Commercial Templates

I’m currently a user of Joomla... and there is a whole host of companies who offer premium quality templates for sale, either individually or through club memberships. I’m currently a member of one club called RocketTheme. They do great work.

Is there anyone doing the same thing for Modx?

As far as I know, everybody making templates for MODx are doing it for free. There are quite a lot available in the Resources section, and I’m building up a showcase at my loripsum site linked below.

There is no reason why a person could not set up a members only club for selling MODx templates, it is just that one does not exist yet. As Susan mentioned, several community members have done some high quality templates ( example, example 2 ). If you are a template designer, and wish to sell MODx templates, please post a link to your site in the forums. It would be cool to see a template shop using shopX!

On a side note, there is no reason that you couldn’t develop commercial modules and/or snippets. The community around here just tends to be more on the benevolent side because we love this CMS and we want to see exactly what it can do!

-sD-

Well to be perfectly honest with all of you, it was the opportunist in me that brought the question out. I love to design, I am sometimes very good at it.. and most importantly, it appears that template clubs can be very successful.

So, I will be considering it as time passes along I am brand new to Modx. (Day 2) - I remember how excited I was when I first discovered Mambo/Joomla about a year ago, and Modx seems even better than that!

Phil

Truth is, templates are so simple to do in MODx that it never really occurred to me something like that would be too much in demand. And now with the SkinGraft they are even simpler to install.

That’s a great feature of Modx of course - but I think the value of any club is the quality of what you are getting and not necessarily how easy it is to use or create.

http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,1575.msg10613.html#msg10613

needs work, I know. I never really intended it to get as far as it has, ecommerce is not my field.

It seems that because the MODx target audience is developers and those skilled in XHTML and CSS this type of service hasn’t popped up yet. I suppose you would have to be a pretty good salesman to sell templates to a designer. maybe the future of MODx, when it is advertised as "end-user friendly", will be a more substantial environment for template shops. As Susan said, it is, after all, not like developing templates for Joomla/Mambo which can be a complete PITA. I think that the wide variety of free templates available for MODx supports the fact that it is a joy to template MODx. You simply create your layout and your CSS, then drop in the tags for menu’s, content, etc... wherever you want them to show up. It is a potential business, but it may be a hard sell, especially with all the "free" competition !

-sD-

Quote from: Scotty at Nov 12, 2006, 01:49 PM

I suppose you would have to be a pretty good salesman to sell templates to a designer. maybe the future of MODx, when it is advertised as "end-user friendly", will be a more substantial environment for template shops.

Yes, but you might also consider the other current target audience of MODx, which is PHP developers like me. You could probably sell commercial templates to me or my clients that I build, deploy, and maintain MODx sites for. A lot of smaller businesses would rather pay a little for a good looking template, than pay a designer a great deal more for a custom site design. And not being a CSS guru myself, I love the prospect of buying a complete MODx template for under $100 and being able to offer truly affordable solutions to these kinds of clients. And that will easily translate to an end-user market as it becomes easier to package and install these things from within MODx.

But I think Scotty and Susan are right; even I can generally buy a complete HTML web site template (from template monster or similar) and turn it into a MODx site; I’m even working on a Flash site template from template monster for one client that will have dynamic content pumped into it and an HTML alternative site, directly from MODx.

So, in reality, commercial templates specifically for MODx might be limiting markets for an accomplished XHTML/CSS designer. But I think the real market for MODx designers is in creating custom designs targeted at specific clients; it’s one of the reasons I chose Etomite originally, and became part of the MODx team, so I could deploy CMS features with sites that looked like they were completely constructed by hand.

The other issue that makes the idea of a commercial template club so interesting is that Modx is still relatively unknown compared to the likes of Joomla who has more than 1TB of downloads per month. So anyone interested now has the ability to build reputation before Modx gets (really) big(ger). lol