Despite a few suggestions I would have for the developers, my overall experience and first impressions are good.

My primary criticisms are:

- custom installation profile core and contrib modules are out of date.
- Although well worth the small price for the commercial theme, using it requires advanced Drupal knowledge.
- lack of documentation, especially given the advanced features, and many CSS details.
- Better documentation should include info about base image sizes to create for each theme feature.

My general comments:

It is absolutely essential to install these commercial theme using their custom installation profile.

My praise is as follows:

The theme I purchased is far more than a "theme".
The theme includes numerous features, including custom content types, that go well beyond basic theme development.
The theme integrates with jquery to implement sliders and so on.
The theme is well integrated with the Webforms module.
The theme I purchased uses superfish menus.

My experience, suggestions for buyers:

After using the custom profile to install in a test xampp environment, update core and test.
After updating core in the a test install, update the contrib modules.
I then made a clone of the /html hierarchy and the SQL database into a second vhost for further development.
In the second vhost I gradually added in all the modules I use for my work.
Then I began to make copies of my custom content types and added those.

Encourage commercial theme producers to create documentation.
Encourage commercial theme producers to keep their packages' drupal cores up to date.

Comments

evankay’s picture

First things first: full disclosure; More than Themes co-founder and team member here :)

Thank you very much for choosing one of our products and for taking the time to review and post this.

Thanks for the constructive criticism, too. All I can say is we’re listening and it’s only thanks to this that we can get better and provide better solutions.

All of your criticism points are valid and we have already started working on those for a while now. Rather than limiting my answer to this, though, I’d like to give a quick hint at some of the things we’ve started doing.

// Updates to core and modules in our themes
Although it’s barely possible to keep all 25+ themes up-to-date at all times, we’ve sped up the pace at which we release updates, starting with our latest releases.

// Documentation
For years we thought there’s no better documentation for a theme than
(a) collecting a standard set of instructions and guidelines applicable to all themes, under a “general” section in our support centre (http://mtt.desk.com/), and
(b) then establishing a process of collecting the most frequently asked questions in theme-specific sections, so that people can easily find what they are looking for.
This way, we feel like our documentation is never out-of-date and instead, is a dynamic and therefore valuable resource for users/customers.

Real-life has shown otherwise, I must admit; it seems that regardless of the above, customers still like to have some sort of “offline” documentation delivered along with the product e.g.: in the form of a PDF document or HTML/mini-site. Which is why we have started trying this out in our latest releases, without neglecting the importance of continuously enriching our support center, as I described above.

// Better documentation should include info about base image sizes to create for each theme feature
That’s spot-on and another one of those things where we thought that since we bundle our products with stock image placeholders, it would be easy for the customer to crop their own images accordingly. Real-life has shown it’s better to clearly document the specs for the images throughout the theme features. Rather than collecting all of that into the documentation, though, we think it’s better to feature the dimensions/specs in the content of each image field, in the Drupal admin section, which is what we’ve been doing in several of our latest Drupal 7 releases (shortly in Drupal 8 releases, too). Thoughts/preferences on that? We are all ears!

Evan @ MtT

sprite’s picture

A PDF for documentation isn't necessary, IMO.

Having detailed documentation for each theme on the company web site seems like a better approach.

The documentation is necessary for multiple reasons.

The documentation should clarify that using the install profile is essential in order to obtain all the features of the theme.

The documentation is necessary to document how to work with the custom content types included with the theme.

The documentation is necessary to explain individualization of the various features (special blocks and so on).

Only a seasoned Drupal developer would know how to work with the above in the absence of documentation.

--

Updating the drupal core and the contrib modules was quite easy and did not require much time effort.

Checking proper function after the core and module update wasn't difficult either.

--

The product is worth its price, even though understanding it requires advanced drupal knowledge.

I suspect I will purchase the complete developer pack of all the themes at some point in the future.

spritefully yours
Technical assistance provided to the Drupal community on my own time ...
Thank yous appreciated ...

evankay’s picture

Many thanks for the ongoing feedback and constructive criticism. As I said, we’re listening and are moving accordingly.

Cheers,
Evan @ MtT