Composr 11.x Future Theme

Theme change for version 11?

Firstly I’d like to say, Composr is incredible. And I want to thank all involved for creating and maintaining such a comprehensive software, it’s crazy what can be done with Composr.

I understand that Composr free, is just that, free. And the fact that we are able to download a great piece of software is really fantastic. I also understand that Chris and others spend a serious amount of time making this software what it is for their paying customers, the Composr creator must make a living, and whatever Chris can do for us free folks, is golden for us. We appreciate it very much.

So, I always hesitate to ask for anything, or inquire, because I am not a coder, I am not a programmer, I have nothing to contribute to this project but perhaps a donation here and there, or some interaction on the forums. But I would like to ask, about themes.

Composr is so wonderful, it seems that an updated theme would also make it even more wonderful. The current theme is a tad outdated, and looking at the flat themes and fontawesome or glyphicon tools icons on the more modern flat themes, it seems that Composr would be even more awesome with a facelift. I understand that 11.x is coming out in the future, are their plans to modernize the theme? Like I said, I always hate to ask, since it’s free, but hey, I had to ask.

Thank you Chris, and anyone else involved in maintaining and upgrading Composr, you all are appreciate very much.
 

Thanks. The default theme will certainly be updated in v11. As to what exactly will be done, it is not fully decided yet, simply because there's quite a few technical things to be done before we want to consider the general look of it (e.g. implementing more theme options).

Thanks Chris, and of course the million dollar question that all developers hate, any timeline on release? I'll duck and cover as the tomatoes fly.

Yeah, sorry we can't give release dates, it depends on things completely outside our control (e.g. how much client work is on - which could both accelerate and decelerate development, depending on the work). Make your plans on what is already out.

Thanks Chris! Appreciate your time for the replies.
I am going to wait till 11.x comes out before I invest more time in a live site. I am signed up for notifications, I'll be checking the ol inbox for the big news of 11. Theme's are very important to me in a CMS.
Thanks again and have a wonderful successful 2018 sir! 

Hi court,

I don't mean this as a dig or complaint at all, you're extremely kind and polite - I just wish I could find a way to make the Composr culture more like other CMSs in regard to how theme expectations worked.

I don't think any Wordpress, Drupal, or Joomla users wait for the core developers to make a new version to get a great theme - they rely on third parties to make those themes (or more rarely people make them themselves).
Obviously we have a big lack of such third parties here.

I often think that the reason for this is we take a lot on in the core product. It's part of my personality to try and solve things directly, to take on responsibilities. But I think that has a chilling effect on external contributions, as it creates an expectation to drink from a single fountain, rather than to set up and visit a thousand little camps. This is in many ways our strength, but I think a weakness for themeing, as to try and do a catch all out-of-the-box solution to creative design, is incredibly difficult (compared to feature development).

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated. How could we encourage, or create a culture to encourage, more high quality themes from third parties?

Can users directly petition theme makers for other CMSs to make themes for Composr, for example? Or at least help spread more awareness more broadly.

I think Composr is probably the most themeable of any CMS, it's incredibly customisable. So I don't think there's a technical barrier.

Oh jeez, no dig taken at all Chris! Pragmatism abounds in my spirit of work.
The theme is really customizable for sure. I love love, absolutely love the core features you all have created, and yes, even I can tweak the theme to a certain degree with css and templates that is so easily accessible in admin zone. Composr is awesome.
I have dabbled in the three famous CMS and sure, they are very flexible with their themeing, and the themes available to those CMS are mind boggling, they certainly have created a market haven't they?

I did not mean to sound so abrupt and pouty if I did by basically stating "I aint doing a thing till a new theme is out" type of attitude. I was getting a tad frustrated when it seemed I tried many things and methods to get the main default theme to act fully responsive, and it seemed no matter what I tried things would just not line up, I wanted my text columns to shrink as the view window is reduced, and they do to an extent then once the view window is reduced to notepad size viewing, the columns dropped off and it looked messy, there is a toggle to flip for responsiveness in the theme, but I don't see where the theme is truly fully responsive where it will travel from desktop to mobile version just by shrinking the view port. Where the columns and boxes simply float under each other and form a visually nice view once it is reduced to mobile size. I tried using percentages for the text columns and that did not fair much better either.
I have been using Bootstrap in my current project and it is very easy to use, even for non coding folks like me.

Perhaps the issue I just explained above can be fixed by me, and all I have to do is come here and post a question for that, but I did not. As far as a flat theme, I can get that just by adjusting module and box corners to square, and changing ghost colors to solid, but the layout and responsiveness is what I am fighting.

As far as themes from developers, I cannot afford it, three thousand dollars may as well be a million for me. And believe me the developers are worth every penny of what they charge, I am a Land Surveyor for my day job and we bill out a two man crew at 3600.00 dollars a day, I completely understand the cost of business and professional work (by the way, our company bills us out at that rate, we see a fraction of it   ). If my website project was for a business, and it was going to be paying the bills in our home, then yes, I would invest the funding to make a professional theme, but it's not, it's a hobby and it's fun. I created an online woodworking community at Home - The Patriot Woodworker and my goal with composr theme was to get it to look similar to our forums I just linked too. The forum theme is beautiful in my opinion, but the forum software is just that, it does not consist of the bells and whistles that Composr has, so I wanted to have Composr as the face of our community, a home page for our forums, and with a wiki portal for members to contribute content wiki style regarding woodworking everything. I notice Composr has single sign on capabilities for IPS but only up to 2x. Hmmm, how much would it cost to get that capacity for IPS 4x ?

You know, if theme developers could create a handful of themes for Composr, just basic fully responsive flat themes, then leave their calling card with the themes, perhaps it would generate more business with the developer? In those top three CMS projects, those theme developers have a free theme, but if you want all the bells and whistles, you pay for it. Perhaps if Composr themers did something like that, created themes that offered the basic layouts, but if the user wants the bells and whistles, they pay the 30 to 80 dollars for the pro-version. Perhaps a theme store could open up here at Composr.
Perhaps, the Composr project gurus could approach theme developers and tell those developers they have a market portal to display their themes at, on Composr. Just some ideas, but I think if professional themers were approached by you Chris, and you sold them the Composr market as a vibrant community that is really chewing at the bit to have modern themes, I don't know, perhaps they'd come aboard and offer their services?

I have blabbered on too much here, thanks Chris for all your hard work, the core is what counts, and the features in the core are amazing.

I did not mean to sound so abrupt and pouty if I did by basically stating

Not at all, I just thought it a good opportunity to spur a conversation .

the columns dropped off and it looked messy

CSS can be pretty complicated, no disagreement from me there.

For what it's worth, we completed default responsive design for v11 some time back, so that's definitely coming with v11. The new 'hybrid mode', which serves optimised CSS to mobile, and full responsive CSS to desktop.

I have been using Bootstrap in my current project and it is very easy to use, even for non coding folks like me.

I doubt we'll ever have Bootstrap in the default theme for quite a few reasons:

1. Too many divs and non-semantic structure requirements. It kind of breaks web semantics by forcing a lot of divs, ordered in a predetermined way that is not related to content structure. That would bake very heavy assumptions and a lot of overhead into the default templates.
2. CSS is much more powerful than it was. My understanding is a lot that Bootstrap used to make easy can now be done using CSS flexbox and other modern techniques.
3. Volatility. We built a Bootstrap theme for a client. Within a year they completely changed everything (they switched from LESS to SASS), so there was no way we could utilise the implementation we did again in the future. I suspect Bootstrap is liable to change multiple times within a single development cycle.
4. Complexity. While Bootstrap looks great, not everyone is going to want a Bootstrap-like layout. So by putting 1000s of lines of Bootstrap-specific code into the default theme, we'd be making things a lot harder for a significant subset of users, who would need to strip all that code. The current default theme is intentionally quite minimal in its styling.

Maybe one day we'll have a second officially maintained theme based on Bootstrap though.

We'll be seeing where things rest when we've done all our other planned changes. Maybe with a default theme that is responsive, flat, and more configurable, people won't care about Bootstrap. Or maybe it will become apparent that another theme based on Bootstrap will have a lot of value. Either way, there's a lot of work to do first, so Bootstrap isn't coming any time soon from the core developers. It could certainly come in third-party themes though.

Hmmm, how much would it cost to get that capacity for IPS 4x ?

It'd be roughly $375 in cost from us. We do have a few months of back-logged work though, so it'd be some time until we could get to it (have to prioritise some people who have been waiting quite a while for us to get stuff done for them). You'd probably be better off offshoring it on a site like Hire Freelancers & Find Freelance Jobs Online | Freelancer. It's a fairly binary thing - the integration works properly, or does not - so if you can get a fixed price on it that should work well for you. They could use the existing IPB2 code as a base. I'd likely then be willing to integrate that code back into the core product and maintain it going forward for no charge because it would benefit others (and we could dump the IPB2 support as that's ancient now).

You know, if theme developers could create a handful of themes for Composr, just basic fully responsive flat themes, then leave their calling card with the themes, perhaps it would generate more business with the developer? In those top three CMS projects, those theme developers have a free theme, but if you want all the bells and whistles, you pay for it. Perhaps if Composr themers did something like that, created themes that offered the basic layouts, but if the user wants the bells and whistles, they pay the 30 to 80 dollars for the pro-version. Perhaps a theme store could open up here at Composr.
Perhaps, the Composr project gurus could approach theme developers and tell those developers they have a market portal to display their themes at, on Composr. Just some ideas, but I think if professional themers were approached by you Chris, and you sold them the Composr market as a vibrant community that is really chewing at the bit to have modern themes, I don't know, perhaps they'd come aboard and offer their services?

Agreed, but I'll have to flip this back to you or other users. I, or people working for me, have tried to contact themers in the past, and they usually just don't even reply to emails, or expect things served on a plate for them (i.e. they aren't willing to try and build a new market). If actual users contact them, they may be more willing. I'm sure that the core Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress, developers were never responsible for persuading theme developers to come to those platforms, it would have happened organically. Like I mentioned, I think ocProducts/me taking on too many responsibilities for things has unintentionally chilled that kind of organic market. So really I have to do what I said I don't normally do, and say - Composr users wanting themes need to somehow find a way to build that market, not the core developers. There needs to be some organic momentum and outreach here, and if I tried to get involved I think I'd retard the efforts rather than advance them.



Thanks for all your words, I appreciate the engagement!

Thank you for your time Chris, I do greatly appreciate it.

@wave ol' friend John from another (very frustrating) CMS

This is a good thread. I'll be thinking on it.

I've been around the block a time or two since 95 when I first discovered the www and built my first site using wordpad.
Unfortunately, the web doesn't make good sense sometimes. The best doesn't always get promoted. Popularity breeds popularity, since that's what sites talk about, so that repetition snowballs so mediocre at best programs end up being top. And the addon devs jump on the bandwagon since that's where the numbers are, meaning the most profitable for them.

How can we get them to step back and realize if they threw a lil effort our way, they would end up profiting more?
I'll be thinking on that…

I've tried all the popular programs…
I've tried all the new fangled programs…
I'm sticking with composr!!!

Hey Dave, great to see ya here!