Liferay themes are not so easy to find and buy
January 7, 2011 8 Comments
I was talking to my friend yesterday about a website he is preparing on Liferay. It’s a very simple site with 6 pages about his start in “Marathon des sables”. He ask me if I know any site where he can easily buy nice looking theme for his site. First I thought about pointing him to the Community Plugins Respository but after I saw whats in there I’ve changed my mind. Themes published there look like they were made 3 – 4 years ago. Most of them consist of nice picture for header and some additional colors. Well colors I can change by myself using “Look and feel” property of any portlet. I don’t need whole theme for that!
Ok, so I googled for “templates liferay buy” but i found nothing. I don’t know why but you won’t find any Liferays themes and skins on such sites like templatemonster.com. So where’s the problem?
Is there no demand for such themes (which means Liferay is used only for big projects and not for low-cost ones)?
Or maybe portlets are the problem? You can have so many of them it’s hard to develop skin that will work with all configurations.
Maybe developing time is so long the cost of such skin is 3 times bigger than developing WP skin?
So let’s sit and think about it for minute or two because without such low-cost skins Liferay Portal can’t compete with low-to-build-site-on CMS systems like WordPress or Drupal. Andy ideas?
Update:
Just had a interesting discussion with Tomas Polesovsky. In his opinion Liferay theme is no harder to develop than Joomla theme. If we make such equation “little/stagnant community=few themes=less interesting product=goto start” it’s obvious that by stimulating theme development we can stimulate whole LR grow.
eo Networks about Liferay 
I talked to Brian Chang on the last Community Event in Offenbach and he told me, they are actually producing a few fancy first class themes… they are aware of the problem and even tried to build a WP theme transformer – but it wasn’t a success.
A market/store will come too – than of course we will se much more themes and portlets and this will totally boost LF. I really hope all of these fancy features will be available within LF CE too.
I am liferay theme developer and like to create themes for liferay .. I have contribute 2 themes to liferay community.
If anybody is interested in developing theme join http://liferay-themes.sourceforge.net/ Liferay Themes project.
Hi mr Wasim.
Give me your email address. I am looking for liferay theme developer for my next projetc.
We arelooking for a theme developer for our corporate site, please send contact info if interested.
Here are those fancy themes Brian was talking about: http://www.liferay.com/marketplace/-/mp/category/15828894
I talked to my webdeveloper about theming in Liferay. He said that theming is done in a very neat way and changeing it is a easy thing. Only problem is that with so many portlets it’s hard to prepare universal style. For example lets take Asset Publisher – on many Pages he can be configured to display variuos things: article in full view, relaed articles, articles selected by tags etc. Every use can have his own look&feel. So preparing theme is not preparing one set of 4 pages and you done (like in WordPress or Joomla) but preparing a set of styles +documentation (something like CSSdocs) with many basic combinations. This way you can style your AP by extending it with many css classes. But this was never written as “Liferay good practices in Theming” – thats why people don’t know how to do it. I think I’m gonna write a separate post about that 🙂
Now that Liferay Marketplace is available, here is where you can find those fancy themes for liferay. http://www.liferay.com/marketplace/-/mp/category/15828894
Please visit http://www.themeray.com for professional liferay themes.