Here at NiceThemes we understand that sometimes the very concepts of theme support and theme customizations may be a little confusing, since the line that separates one from the other is often very thin.

Although we’re happy and we’ll do our best to help you with theme-specific issues, we can’t help with customizations that go beyond the options we offer inside our themes. That’s why we wrote this article, which intends to provide information about how you can tell and understand the differences between a support issue and a customization request.

Theme Support

Support issues are related to the functionality of your theme. If the theme does not work as expected from how we advertise it, that’s a support issue, and we will give you support for it.

So how can you recognize a support issue when you see it? The following tips can help you with that:

• Does your theme look broken? Do you see any PHP warning or error messages, but the theme still works somehow? If you’ve already deactivated all your plugins and keep seeing those messages, then feel free to create a new support ticket.
• Does your theme not look as expected? Have you followed all the steps we provided to you in order to set up the theme, including our install videos and help documents? If you did all of that, then you may have a support issue and should contact us.
• You can’t use the theme at all? Have you deactivated all of your plugins and it still doesn’t work? Please contact us right away.

Theme Customization

Theme customization doesn’t have to do with theme issues, since it’s not related to the the actual functionality of a theme. Instead, it’s about modifications you may want to perform on how the theme works or how it looks beyond the scope of the styles and functionality that it offers.

• If you need to change how an element looks or works outside of the settings in Theme Options, then you have a customization issue.
• If you need to add a new element or remove an existent one, and there’s not a setting to do it in Theme Options, that’s another customization issue.

Unfortunately, we can’t help with this kind of issues in our support forums, and neither we offer paid theme customization services.

Third Party Plugins

Sometimes we recommend some third party plugins to be installed to improve what you can get from the theme, and we guarantee that the theme will work and look as expected with those plugins. However, we can’t guarantee the same for all the plugins in the WordPress universe.

Themes and plugins that follow WordPress’ best-practices should work seamlessly with each other, but sometimes a poorly coded plugin ends up being installed and making a theme look broken. We work hard to make our themes compatible with all major plugins, but since they’re being updated constantly, we don’t have a way to guarantee a 100% compatibility for all of them all the time.

That’s why we don’t consider plugin compatibility problems to be support issues. However, we will really appreciate if you notify us about this kind of troubles in case you find any, so we can take them into account for improvements in future versions of our products.

General Questions About WordPress

We’ve all been there, being newbies at working with WordPress and websites in general. We struggled lots of times and for long hours trying to solve problems and looking for answers to our questions all over the internet.

Sadly, we can’t answer general questions about WordPress in our support forums, since they are meant for questions about our products only. There’s a lot of other websites, forums and resources dedicated to general issues where you can find a lot of answers to practically any question you have. Some great examples are the official WordPress Support Forums, StackOverflow and WordPress Developers.