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Barriers To Entry To Contributing Themes

Posted on: Thu, 2009-10-01 12:30 | By: matt | In:

It seems the issue of a lack of good available themes for Drupal has really come to the forefront this week. Not only have Todd Nienkerk, from Four Kitchens, posted about the problem and Morten posted a CVS Haiku but, we have lost countless hours in Design for Drupal meetings and IRC talking about this. One thing seems for sure. As Leisa Reichelt points out, the current drupal.org setup to contribute a theme has a high barrier to entry.

Commercial Themes vs Contributed Themes

Todd brought up an interesting point on the Drupal ecosystem and commercial themes. Joomla has a commercial ecosystem that has been able to sell themes and make money doing it. The Drupal ecosystem has seen this in limited fashion with companies like Top Notch Themes. But, this doesn't have anything to do with contributing themes to drupal.org as that is not the place for commercial themes.

Is the issue one of getting a paid reward so even decent free themes don't have a place? Wordpress and Joomla both have good, or at least decent, free themes. Shouldn't there me a place in Drupal for that? When I looked outside drupal.org for a theme for my blog I quickly found some options that were better than what I found on drupal.org. Why weren't these free themes on drupal.org? The barrier to entry was too high.

Barriers To Entry

Contributing a theme to drupal.org isn't an easy process. While the process could use some good UX study there are some things that are fairly obvious barriers to entry.

  • CVS - The current setup where you are required to use CVS and tag things in a certain drupal way is a barrier to entry to many themers. Most of them aren't the kind of people who love popping open the command line. They like nice and easy to install GUIs and, quite frankly, they don't exist for CVS. This raises a lot of questions to what would be a better way. What about the SF way where there are file downloads and VCS which are separate? I don't know the answer but I have worked around the front end drupalers enough to know this is a problem.
  • The GPL - Legally speaking images and CSS files don't have to be shared via the GPL. They are served by the web server and are not derivatives of drupal. Many great website themes (like the one this site is running) have parts of it licensed under Creative Commons, BSD, and other licenses. The drupal.org CVS policy is that only GPL stuff can go in there. This is a barrier to converting designs to drupal themes, using some great icon sets, and so much more. I'm sure what to do here (if there is anything). It is something we need to acknowledge.

I know there are other barriers to entry to contributing drupal themes. I'd really like to see this studied on a deeper level and maybe see some experiments setup to try and drive up the contributions. In any case, the setup on drupal.org has barriers to entry we can work on.