files managed on one website, synced to as many other websites as the Pro license covers (one, ten or unlimited websites). We were talking a lot about scaling Web design process, and this is just a cherry on the top of the cake.

A Web agency can keep the entire design system on the main website, and then sending whatever is needed to client sites under development or maintenance. Nice one, Themeco.

Support

From the day one, Themeco devoted lot of time, energy and love to provide support that is best in business. They go over and beyond, and they respond very quickly. Usually within a few hours and sometimes faster.

There was a short period when Themeco was restructuring the support system, and they came out with a huge update that radically changed things. It created a huge pressure on the (new) support team and the quality went a bit down. The theme was actually never unusable or something. But there were several influential individuals creating negative hype around it. Themeco did that bold move to transfer the theme far into the future, beyond the competition. That move paid off tenfold. So if you find traces of that by searching the historic content on the Internet, that’s it. And it is all long gone.

As I have said, the support is absolutely one of the best in the business. Up until recently it was unlimited, but that obviously cannot work forever, so now the direct support lasts for 12 months, and it can be paid for later. The Support Forum is open for everyone to see, but questions can be asked only by registered users with licenses.

The Community

There are a few Facebook pages dedicated to Themeco products, but the main one is called Pro Theme & X Theme Users. Most questions got answered literally in minutes, and there are many professional web designers and developers that gladly help to everybody. I am active on the daily basis there as well. :)

Security

If you are not subscribed to WPScan Vulnerability Database already, you should be. Go ahead and check the popular themes on the market. You will find out that most of them had security breaches. But not X. And not Pro. They have a spotless security record from the day one.

In May 2020, five popular page builders and one (most popular) theme was reported having serious vulnerabilities. After that, again in August 2020 this most popular WordPress theme had vulnerability issues, along with its Page builder. Security is a serious thing. A page builder that is probably the most popular one on the market has security breaches every 3.5 months on average since it was first introduced to the market!

In over a decade of existence, both X and Pro had zero security breaches!

The Long-term Sustainability

I have been using Themeco’s themes almost from their beginnings. One of the most important aspects of deciding to go with them at the time was the human factor. I felt the passion and devotion of Kyle Wakefield and his team. I knew those treats would lead to great things, and that they would provide long-term security. For me, that was enough. If you want to hear the Themeco story, you can watch this video. (50 min).

Notable Features

This article is an overview of the Theme and its functionalities, so I won’t bore you with too much content. Everything important has been said. Here is a list of what we have mentioned already, and a few more things:

• • Undo/Redo/Autosave
  • Global Colors (also can be applied to the WP Rich text editor)
  • Native AI
  • Native Forms and Filters
  • Editable breakpoints
  • Theme parameters (Like the ACF Options page, but native)
  • Color Picker
  • Global or Page-level CSS/JS
  • Font Manager
  • Template Manager
  • SiteDrive: Sync Libraries, design system and anything else between websites
  • Dark/Light Mode
  • Dynamic Content
  • TWIG renderer
  • Natively set and get cookies
  • 1st-class ACF Pro integration
  • Element Scroll, Hover effects & CSS Masks
  • Element Conditional logic
  • Element Condition expressions
  • WordPress Loop inside any container
  • Menu and User loopers
  • External API looper – display any website, doc, RSS feed, sheet… Anything.
  • Header & Footer Builder
  • Gradient builder
  • Full control over blog layouts, posts, and index archives
  • Unlimited Headers and Footers
  • Lots of Premium Plugins
  • Flexbox, Masonry layout and native CSS Grid
  • Components builder
  • Custom Attributes
  • Native Dropdowns, Modals and Fly-ins
  • QR Code buider
  • Powered by Ember and super-fast backend/frontend, PHP 8 compatible
  • Font Awesome Pro V7 with an ability to turn off unused weights. SVG or Webfont display, Duotone.
  • Design Cloud – Offsite repository of ready-made elements
  • Editable Keyboard shortcuts
  • Customizable UI
  • Code editor keys (theme key (Sublime, Vim, Emax) and custom themes, with dynamic content
    GraphQL syntax highlighting
  • Mobile-first or Desktop first workflow
  • Preview scaling
  • Full responsive styling
  • Element animations
  • Lottie animations support
  • Element status indicators (has CSS, Has Looper, Has Effect, etc)
  • Right-click contextual menu in the builder
  • Elements API for developers
  • Easily installable Child Theme
  • Extensive documentation
  • Ready Made Templates in the Design Cloud
  • Demo websites and demo content
  • And more

The Future

Themeco always has an exciting roadmap. They just completed the exciting 8.0 cycle and already working on the next one, including improving Cornerstone AI with its own model. As per usual, they are going to do it in a revolutionary way “giving you the keys to the car so you can drive wherever you want“.

This Texas-based company is always full of surprises. :)

The Verdict

I am obviously biased. But with a good reason. If there was a reason for me to leave Themeco in the last 11 years, I would do it. Instead, they have become an invaluable partner I can count on. They have provided me with an advanced piece of technology that works flawlessly and that doesn’t stay in between my imagination and the final product.

This technology cuts down the development time significantly. Unless you are in an organization with complex divisions and decision making, there is no need to build a mockup in XD, Figma or other Prototyping tools. Cornerstone builder works almost like those tools. The live prototype instantly becomes the final product. Surely it is one of the best WordPress themes on the market.

So there is really no other rating for it than this:

That’s it for now. I will get back to this X and Pro theme review to update it, whenever I feel that I should add more to it, and also when new theme updates will be available. See you soon!

Oh, right… The link to the Themeco’s Pro page: