I was hanging out on the WordPress Tavern Forum in the ChatBox, where I heard about a new “free premium” theme site called WP Gorilla coming soon. Yes, I know the term “free premium” and even “freemium” are not exactly new terms, but here’s what intrigued me about this project.
- It’s designed to be run in a collaborative fashion.
- The themes (which you can see on this Flickr page) look absolutely stunning.
- The themes are completely free, open source, all that jazz.
- It’s caught the attention of Matt (in a good way).
One problem that I can foresee in the future is how they would make money. Jeremie of Web-kreation, who appears to be leading this project has stated in the comments of the announcement post:
My goal is really to make this project opensource and I would rather avoid to ask money from our users but if this project grow too fast or too big for us to maintain, we might have no choice but to offer paid support.
I would imagine this would be kind of like the “enterprise” support Automattic offers for WordPress users, although people could still seek help in the public forums.
So what do you think of this project? If it takes off, do you think it can compete with the likes of paid WordPress theme sites such as WooThemes, iThemes, etc.? Will you be contributing to it?
They sure picked a terrible name.
Gorilla Themes is a premium theme company that sells premium WordPress themes.
Talk about brand confusion.
They need to come up with a new name.
@Carl: Thanks, I wasn’t aware of that. Wonder what the chances are of two totally different WordPress theme-related sites having the word “gorilla” in the name…lol.
Since GorillaThemes.com is obviously the more established of the two, I wonder if WPGorilla would consider changing their name?
I’d say so. It doesn’t seem very kosher to me.
Gorilla Themes is an established premium themes company. To launch another premium themes site using “Gorilla” in the name… giving away FREE premium themes… doesn’t seem very cool to me.
All they had to do was go to Google and search for “gorilla wordpress” or “gorilla themes” and they would have instantly seen GorillaThemes.com as the first result.
Research people… research.
Yea they didnt think it through with the domain name on this.
I like the concept of it, people getting together and busting out themes and what not.
But i dont think it will kick off.
1. There is plenty (if not to many) themes out there that would suite eveyone.
2. For support etc.. Wpcodex is there.
They should just contribute to the wordpress community as a whole, not try and a break it of with another startup.
Its like all them assholes that try to copy dig, and fail to get anywhere, stick with the one, and make it bigger than ever, youll always be apart of that community.
I could go on for days why this wont work. But it is a really really good concept/idea, fair play to them. Keep us posted Leland.
I also don’t think it will work.
There will always be a place for Premium themes and freemium themes.
Talented designers will definitely not want to contribute for nothing. At most.. you will get mid level designers creating so-so to maybe slight above designs, which are already freely available.
The concept and idea can work to a certain extend, but I don’t think it will take off and become very successful
@Anto: Yeah…apparently they’re looking for a new name due to the whole GorillaThemes deal.
@Mike: Well, think about WordPress itself for a minute. They get lots of contributions from volunteers in each new release. People contribute to the codex, etc. This is true for many other open source projects as well. I’m not saying this will happen with WPGorilla (or whatever their new name is going to be), but they all have to start somewhere.