RocketTheme Blog

For over a decade, RocketTheme has earned a reputation as being a leading innovator in the area of theming and design for Joomla, WordPress, and beyond.

In this quick post, we’ll update you on where RocketTheme is, and what you as a RocketTheme customer can expect from us going forward.

RocketTheme’s History of Innovation

RocketTheme became the most popular Joomla template provider in the world by building templates that did things no other template provider had ever done before. We found new and exciting ways to integrate cutting-edge technologies into themes that anyone could use.

RocketTheme was among the first to bring parallax to its themes, as well as a color chooser that enabled users to change the color scheme of a website on the front end to see how their selected colors affect the design.

Gantry, one of the most popular theming frameworks for Joomla or WordPress, is also a RocketTheme creation.

More recently, the RocketTheme team developed Grav. Grav is a cutting-edge flat-file CMS that is open source and making waves for its simplicity and incredible speed, including being listed among the top PHP projects on GitHub.

At the core of RocketTheme is a desire to innovate. The team is excited to push boundaries with each new project and to create something that you won’t find anywhere else. It’s because of this we are introducing a few upcoming changes that we feel will better enable the RocketTheme team to do what it does best, innovate.

Updated Theme Release Schedule

For the past several years, we’ve strived to abide by a release schedule that gave our developers a deadline for each theme’s release. This enabled our customers to expect a new theme around the beginning of each month.

One side-effect of this fixed schedule was the restriction of the team’s ability to develop and test exciting new features that take each theme to a new level. We found ourselves designing based on what we could accomplish by a specific date rather than on introducing exciting new features.

It’s for this reason that RocketTheme has decided to alter its theme release schedule from a fixed monthly date to a more fluid 4-6 weeks. This will give the team the time and flexibility it needs to come up with new features that go beyond what would be possible with a fixed deadline.

Topaz, RocketTheme’s latest theme for WordPress and Joomla, featured a fluid design and CMS integration enabling users to quickly create particles that were dynamically populated with content sourced directly from the CMS.

This was a big undertaking - and it took us past the normal deadline - but the result is clear. Topaz was met with an overwhelmingly positive response. Making themes with innovative new features takes a little more time, but that time is well spent as it makes those themes that much more useful.

Another great side-effect of this change is that both Joomla and WordPress receive releases at about the same time. That means you aren't waiting an extra two weeks for the WordPress version of a theme.

More Industry-specific Theme Designs

RocketTheme has strived to create theme designs that are as flexible as possible. This often means designing themes for a wide range of industries and site types, but we recognize that this doesn’t work for everyone.

One request we have received from our users is for some industry-specific themes. For example, themes that would work very well out of the box for musicians, artists, startups, or for the travel industry. These themes would be better focused on enabling developers to have the features and design elements they need most right away.

It would also make it easier to find a theme that fits your needs.

So, over the next several months, we will be working on bringing this concept to life in a way that only RocketTheme knows how. This doesn’t mean that RocketTheme won’t be producing great general-use themes, but that you will start to see more better-focused designs in our catalog.

Support for Grav

Grav has been a project of passion for our team for some time. Over the past year, it has gone from beta to its first official release and to date has over 100 plugins and 59 free themes available.

As a CMS, it has quickly become a go-to choice for many developers looking to create a website that doesn’t quite fit the scope of a larger database-driven CMS like Joomla or WordPress.

This is why the RocketTheme team is working on bringing the Gantry framework to Grav soon. Once this is done, we expect to add Grav to RocketTheme's list of supported platforms. Stay tuned to the Gantry Blog for more information on this project as it becomes available.

We believe that these changes, in addition to a number of other exciting projects that are going to be announced here soon, will make your experience with RocketTheme an even better one.

Have any questions or thoughts? Please leave them in the comments section below.

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