Briny

The override layer, not the page builder, is the unusual part

AncoraThemes describes Briny as having a system of inheritance and override options that sets individual parameters for different sections of your site and for supported plugins. That sentence is easy to skim past, but it names the one mechanism here that is not standard theme furniture.

Inheritance means there is a base value somewhere — a font, a colour, a heading treatment — and overrides let a specific section or plugin area depart from it without you rebuilding the whole site's styling. It is how a shop area can read differently from course pages, or how a landing page can carry its own typography while the rest of the site stays consistent.

The vendor backs this with 750+ Customizer options, custom post types, custom shortcodes and widget sets, all sitting under a custom theme options panel. Volume like that is only workable if the override system behaves, because otherwise every change becomes a hunt through a very long settings list.

What the theme ships as dive-school content

The vendor's feature list describes premade diving products, services and instructors, plus contact forms, a gallery with an Instagram feed, and online appointments booking. For a dive centre, that trio — courses, services, staff — is close to the whole site architecture, so having post types and layouts for them saves the structural work of designing three content models from scratch.

Briny is also positioned beyond diving: the vendor says it can suit a sea adventure agency offering snorkelling, surfing or hiking, and the changelog shows homepages added later for a private beach and bar, a watersports centre and a water park. Treat those as alternative starting points rather than proof that every layout maps onto your business.

Editing happens in Elementor, and the vendor states that headers and footers are also built there rather than locked into theme options. Elementor appears again in the compatibility attributes recorded on 4 November 2026. Gutenberg Optimized is recorded as No, which speaks to block-editor styling support, not to whether the block editor works on your install.

Bookings moved from Booked to QuickCal in the changelog

Online booking is a headline item, and the version history is more informative here than the feature list. The 19 October 2023 release (1.6.0) added QuickCal compatibility. The 23 February 2024 release (1.7.0) added the QuickCal plugin and removed the Booked Appointments plugin. The plugin compatibility list in the description still names Booked — a leftover that contradicts the changelog.

If booking is central to your project, resolve which mechanism the build you hold actually supports before you design the flow for lesson dates, course sessions or equipment pickups. Nothing in the listing states that a booking plugin is bundled, and plugin removal entries only describe what changed inside the theme folder.

The changelog also records boat booking functionality added in version 1.3.0 (January 2021), so operators selling trips as well as training were catered to at some point in the theme's development. Whether that survives in a current demo is something the changelog cannot tell you.

A store for kit or for rentals

WooCommerce is listed among compatible plugins, and the vendor frames the shop in two directions: selling scuba diving equipment, or running a rental service. The recorded attributes name WooCommerce 6.x, 7.x and 8.x as supported ranges. Those are declared versions, not a tested matrix covering every combination with your other plugins.

The distinction matters in how you model products. Selling gear means stock, shipping and variations. Rentals usually mean dates, deposits and availability — and the theme's own description does not detail rental-specific product handling, so expect to shape that in WooCommerce itself.

Media is treated as a selling point rather than decoration: a gallery, an Instagram feed, and sliders built with Slider Revolution and Swiper, described as included. Two caveats come straight from the vendor. Images in the live preview are copyrighted to their owners and are not part of the template. And the Slider Revolution Distortion Effect add-on is not in the theme package, needing a separate Slider Revolution licence.

RTL support is a layout change, not a text flip

The catalog title carries a "+ RTL" suffix, and the changelog dates RTL to version 1.2.1 in July 2020. WPML also appears in the compatibility list, so the theme is written for multilingual and right-to-left sites.

For a centre serving Arabic- or Hebrew-speaking divers — Red Sea operations being the obvious case — the practical work goes beyond switching text direction. Navigation mirrors, slider captions flip sides, and layouts built as left-image right-text need checking in reverse. Because Briny puts sliders and grids on its front pages, those are the components to inspect first.

WPML in that list says the theme is declared compatible with the translation plugin. It does not say how much of the demo content is translated, nor how course and product copy behaves across languages. Plan the multilingual structure as its own task.

Version records that disagree, and what that means for you

The marketplace metadata lists 1.6.0 as the latest version, while the vendor's changelog runs to 1.7.10 dated 12 October 2026. Neither figure describes the copy you end up running, so the version shown inside WordPress is the only reliable answer once installed.

The changelog itself reads as maintenance with occasional substance: repeated trx_addons updates inside the theme folder, WordPress compatibility claims through 7.0, and two security entries — a ThemeREX Addons vulnerability fixed in 1.2.0 (April 2020) and a potential LFI vulnerability during pagination fixed in 1.7.5 (December 2025). Those dates tell you the theme has been patched; they do not tell you what state an old copy is in.

Beyond that, the listed files are PHP, CSS and JavaScript, documentation is described as well documented, and the declared WordPress range runs from 4.9.x up to 7.0.x. All vendor claims rather than results of independent testing. The vendor is AncoraThemes; the marketplace category is travel and retail, which matches a theme built for businesses that both teach and sell.

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