History of Bearsthemes and Give
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 lies in the way they attempt to extend the Give forms for their purpose. The theme creates its own templates for donation forms, extending Give in creative but ultimately disruptive ways.
The problems with the Alone theme
- Routing users to a hacked version of the plugin
- Silently deleting donations from the database on a schedule.
- Unresponsiveness to the Give development team’soffers 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 (discovered by the Give team around 2019), instead of routing new users to download the official Give 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 Give: shipping version 2.6.0 disguised as 3.6.0 (which at the time was not a real version number for perceivably the next few years) so that WordPress would not offer updates to the plugin. They did this presumably to prevent changes to the Give output that would break their customizations.
A side effect of spoofing the version number is that security patches, updates, and other necessary changes to Give 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 Give has no control or knowledge), there was no way to know how many hacked versions of the plugin were still out there.
This puts Give 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 Give are available, and the Give team has no way to alert them until they reach out.
The Give team alerted the Envato team (where Alone is sold) of the bundling of a hacked version of Give, and this functionality was changed, but not before much damage was done.
If you are using the Alone theme, be sure to review your Give version number. If it is higher than what you see on WordPress.org, then you need to uninstall it and instead install Give by navigating to “Plugins > Add New” in your WordPress admin area.
Silently deleting donations from the database on a schedule.
In 2025, the Give team discovered a function that ships with the Alone theme with the name alone_donations_cron_exec() that appears to be a cleanup script that they use for resetting sites to remove all donations and donors before a specific date, and to delete donations (but retain donors) after a specific date. The date hardcoded into the copy of the Alone theme that the Give team tested is January 1st, 2025. If this function is triggered (which it appears to be automatically triggered on a schedule by the theme itself), it essentially wipes your donation record rather indiscriminately.
This functionality has no place in a theme other than as a tool for developers on testing sites. The fact that it ships with a customer’s theme is concerning.
Being Unresponsive to Attempts to collaborate.
The Give 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 Give team with them so that outstanding issues and communication problems can be resolved.
Note: Nulled software comes with a price, and it isn’t one worth paying. Read more about Give Nulled here.
A Better Option: KadenceWP
There are several excellent options for individuals seeking a well-developed theme with a strong team behind it. Give recommends the KadenceWP theme as an alternative to the Alone theme. Kadence offers a variety of beautiful starter templates that make setting upyour nonprofit’s donation site online easier than ever. The KadenceWP Theme is developed and supported by the same parent company as Give, enabling streamlined support if and when issues arise. In fact, the Give 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.
