The future of SMF themes - free or paid?

[bloc]

Over the recent years theres been a shift in the theme-making scene for SMF( I can say this because I've been here since 2004, making themes as long as that too). While free themes still are being made around here of course, the trend is going towards more and more paid themes. As one myself that offered premium themes I just recently found out that I wasn't really interested in it anymore, that it killed the creative flow for me and made me chase "what theme will bring most customers". Well, I didn't get into theme-making for SMF just for that - the free and creative community was what attracted me in the first place - and I suspect that a lot of you feel the same way.

After all, we are using a free script, right? Something that is born and nurtured by individuals that do it for free.

Don't get me wrong, I have no ill feelings against those that offer paid themes(or paid mods for that matter), but i do wonder if the future of SMF themes will be a paid alternative only. Let me put it this way: if highly skilled coders can create free contributions to a free script - why can't skilled designers to the same to free themes?

I hope it won't be a paid alternative only. I hope the future will be a free one, or at least overwhelming free. And I hope that all creative souls out there also see it, because thats is the only way SMF will stay a good alternative to all the paid ones, Vbulletin, Zenforo, IPboard etc. Having a quality script AND free quality themes/mods.

I'll do my bit and follow the dream. Hope you do to.

[Illori]

i surely hope that there are free custom well coded themes in the future, or we will have nothing worthwhile to pick from and the showcase will be very bland to look at.

I know until recently all the themes i picked for my forums were from your free collection, and i still use only free themes.

[Antes]

I have no comment just "+1"

[kat]

Excellent post, Bloc.

Personally, I'll be sticking with the freebies.

Why?

Well, SMF is free. We want people to have the best that we can offer.

What our members must realise, surely, is that the last thing that we're doing it for, is to make a fast buck.

So, I believe that they realise that SMF is as good as we can make it, for no other reason than "We want to".

My own belief is that I'd rather support the guys that do things for free, to give them the "feelgood" factor and, hopefully, encourage them to do more.

[mashby]

Well, it certainly would be a nice complement to have themes be free to match the philosophy of SMF, but that obviously cannot be dictated. It seems that the majority of themes are still free (all of the ones available here on SMF are anyway). And even the paid ones are free if you know how and where to find them (I don't condone doing that though). If you can get something for free over paying for it, I'd think free will win every time. It's more a matter of the theme author's motivation. Are you making themes to delight your users or making themes to make some money (or both)? I don't see an issue with either approach so long as the approach satisfies the theme author.

But seriously, while free is better, it cannot be the realistic path for every theme author.

[Antechinus]

Personally I'm not into offering "premium themes" myself. The amount of money most guys seem to make out of them isn't that great, and there's the constant hassle of trying to track down ripped copies, and of what to do about them when you discover them, and of deciding whether or not to support someone who may have ripped a copy of someone eles'e preimium theme. Frankly, the whole "premium theme" debacle is more trouble than it's worth IMO and I simply cannot be bothered with it.

Now if someone directly commissions me to create a theme just for their site then I'll charge for that, and I wont be shy about naming whatever price I think it appropriate. Once it's done and dusted it's their's to do with as they wish. If they want to put it up for free download that's their business. If someone else rips it that's not my problem. That is a clean cut deal with no BS involved, and IMO that's the only sort of paid theming job that is worth having.

Also, at the risk of offending some people, I have to say that (again, IMO) a lot of so-called premium themes aren't that remarkable in terms of coding and graphics when you compare them to the best of the free themes.

Basically, I just want to make themes that I enjoy looking at and using. I'm happy to do that for free, when I have the time and the inspiration. I'll do them to the best of my ability regardless of whether they are paid or free, just because if I don't the results will piss me off.

[ARG01]

The only time that I charge a fee is when someone makes an offer to pay for a specific design. If they just need a few simple things done I normally will do it for free if I have the time. I own and operate two different businesses so my free time, especially during the warmer months is usually very slim. When I do find free time away from work and family I like to dabble with variations of other themes merely for display purposes on a site used for examples, mainly of my graphic work, not much coding. I have found that many would rather use their current theme and just give it a new appearance. This comes in handy when they don't want to mess with manually editing mods that they may currently be using. If someone sees a variation that they like on my example site, I have no issues sending them a download link, free of charge.
No matter how hard I try, I have never been able to package a theme correctly so it will install by the theme manager so that is the main reason that I shy away from creating my own themes, free or not.
And lets face it, too many frown on Curve variations so I stopped designing those.

[JBlaze]

I've already gone and given up in the "premium script/whatever" area. It's just too much of a pain to manage, and ends up taking up more time than the actual work to create it.

[Antechinus]

And lets face it, too many frown on Curve variations so I stopped designing those.

The problem with Curve variations is not that Curve variations as such are necessarily evil, but that there are too many mediocre ones. The Theme Site is full of the things and that gets rather boring. Now I understand why people like making them. The dead basic ones are comparatively quick and easy to do (just throw a filter on main_block.png and change some link colours) and if you're a beginner then that is going to be appealing.

Opening a board index screenshot in Photoshop and trying varous filters on it can get you some good ideas, but if you really want a good result it's not enough to just churn out a stack of them. You have to pick out the combinations that really rock and throw the rest away, and you have to spend the time detailing the selected ones up so they work to best effect. This is why we went to the trouble of supplying PSD's for Curve: we wanted people to have the ability to put together variations that were really nice. The resource is available and is meant to be used.

* Antechinus reminds himself that he did mean to make them in .xcf format for GIMP enthusiasts too..........................

I'm currently curious as to how far I can push Curve just by changing css and images. There's a lot more potential there than most people realise, although ultimately you do have to put up with some restrictions on layout.

TBH I really love hacking templates to bits and putting them back together to get new layouts I like better than default, but that does make mod installation more difficult for some people (and requires fairly solid knowledge of css and markup) so there is definitely a place for good "Curve variations".

[ARG01]

I'm currently curious as to how far I can push Curve just by changing css and images. There's a lot more potential there than most people realise, although ultimately you do have to put up with some restrictions on layout.

TBH I really love hacking templates to bits and putting them back together to get new layouts I like better than default, but that does make mod installation more difficult for some people (and requires fairly solid knowledge of css and markup) so there is definitely a place for good "Curve variations".

I am the same way. My next, personal venture is to hack the crap out of Curve beginning with eliminating the main_block.png and menu_gfx.png. Also going to rid myself of the dreaded

Koodi [Valitse] Laajenna

padding-left: 9px;
that seems to be nemesis of many graphic designers. I just need to find a way to make portals work properly without it.

And of course, the theme will be offered for free.

[Mick.]

I will never make a paid mod or theme but I do support those who have.

[bloc]

Well, it certainly would be a nice complement to have themes be free to match the philosophy of SMF, but that obviously cannot be dictated. It seems that the majority of themes are still free (all of the ones available here on SMF are anyway). And even the paid ones are free if you know how and where to find them (I don't condone doing that though). If you can get something for free over paying for it, I'd think free will win every time. It's more a matter of the theme author's motivation. Are you making themes to delight your users or making themes to make some money (or both)? I don't see an issue with either approach so long as the approach satisfies the theme author.

But seriously, while free is better, it cannot be the realistic path for every theme author.

No, thats true. But as Antech mentions - is your good efforts really good enough to validate charging for it? IMO its not always, I would personally only buy from one theme provider currently, and far from everything offered here either.

Which leads back to the free/paid question again. No-one expects you to sit and make quality work without getting something back for your time, but not everyone really need that rerutn thing in form of money. I am not rich lol - but I am not so concerned about giving/doing things without anything in return either. Thats what "open source" was formed from, people that have that and think that. There are enough already of people that wants money for services of varying quality.

The only time that I charge a fee is when someone makes an offer to pay for a specific design. If they just need a few simple things done I normally will do it for free if I have the time. I own and operate two different businesses so my free time, especially during the warmer months is usually very slim. When I do find free time away from work and family I like to dabble with variations of other themes merely for display purposes on a site used for examples, mainly of my graphic work, not much coding. I have found that many would rather use their current theme and just give it a new appearance. This comes in handy when they don't want to mess with manually editing mods that they may currently be using. If someone sees a variation that they like on my example site, I have no issues sending them a download link, free of charge.
No matter how hard I try, I have never been able to package a theme correctly so it will install by the theme manager so that is the main reason that I shy away from creating my own themes, free or not.
And lets face it, too many frown on Curve variations so I stopped designing those.

Fair enough, you get something unique created just for you then. But doing free public work adds another aspect to that: you get to actually influence a whole community in one way or another. Would SMF be the same if for example Aeva was never made, or any other major mods..or dare I say it, without themes like Helios.. ? ok, so it was a stretch, but it does influence people in a positive way(hopefully). You even get to do stuff that perhaps any customers(as in being paid for it) would NOT accept. Thats where innovation starts too - not if anyone does themes that look like other themes,and puts a price tag on it.

And lets face it, too many frown on Curve variations so I stopped designing those.

The problem with Curve variations is not that Curve variations as such are necessarily evil, but that there are too many mediocre ones. The Theme Site is full of the things and that gets rather boring. Now I understand why people like making them. The dead basic ones are comparatively quick and easy to do (just throw a filter on main_block.png and change some link colours) and if you're a beginner then that is going to be appealing.

Opening a board index screenshot in Photoshop and trying varous filters on it can get you some good ideas, but if you really want a good result it's not enough to just churn out a stack of them. You have to pick out the combinations that really rock and throw the rest away, and you have to spend the time detailing the selected ones up so they work to best effect. This is why we went to the trouble of supplying PSD's for Curve: we wanted people to have the ability to put together variations that were really nice. The resource is available and is meant to be used.

* Antechinus reminds himself that he did mean to make them in .xcf format for GIMP enthusiasts too..........................

I'm currently curious as to how far I can push Curve just by changing css and images. There's a lot more potential there than most people realise, although ultimately you do have to put up with some restrictions on layout.

TBH I really love hacking templates to bits and putting them back together to get new layouts I like better than default, but that does make mod installation more difficult for some people (and requires fairly solid knowledge of css and markup) so there is definitely a place for good "Curve variations".

Very true. Curve wasn't really made for this though..but it was one of the goals, so with a little push its doable. Your work with backgronds and sprites have really helped there.

[Antechinus]

I am the same way. My next, personal venture is to hack the crap out of Curve beginning with eliminating the main_block.png and menu_gfx.png.

TBH I don't think there's anything wrong with the main_block or menu_gfx images. Perhaps because this is how I understand how to work with them. I'm not sure everyone does. I get the impression that sprites confuse some people, but really they're very easy construct and to customise (IMHO).

Having said that, I do think we made a small mistake with menu_gfx.png, in that it relies on the image to form the background for the drop menus. The menus are far less usable if the image is missing, or if someone wishes to browse with images disabled. That's why in my updates of my variants I'm using CSS background colour behind the image. I can do this because I've re-styled the drops (it can't be done well with the default Curve look).

Oh and here's something you may not realise: there are quite a lot of custom themes, which nobody thinks of as "Curve variations", that actually could be done on unmodified default templates. Off the top of my head, Dziner's famous Outline is one example. Crip's new and very tasty Flagrantly is another example. In both these cases, the authors constructed their own index.template.php, with custom markup classes for structure and menus, and added custom css to suit. Really, they needn't have done this. All that was actually required was using a default index.template.php with an edited copyright, modifying images to get the desired look (standard practice for Curve variants anyway) and tweaking the default index.css. I'm sure I could find lots of other examples on the Theme Site if I looked. Curve's default markup is a lot more flexible than some people think.

Also going to rid myself of the dreaded

Koodi [Valitse] Laajenna

padding-left: 9px;
that seems to be nemesis of many graphic designers. I just need to find a way to make portals work properly without it.

Not sure what problem you're referring to here, but it should be easily solvable with a bit of css tweaking.

[bloc]

Even if it was more flexible than what people think, its still very targeted at that one kind of layout as Curve was. So that might explain why people, insteeaad of trying to mould Curve into something other, rather start from scratch. Ideally, Curve CSS should be as basic as possible so you could tag onto your own specialized CSS. Right now its more a journey of first stripping , examine if it removed any vital functionality and THEN make your own, which also must solve any said broken functionally.

This is partly what my bwTheme project is all about, simplifying so that the "sub-themes" can be as experimental as they want and add as much code as they want.

[Antechinus]

It is as basic as it can be to get a default theme that will look like that, and also allow some flexibility.

[bloc]

err...no. We just have to agreed to disagreed on this, but its very clear that both templates and CSS are way too complex and not sharing enough common markup/CSS.

[Antechinus]

Hmm, but there's also the point that the current default markup doesn't allow enough styling possibilities (IMHO of course). Making things less specific and more generic has problems too. I agree there are some areas that can be rationalised, but there are also a lot of places where more styling hooks (specific ones) would be useful.

ETA: One of Curve's biggest faults, as a design for a default theme, is that it doesn't allow people to add logos of varying size without the header looking odd.

[Antechinus]

I suppose what I'm saying re css and markup is that although I can see good arguments for keeping the default css as simple as possible, I would not want to do this at the expense of allowing greater specificity for those themers who want it. So we should go with a lot of generic classes in the default for simplicity but also allow for any element at all, anywhere, to be individually targeted.

This was the whole idea of Curve: to allow themers to do what the hell they wanted to without having to hack templates for trivial things. We've got a partical success and we shouldn't go backwards on this. In the case of elements that have more than one class, the more specific class should be last in the markup. That in itself will help quite a bit. That's another problem with 2.0: the more generic classes are often last in the markup, and getting around them can be done but requires more fiddling with css than should really be necessary.

[MrGrumpy]

I personally don't have a problem with paid themes, I've had my own before, but a lot I've seen seem to just use web templates/copied designs so really it isn't there own work they have just fitted smf into the design that's been downloaded or ripped off from elsewhere.

I do think tho that speeding up the approval process might get more themes submitted, at the moment its taking weeks for themes to be approved. That can be a bit off putting when you are making themes that you have to wait weeks or even a month, especially if there is anything that needs rectifying as you waiting weeks/month to be told it hasn't passed the approval process, so you have to fix it and upload it and wait again, which then makes it understandable that people go off and make there own theme site and start releasing premium themes.

ETA: One of Curve's biggest faults, as a design for a default theme, is that it doesn't allow people to add logos of varying size without the header looking odd.

Thats a massive fault IMO - no offence to whoever it was that designed the header but it does suck a bit, a little bit of tweeking and you can display much larger images in the curve header so why that little 1 was used in the position it is is plain daft. Not much work and the header could be much more user/designer friendly - this theme has none of the header functions/features removed, just the layout is changed, avatar is there, header links are there, news is there, search is there, you can upload an image to replace the "My Community" http://www.petchatforum.net/smf/ that logo is 468x97 but it can display an image 100-200px wider and much higher. I know the design of that theme isn't ground breaking but it does seem more logical and user/designer friendly

Also the news in the header looks like someone has aligned it wrong with the "News" heading displayed at the end the line of news, just doesn't seem logical to me to put a title at the end of a line instead of the start, looks like someone put float right instead of float left by accident

Another thing that bugs me with trying to style a theme is the sticky/locked icon on messageindex - icons are usually displayed through code in template files but those icons are done in css as a background image which causes problems with adding image backgrounds to boards as there is already a background image defined and you can't just add an image to the windowbg's. If you look at the theme I linked above you can see how it messed up my messageindex with not being able to show my gradients on the sticky/locked topics.

[Antechinus]

ETA: One of Curve's biggest faults, as a design for a default theme, is that it doesn't allow people to add logos of varying size without the header looking odd.

Thats a massive fault IMO - no offence to whoever it was that designed the header................

Hey, Bloc.

Also the news in the header looks like someone has aligned it wrong with the "News" heading displayed at the end the line of news, just doesn't seem logical to me to put a title at the end of a line instead of the start, looks like someone put float right instead of float left by accident

Yes I don't like the right aligned text either, and I change it whenever I edit the default (I tend to use a fixed width of around 400px with left-aligned text). However, that's how the thing was originally designed and at the time the team seemed to like it that way. Easy to change with a couple of css tweaks anyway.

Another thing that bugs me with trying to style a theme is the sticky/locked icon on messageindex - icons are usually displayed through code in template files but those icons are done in css as a background image which causes problems with adding image backgrounds to boards as there is already a background image defined and you can't just add an image to the windowbg's. If you look at the theme I linked above you can see how it messed up my messageindex with not being able to show my gradients on the sticky/locked topics.

I assume you're using an older and less capable browser. Anything that can handle css3 attributes can probably handle multiple background images (which is one of the best things in css3). So for instance in FF4 and Chrome there's no problem. You can have both. It would be a problem for IE8 and older versions of IE, but should be fine with IE9.