For a long time I've turned a blind-eye to the various websites targetting all sorts of designers with offers of great templates at unbelievable prices.

You see, it just seemed wrong to use someone else's design on a site I was putting my name on.  of course, without spending time looking at what was available from whom, I was totally biased against these groups selling mass-merchandise templates and, well, wrongly so... 

..A couple of weeks back I needed to throw up 3 different sketches of sites built with Joomla.  Being sick of the stock Solarflare template its bundled with, I immediately decided to take a first peek at a site that seemed popular on the forums called Rockettheme

I discovered a site quite unlike what I was expecting -  its run by a couple of people who are personally available in their forums, and well, they seem to have built a serious community around their templates!

If you pop over to the RocketTheme forums, you'll note that they have over 9,000 members registered, who seem very vocal and positive about the templates they are buying through their site membership.

In addition to a bunch of interested folks buying into their club, the templates themselves are innovative in being able to stretch to variable widths - offering font size selection as standard. Each month the club releases a new template which has a variety of color options and they can be bought in quarterly or annual chunks through site subscription.

Oh wait, and get this, something that might really show this club as unique is that they are now offering templates for Simple Machines Forum! Wow, that's pretty groovy given that the SMF community doesn't really put out many standards-compliant innovative templates.  Imagine, with a Rockettheme, you can actually maintain a consistent aesthetic across Joomla and an integrated install of a discussion forum - sexy stuff!

I'm hooked - expect to hear from me in the next couple weeks as I download and deconstruct these templates to see how easy it is to build on/innovate with Rockettheme's hard work, hastening site development time etc!

Comments (12) >>

I recommend Rocket Theme
written by tomthornz, September 19, 2006

I've been using RocketTheme templates for a while now and can fully recommend them to all. The templates offer easy customisation and great flexibility, the forum also offers great support for customisations and Joomla templating issues in general.

Rockettheme
written by kitecom, September 19, 2006

Great new site! I agree on rockettheme, they're a really innovative bunch of guys. Along with www.templateplazza.com, they're producing original and exciting templates that are (as you'd expect) fully compliant. Well worth the membership.

RocketTheme is great, check "Joomla Junkie" (newcomers)
written by g0nz0, September 19, 2006

Yes, RocketTheme is nice and famous: Andy Miller owns it, he's a Joomla core developer and designed the Joomla-backend and many famous Mambo/Joomla-templates (SolarFlare...). His developer blog: http://dev.joomla.org/component/option,com_jd-wp/Itemid,33/cat,8/ Here's a newcomer: http://www.joomlajunkie.com/ Nice templates, Demos http://demo.joomlajunkie.com/

Thanks for the reccomendation
written by Andrew, September 20, 2006

Hey Guys, I am a developer for JoomlaJunkie and really appreciate the kind words from g0nz0. Yes we are the newcomer on the scene, we have loads of really cool things planned for the future. We are owned and run by a really dynamic group of young individuals bursting with talent who love Joomla.

The big three?
written by Paul, September 20, 2006

As well as RT, www.joomlashack.com and www.joomlart.com seem to make up the big three template shops. Maybe you could review each one?!

...
written by Paul, September 20, 2006

mmm, the first comment uses an affiliate link *rollseyes*

Good stuff!
written by designguru, September 20, 2006

I'm glad to see that people are into the debate on templates - the more I've been playing with the Rocket Theme ones, the more I'm warming up to the whole concept, though its realyl interesting how much time it takes to familiarize yourself with a pre-made template if you're used to creating your own and want to make major edits... I suppose I get set in my ways when setting up CSS/stylesheets etc If anyone knows of other template sites for Joomla, drop the links here - I'll post a poll soon as we can see who likes what.

Strange article title vs content..
written by eyezberg, September 20, 2006

I think it's strange to start this article with

the various websites targetting all sorts of designers with offers of great templates at unbelievable prices

and then the rest is just about how cool Rockettheme is..?! This should be titled "Rocket theme review / praise" or similar, but not Template Clubs. At least links to the other ones should be added (joomlashack, joomlart, etc etc as cited before), and a helpfull article would be a review like for example: ok, these clubs have provided their latest template each for testing & evaluation, this is based on criteria xyz, and results are: club a is good in.., club b has cool feature blabla etc.

comments vs. content...
written by designguru, September 20, 2006

Hey eyezberg, RocketTheme is my first venture into template clubs... this is just a first post on the topic - don't worry, I'm basically going to go through a bunch and offer up rating them to the people reading this blog through a poll...

for the author
written by damo, September 27, 2006

you should follow this link and sign up to the rocket theme affiliate programme. yo might even make some cash

rofl, affiliate link spam, tsk tsk
written by Barrie North, November 17, 2006

Come on Damien!

RocketTheme even bigger now
written by Ed Detlie, September 11, 2007

I agree that RocketTheme is tremendous. As of September of 2007, RocketTheme has had nearly 100,000 posts on their forum, with nearly 17,000 members. I have seen people post requests for minor custom work and have someone on the forum do the work for them, often in a few hours. This is an even more vibrant community than Joomla, which is about to pass 1,000,000 posts in the Joomla forum.

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