On 1/6/2011 11:11 AM, Ryan Foster wrote:
I think the way that Magento and Wordpress do it are good examples. With Wordpress, there is one "official" theme that is included with the install, but there are literally thousands of themes that are not maintained by Wordpress that they list on there site http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/, and now with the 3.0 release you can even search for new themes and install them automatically from inside your Wordpress install. Doing it this way fosters wider community support by delegating maintenance of these themes to individual contributors rather than forcing it on a handful of committers and also allows developers to monetize there contributions by offering "premium" themes and plugins. In fact, there are many individuals and companies in the Wordpress community that make their living solely by selling themes and plugins. This furthers solidifies the base of support for the project by offering a mid-tier option for someone who wants something more than OOTB but can't
necessarily afford custom development.
This was discussed when we first added visual theme capability. There is nothing blocking third-party visual themes being offered on other sites. It was suggested that OFBiz have only one theme, but the decision was made to have more than one so that visual theme selection could be demonstrated.
-Adrian
