Suggestions to theme forest on their theme packaging

Hi,

Thank you for replying to my tweet so fast. Awesome!

We have an automated system to deploy drupal websites. So what we have is a system that creates a dev-staging-live workflow with repository and jenkins for each project. What we want is to give that process a theme package so it can automatically install the correct sources and install the drupal theme. We have been using template monsters themes for a while now and this works great because they use a standard packaging. So the sources are always in the same location. The database dump is in the same location. We can give the tarball to our script and everything works out fine.
We discovered themeforest which has awesome responsive themes and we really like to offer these themes to our clients too.

Here is what I m facing:
Yesterday I bought two themes to test the automation. I was a horrible experience. Both themes are completely packaged different. No standard at all.

I bought haiku and finesse

This is the haiku folder layout
> haiku_install_plus_standalone
>> drupal_7/ (containing sources)

database is located in:
> haiku_install_plus_standalone/Haiku.zip

Haiku theme even contains a .git folder that made my deployment fail. This should be fixed.

This is the finesse layout
> Finesse_Themeforest
>> For New Fresh Drupal Installation
>>> source_code (drupal sources)

database is located in
>> Finesse_Themeforest/For New Fresh Drupal Installation/source_code/data.sql

You see that the installation of this cannot be automated. You need to go in manualy.

If you look at templatemonster you ll see that they have a great standard in place. If themeforest could have that too that would be great. I m just thinking about the wins for you guys too. It must be a lot easier to maintain too if you have standards. You can enforce this easely upon your themers.

What I suggest is:
* a fixed location of the sources
* a fixed location to the [theme_name].sql
* consistent naming
** same name for the archive as for the theme folder and sql file

This way installation of the themes can be automated and this will save us valuable time.

I hope I making sense. We still will use your themes but it is more work for us. So if we can choose for a client between themeforest and template monster we know we win half an hour-hour and on small sites, with small margins that is significant. Since the market themeforest is in depends on small margins I believe you should get in the standards not only to accommodate clients who use the themes automated but also to simplify your jobs too maintaining it all. It is far easier to do security reviews if all is standardized.

Our beta platform is right now buying about 5 templates a month but we hope to increase sales as will release the alpha of our platform and making it available to re-sellers. This means that we will be buying a lots of licences.

Thanks for listening.

Dominique De Cooman