Questions about Themes availability for Share

[arnoldschrijve1]

I read the TechCrunch article about Alfresco having 5 million plus users used by more than 150.000 companies and it made me wonder why with such an installed base there are only so little Share themes available besides the ones included in the product.
A google search resulted in only 3 themes: Share Extras RedTheme, Google code alfresco-themes AbstractPurpleTheme and a theme on fme.de (the first ones are very basic themes; the fme theme is more attractive, but proprietary).

What could be the reason for this?

1. Are typical users happy with the 4 default themes?
2. Do companies generally develop their own (highly) customized theme?
3. Is Share theme development too difficult / time-consuming / costly
4. Is the Alfresco community in general more code-oriented, less interested/skilled in UX design?
5. Or maybe theme development is a no-brainer, only limited customization possible in a standard theme setup

What is your opinion?

(Correction: I found that the fme theme is not proprietary at all, but is available in this google code project: http://code.google.com/p/fme-alfresco-extensions/ )

PS. If you happen to know about any other themes I'd be glad to hear about them.

[jpotts]

Those are the only themes I know about.

My experience has been that people either do some light customization of the repository (like types and aspects, maybe some dashlets) and live with the out-of-the-box themes or they do a massive customization. Big customizations result in very specific themes that don't really lend themselves to sharing with the broader community.

In last year's community survey (and again this year) we asked about the types of community contributions people leverage, and themes are very low on the list (to your point there aren't many to choose from). We also asked what people would like to contribute and share themes are selected by less than 1 in 10 respondents. I don't think people are sitting on a bunch of really cool themes, I just think people aren't creating new ones beyond what they need to do to match their corporate branding.

I think most people who implement Alfresco are more focused on integrating it with other systems and adding specialized functionality than they are tweaking the colors of the UI.

Jeff

[arnoldschrijve1]

You are probably right, Jeff. It is very true that most people are focused integrations and extensions, rather than styling, myself inclusive.
That's why it would be really nice if there were a bit more out-of-the-box themes to relieve us of this 'burden'. Especially now that Alfresco has a self-service cloud offering there will be more customers/users that stick with the default themes.
Also having more color schemes to choose from helps when creating quick demo's for a prospect. Some time ago we showed a PoC of a DAM system based on an out-of-the-box Share app to a retailer in garden supplies. After choosing the green theme and adding their logo the site looked remarkingly similar to their own brand style.

[jpotts]

Yes, with the cloud offering currently not offering any customization capability, I agree that increasing the number of out-of-the-box themes is a good idea. And for someone who is better than me at picking out color schemes, it wouldn't take much effort at all to knock out a dozen new ones.

Thanks for this feedback. I've passed it along to both the cloud product manager and the on-premise product manager.

Jeff