Hi,

Am designing a new website and went to the theme extensions. Just 3 new themes since July 22 2009.

Any ideas why? Is the support base fading?

Thanks.

Hi Don - welcome to the forum.

This is an interesting issue that I have noticed as well. The odd thing is that the community is more active than ever, just not in making themes! I think the main reason that there aren't many themes is that the majority of sites made use a custom design - rather than using a theme.

Initially a large number of the themes were made by students during the Google Summer of Code but because it is so easy to make any HTML/CSS/JS combo into a SS site then making themes hasn't really been a priority.

Unfortunately it does have the effect of making the community look quiet, I guess that's why the Showcase has more items than themes.

DonR - you might stumble on a couple threads where I talk about this. Multiple reasons have caused this IMHO. One is the idea of a 'theme' is a little limiting in SS compared to say Wordpress. It can't contain any PHP or other functionality apart from html / css. I've talked to a couple people from the WP community who find this a bit of a turn off and they can't really design a site with widgets, sliders very easily.

Other thing is the community of SS devs seem to be professional, developer focused who use SS as a tool rather than a hobby blog engine. This is backed up by the fact that durning the weekend our traffic basically dies!

And I guess the third thing, is that SS doesn't really have the scale yet to attract the serious professional theme builders. Would love to see a serious contenter in the premium add ons for SS market (been a couple pop up) but frankly there just isn't much scale for those sort of things to really fly just yet.

Welcome to hear suggestions from people!

Hi Guys,

I think you hit the nail on the head there, all the sites I create are for use by companies and charities and they all want a design unique to them. I pretty much start my designs off with either blackcandy or simplestripe or my derivatives of them and then rip them to pieces to make the design I want, the benefit of the both of them is they get you a chunk of the way there with basic html and css. I wouldn't dream of giving one of my clients an off the shelf design/template that anyone else could have.

Mick

I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a couple of basic (more modern) SilverStripe themes (2 column, three column, etc...) alongside the not-so-basic-and-somewhat-intense blackcandy, that could easily be adapted, especially for 'budget' clients. In fact it wouldn't be very hard to adapt some of the existing templates out there, but of course there are the legal(?) issues to consider.

Think of well documented styles. Maybe even accompanied by an (optional) SiteConfig decorator that quickly lets you adapt some colors and a logo... Not much more - don't want the change the context of SilverStripe. But it might pull yet more people over the line...

Maybe when I'm bored on a weekend, I'll create a pure css theme and sacrifice it to the altar of the themes page. =D

Why not start a SilverStripe Theme Contest :-)

We should define some rules for it, for example:

Valid XHTML oder HTML5?
Should use a CSS framework like 960/Yaml/Blueprint
Should include also templates for the blog module
Should have a 3 level menu
Should include minimum 5 different content types (possible page layouts)
...

Just an idea ...

danzzz - Stay tuned' ;)