Hey there! Great theme that's going on here. I run a podcast site, and I'm looking into the viability of converting my current site to this theme within the next couple months for a visual overhaul. I like to do that every couple years. Anyway, I thought I would mention a couple thoughts I've had and problems I've come across here, with hopes of maybe getting some solutions thought out while I work. I appreciate all the work, and the time spent reading these forums.

1> My first big issue deals with the site handling a specific plugin. I'm not sure how the theme creator handles which plugins he supports. However, the plugin I use for podcast is rather popular amongst podcasters. Blubrry Powerpress is pretty much the best solution we have. It's well developed, and for the most part, it works out of the box with just about every theme out there. Including this one. However, it has some issues with something going on in the theme, and I'd like to see why that is.

Notably, the plugin can include an MP3 player in the post. It can even include it in the excerpt so that I can have the player available on the first page on the website. The problem is that it doesn't work uniformly in Arras Theme. If the player is in the excerpt for Featured Post #1 (Node Based), it works well. But if that same episode shows up in Quick Preview based section, you see a garbled up mess of code, rather than the player itself.

I'm including a screenshot to show exactly what I'm talking about. Notice how the Node Based display handles it just fine, but the Quick PReview Based display just displays the code.

Not sure what is causing that, but it's a bit of an issue. Secondly, though not nearly as big of an issue. Powerpress out of the box doesn't actually work with the theme at all. There is an option in the "Appearance" tab for Powerpress that says "Having theme issues?" and when you set that to "Yes, please try to fix" the plugin starts working. So I'm not sure what it is that it's doing to fix the problem, but the good thing is that it is fixing it. As such, there is nothing technically needed here, but I thought I would mention it, in case it ends up being the root of the first problem, or in case someone wants to investigate that.

2> The second suggestion I have is that I think the theme needs more control over the repetition of posts. Currently, the only option is "Check this to prevent duplicate posts from displaying within the slideshow and the featured posts". Granted, that's a really good start. But I actually don't mind that the slideshow duplicates posts. I just want to be able to control which of the other categories repeats previous posts.

For instance, in the above screenshot, you will notice that the Second featured posts category has "Book of the Month" as the title. Every month, the site has a Comic Book that we choose as the book of the month from our sponsor. Well, if I click  avoid duplicate posts option, then when the new post is made, it will show up in the slideshow, but not the Book of the Month section. But if I don't click it, it shows up in my Slideshow, my Book of the Month section, AND my News Posts section (Which I have changed from a per line display to a Quick Preview. So basically within like 2 pages of scrolling, you would see the post 3 times. That's a bit excessive.

What I would like to see, is a way to exclude specific categories instead of just including them. You do have the option to include everything BUT the category you want already. But from the playing around with things, it looks like sometimes (and not always), those categories include child categories. Which will pick up some posts I don't want. But if there was a way to specifically exclude a category per section, that would fix the problem in my case.

I hope that made sense.

3> I know I've seen similar suggestions around here, and this may very well be something I could code myself in a child theme. But I'm not sure how complicated it would be, since I'm only a low level coder at best and I've never messed around with child themes. I love the thumbnails, but with Podcasting multiple shows, I use the same art on every post in a certain category. On my previous theme, this meant mucking around with the theme code every time we add a new show. That also meant that I was stuck with that version of the theme, unless I wanted to recode is every time. Again, this might be something I can do with Child Themes, I'm not sure how well that lets you replace existing code. But, it would be nice if I could choose an image for specific categories. And then choose whether that overrides any images it has in the post, or if the images in the post override the category image.

Having something in the admin panel to say, "Pick a category, and add an image URL to make that your thumbnail for the category" would be a huge help.

4> It'd be nice if when viewing a specific category, it also displayed the RSS feed for that particular category.

Sorry for being so winded. I always have such bizarre problems, that it feels I need to write a book to explain them correctly. To see what we are are currently using for our site, check out http://www.geekshow.us - That should give you a good idea of where I'm trying to get to. To see what I'm fiddling around with now when it comes to this theme, that's at http://www.geekshow.us/newdev - Obviously, that's a work in progress and may change frequently.

Any help? Yep,it's much appreciated.