Pagebuilder Theme Pros and Cons

While developing custom theme in portal 7 most of the people choose either the Portal Theme (standard) and Pagebuilder theme and we realized the following are pros and cons of page builder theme

Pros

1. You can create a page with a single click by using the Page Builder theme , from the “actions” link at top
2. Use the Customize button to add content or change the style and layout of the current page
3. WYSIWYG-style page editing tools
4. Pagebuilder Theme supports tagging and rating by default.
5. You can integrate the portlets with iwidgets like website displayer ..etc

Cons

1. The Page Builder theme does not use side navigation by default . But we can write our own ofcourse.
2. The “Show layout tools/hide layout tools” will not be shown in pages using the default Page Builder Theme.  In order to utilize the layout tools, users should switch the theme of the page to the Portal Theme. 
3. “Edit page layout” portlet structure is different from what end user sees because page layout is depends on the static layout HTML files attached as page metadata.
4. You can’t create the layout containers inside the another layout container.
5. The Page Builder theme does not support the portal color palette for themes.
6. Uses lot javascript code (DOJO widgets)
7. Troubleshooting is pain.
8. Need theme developer with lot of DOJO and javascript knowledge to edit any of the existing widgets.
9. Can’t find complete documentation, lot of hidden things like TLD’s, widgets …etc

To create custom page builder theme you need to touch multiple places like need EAR or WAR for the dynamic components , webDAV for storing the static or layout files. This is has both advantage and disadvantage.