History of Bearsthemes and GiveWP

The Alone theme by Bearthemes has been among the most popular search results for “WordPress Charity Theme” for many years, and lives at the top of ThemeForest’s lists for anything related to nonprofits. That’s led to many thousands of purchases for them. 

The problem is the way in which they attempt to extend the GiveWP forms for their purpose. The theme creates their own templates for donation forms, extending GiveWP in creative but ultimately disruptive ways. 

The problems with the Alone theme

1. Routing users to hacked version of the plugin
2. Unresponsiveness to GIveWP development team offers to help

Routing users to a hacked version of the plugin

The Alone theme uses the WordPress “required plugin” functionality (baked into WordPress theming itself) that requires downloading plugins when you first install the theme. For years, instead of routing new users to download the official GiveWP plugin from WordPress.org it was routing them to download a hacked version of the plugin that they hosted on their own servers. 

The hacked version of the plugin spoofed the version number of GiveWP: shipping version 2.6.0 disguised as 3.6.0 (which even to this day is not a real version number) so that WordPress would not offer updates to the plugin. They did this presumably to prevent changes to the GiveWP output that would break their customizations.

A side effect of spoofing the version number is that security patches, updates, and other necessary changes to GiveWP have not been offered to any organization still running that hacked version. Because of how WordPress works (it’s distributed software installed on servers where GiveWP has no control or knowledge), there’s no way to know how many hacked versions of the plugin are still out there. 

This puts GiveWP users at risk of website hacks and a myriad of complications with plugin conflicts. Worst of all, users have no idea that security and functionality updates to GiveWP are available, and the GiveWP team has no way to alert them until they reach out. 

The GiveWP team alerted the Envato team (where Alone is sold) of the bundling of a hacked version of GiveWP, and it has since been changed, but not before much damage was done.

If you are using the Alone theme, be sure to review your GiveWP version number. If it is higher than what you see on WordPress.org, then you need to uninstall it and instead install GiveWP by navigating to “Plugins > Add New” in your WordPress admin area.

Being Unresponsive to Attempts to collaborate. 

The GiveWP team has always been open to collaboration with any third-party developer looking to extend the product, and has reached out several times to the developers of the Alone theme to offer premium add-ons and even access to our private GitHub repositories to be able to anticipate changes before they go live. Those attempts were never responded to. 

That outreach is ongoing to the theme authors and continues to be ignored. If you have any contact with them, please feel free to connect the GiveWP team with them so that outstanding issues and communication problems can be resolved.

A Better Option: KadenceWP

There are a number of great options for someone looking for a well developed theme with a great team behind it. GiveWP recommends the KadenceWP theme as an alternative to the Alone theme. Kadence offers a number of beautiful starter templates that make getting your nonprofit’s donation site online easier than ever.  The KadenceWP Theme is developed and supported by the same parent company as GiveWP, enabling streamlined support if and when issues arise. In fact, the GiveWP and Kadence teams often work closely together to create solutions that make fast and accessible WordPress development for nonprofits and donation sites easier than ever. 

The Kadence theme, coupled with the Kadence Blocks plugin, gives website owners easy to use no-code methods of creating stunningly beautiful and effective websites that engage audiences. With built-in wireframes, design libraries, and starter templates to help you get started, Kadence provides easy to use block-based design tools that give you the ultimate in design control and flexibility. Consistently rated one of the best themes and block plugins available, Kadence has a strong 5-star rating on the WordPress repository, with numerous users noting that it is the best theme they’ve ever used. Page speed scores and accessibility audits both give sites developed with Kadence exceptional scores. Reviewers consistently rave about the above-and-beyond support received by customers and users alike. 

Kadence is one of the fastest growing themes available, for good reason.