I’ve recently got involved in theme development with WordPress.
When somebody downloads my theme, it would come without any additional plug-ins, like a bare-bones version. If those plug-ins contribute to the theme this would be excluded from the user until those plug-ins are downloaded.
It’s true. But a theme is a theme and plugin is a plugin. So if you develop a theme which involves any plugin you just need to inform about that fact… I think there’s no other option…
The sliders and any animation could quite easily be hard coded in. However, would this be good enough? How would those slider’s work in WordPress, with custom fields?
To you understand the problem. I’ve seen some theme’s which have an auto-complete button which kind of fills out all the information in. Those kind of themes are much easier to work with because you know where everything goes.
I have no idea how the auto-complete is achieved, but it seams to be common amongst Templatic themes.