Funding Request: Templates to get people hooked on Neos

Most content management systems and all SaaS systems provide beautiful templates to start your first project.

While you always have to adopt them, you have an instant feeling of progress. For companies without well-defined and complex corporate identifies often nice theme and some adoptions do the trick. But then we all know each website grows and changes - this is where tools like Wordpress suck and Neos works beautifully.

I know from many people who gave Neos a try, but then it was so complicated to get something working that they used a different system - good developers which might otherwise have worked with Neos, were hooked and forced to get some “smaller” issues fixed while learning the system and became fans…

From a business perspective, developing Neos templates makes no sense. Even if you charge €500, without the ecosystem and without a marketplace it just doesn’t make sense.

I would like to develop some high-quality themes. The way I envision it is that the template comes with many NodeTypes, CSS and JS styling with a proper workflow. Users of the theme can do minor changes in the backend, and for bigger changes the theme is always at hand. The theme should be the main site package, so developers have a proper setup and can always change everything they want.

Thoughts? :slight_smile:


Update: Budget proposal from August 25th

  • Develop a Neos theme as a site package based on open source HTML&JS&CSS template
  • Create around 20 NodeTypes which cover all typical needs for a website.
  • Support multiple languages
  • Allow editors to “configure” the basics of the theme in Neos (logo, footer, …)
  • Build a structure that developers can easily adapt the theme via SCSS
  • Write proper documentation so that people really can use this as their first Neos experience

Estimated workload:

  • 40-50 hours for the theme (YAML, Fusion, AFX, SCSS) and configuration options
  • 10 hours for docs
  • 10 hours support for people who use it over the next months
  • 10 hours for maintenance, bug fixing and keeping it up to date this year

Of course, I would love to copy-paste the structure and build another theme based on that, this should be way faster than.

Required budget: EUR 7.000 net
Bonus: EUR 2.000 net for adding a blog, and a second theme.

7 Likes

I like the idea. It would be cool to have the possibility to choose a afx or fluid version for a theme. I know AFX is best practice but I’m sure there are still people like to work with fluid. I think it’s easier to understand.

1 Like

As I a couple of times has tried starting up with a blank template for Neos, for making something else than the demo-site, but have never had luck to get a good result, I think it’s a really good idea.
(the learning curve is very steep in my opinion :neutral_face:)

1 Like

Hello Andres,

I agree. The learning curve is still steep. We are aware of this and there are many efforts improving that:

* New and improve documentation
* Introduction video course
* A better boilerplate to start

And I think templates could be a next step in this effort :slight_smile:

1 Like

I think it’s a good idea to provide some good examples than can people can use as a start.

Recently I started to implement one of the https://html5up.net templates for a basic blog/seo distribution I wanted to maintain.
It also uses my colorpicker package for customisation.

The html5up templates seem to have a lot in common to make it a bit easier to switch from one to the other. But even if that won’t work it’s not a blocker for me, as on the way I would learn what’s needed for a template package to provide.

2 Likes

Those templates look really nice and simple. Maybe we should spend some time on a sprint and provide some site packages for them.

Would be really cool to install neos and get asked to choose between such templates.

1 Like

Next sprint is in November, where we have the retro. And I guess to have it done well it’s 60-80h. So I wouldn’t be on sprints.

This is where we talked about splash a year ago :see_no_evil:

Yeah, i never got feedback for the splash approach.

However it does not really matter since even splash would take an existing site package and convert to the given namespace. So having proper ready to go site-packages is a requirement there aswell. Finish splash to help users create their own fork is kind of a second step.

Regarding hours, i think the html5up templates will not take much to integrate properly. I will try to find the time for an experiment on that.

3 Likes

Good idea. What do you think about a small challenge for the community.
Like our neos wallpaper challenge, the community can create nice layouts for starter site packages.

Some of the team or even the community can implement them and we can then provide some of them?

This still would mean:

  • someone has to create the challenge
  • promote the challenge
  • test and validate all entries
  • pick the best entry and make sure it follows all best practices
  • create documentation

My feeling is that this would actually be more work.

Agreed, we want to have the problem of too many good public templates first before we can make a challenge out of this.

@AND, this may interest you.

Thank you Viktor.

II may suggest to create a good step by step guide to make a template by yourself. Such thing does not exists in Neos as it is in Typo3 (Wordpress does not need it because it is a blog, not a CAF/CMF).

If you create a wonderful template but you do not have good documentation to customize it, you will be just a complex CMS and there are a lot of easier well supported projects around.

Instead, people must have clear Neos is a framework, you can make the applications you want, so, teach the people how.

I am not against the templating, it is a must, but for me the problem is the lack of documentation for people that does not know anything about Neos and Typo3.

Good luck