Thread

Hey, I made a theme!

It’s not clear yet whether there is a market for this, but I’ve been wanting to make an installable theme for a while. At the very least, I have a default installation to use on new projects.

As I make more of these, I may move them to a separate site. For now, it is located at my company site. The marketing page needs work, but it’s a start.

I’m interested to see what people think. Let me know if you have any feedback.

Demo site: http://magnetic.greeninteractive.com/
Theme page: http://greeninteractive.com/ee-themes/

Thanks,
Doug

Thats great. I would love to see more themes like this out there.

Thanks Michael! I hope to make some more as time allows.

Hey Doug,

I’m interested to see what people think. Let me know if you have any feedback.

Looks like good work. Installable themes aren’t the easiest thing to whip out from what I understand.

It’s not clear yet whether there is a market for this…

Based on the past attempts at installable themes for EE I would lean toward the idea that the market for this is minimal at this point. I’m curious what led to your desire to have an installable theme.

Does it setup channels, fields etc upon installation?

Hi Erik,

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, it installs channels, fields, categories, snippets, variables, etc. I’ll need to add some documentation to detail the specifics. Overall, creating it wasn’t too bad. Planning and figuring out the installation files was the tricky part.

I agree that the market is probably minimal at this point. But I do think it would be nice to have some themes available for an initial installation. I liked the templates that were installed with EE 1. They were useful as a starting point at least. I don’t find the EE 2 Agile theme that useful. I used it to pick apart the installation files, but the way the files are constructed are very different from how I would do it, and therefore not really useful to me.

I’m interested in making themes in general. I think EE could benefit from some basic themes to start with. I know that if there were more available, I would probably use them for certain projects. I’d like to make a minimal installation theme, available for free. This would generate a basic setup with a content channel or two, a few fields, and some basic CSS. That’s probably what I will work on next. I also may make some for other platforms that are more amenable to theming.

Sounds good, Doug.

Out of curiosity have you seen these: http://themeforest.net/category/cms-themes/expressionengine

Yes, I am familiar with those themes, and know that they were once at WooThemes. I was sorry to see Woo drop EE support, but I can understand wanting to focus on their core software, WordPress.

I’d be interested to see how you went about creating your installation files.

Hi Jeremy, I’ll have to work on some details when I’m able to. I used the Agile preferences file as a starting point, and also looked at the Bueno theme, which was a free EE theme at one point from WooThemes. And Marcus Neto has some information on creating installable templates, which was helpful (http://eetemplates.com/). The data itself came from a SQL data export from phpMyAdmin.