Popular RT Themes
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- Testing123
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 135
- Thanks: 1
- Music Education
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I got to wondering about how RT chooses their direction of focus when creating new themes. I know they have said they try to cater to the wants and needs of their users, but a lot of suggestions seem a bit 'broad' in nature. "It's helpful if you're specific and show examples." What to do?
One way might be to see what the community has already chosen to use and then apply those concepts/designs in new, creative ways. I'll bet RT has already done this, but I wanted to see for myself. I went to the Member Sites forum and looked at every site as to the theme they used. I began on Sept. 10 and went back to ~Feb. 20, stopping there as I thought the large number of sites listed within that time frame would give me enough of a representation. This method obviously presents skewed results as many sites (and thus the themes used) are not represented in this forum (mine for example!), however, I couldn't come up with a better way of doing this within a limited a time frame, so this is what I chose.
The results below represent 259 sites as listed in the Members Site forum.
2 sites used a combination of themes (2 or more) for their final site theme.
1 site is listed as a non-Joomla site; Drupal using Firenzie.
No effort was directed toward weeding out sites which may be listed more than once due to a change in theme used.
Here is the Top 10 most used themes as listed in the Members Sites forum:
# of
Sites Theme Name
35 HiveMind
28 MediaMogul
21 Chromatophore
19 Populus
18 Replicant
18 Dimensions
17 Hyperion
16 Synapse
13 Firenzie
13 Versatility III
HiveMind with its 'light' and quick structure weighs in as the most used. Many here seem to ask for light themes, so this may not be surprising. However, coming in as #2 with 28 sites listed is MediaMogul. This theme is certainly not light at all. Maybe light themes work better for more experienced developers with the less experienced gravitating towards having all of the bells and whistles out of the box?
I don't know how useful this little exercise is, but maybe it will generate some interesting discussion.
What do you think?
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- Terp
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 1720
- Thanks: 23
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I posted about how I was not a fan of Hive when it released, being too 'vanilla' and generic, but it has grown on me and I am going to add another year to my account to use it for a couple of sites soon.
I am now a fan of the light-weight, clean, uncluttered, graphic-less templates now that I am starting to take my Joomla/RT training wheels off.
I would like to see a cross between Replicant and Hive following the less is more approach...
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- GollumX
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 2817
- Thanks: 0
- How about going to the download section, grabbing the no. of downloads and adding them to your stats. That would give us a slightly better picture of what us members want in a template.
- Say no to Internet Explorer 6.
twitter.com/mark_up
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Looking at release dates and so on.. Hivemind is def. one of the most popular one in recent time - more of that
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- GollumX
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 2817
- Thanks: 0
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And I think the highest rated one before that was V3.
The fact of the matter is that although these clean, relatively simple themes aren't the sexiest and certainly wouldn't win any design competitions, they are highly versatile. I doubt there isn't a web developer here who hasn't used those two themes.
I absolutely love Replicant, but it's been almost a year and haven't found a client who could use it.
The amazing themes bring in the new members RT needs to pay the bills... so we need them to keep coming... but hopefully we can convince Andy to increase the number of "clean, simple, corporate" themes. I vote for four of them per year. - Say no to Internet Explorer 6.
twitter.com/mark_up
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- SureLurksalot
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 512
- Thanks: 0
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less really is more.
I really love having clean, lightweight templates that avoid fads and put the focus on presenting content, not this cool doo-hickey thinga-mabob or that whatchacallit.
It's like having a nice clean canvas to start painting on....... - Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
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- Terp
- Elite Rocketeer
- Posts: 1720
- Thanks: 23
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Trent Harrison wrote:
To each his own I guess. Perihelion is far and away my favorite and you don't even have it listed.
I think that one still has the 'new car' smell and too early to be used/downloaded by more members than the ones listed, sir.
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- James Spencer
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 46340
- Thanks: 50
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The member site statistics probably isn't that accurate in terms of what the real distribution is. Not every submits their site into that board so the downloads are probably a safer bet. Again, a download doesn't tell you if its being used. Only those who can scan every single site on the web would be able to tell you... Google?
- James Spencer / Developer & Support / Hull, UK
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