Fins

You may find that these themes are the last mile in a long search for the perfect SSG. That was the intention, when creating them.

Hey! Thumbnails or even Installation is where to go if you want the eye-candy or quick view.

Fins - a collection of 17 Rocket Themes

Rocket Themes is my answer to the problem given to me by a former employer, and future customers: "We can't use Rocket because the site we need doesn't look like that."

So Rocket themes let me swap look and feel in as little as 30 seconds. No imagination required - Rocket can now be considered for sites that look entirely different.

Learning from WordPress

It also might be possible that the biggest single factor to Wordpress's success - currently 38% of the internet - is themes? It's hard to know.

I created these starter themes as one way to allow Rocket to eventually grow into some of those same markets that would otherwise be unavailable to it.

Proving out theme-ability

These starter themes give you very modest blocking for theming out your own Rocket site without getting tangled up in the Rocket codebase. Proving out how theming might work is an important step in giving Rocket a proper lift-off in the marketplace.

These themes are not currently presented as finished products like Wordpress a theme would, but instead as a head start for devs already planning on creating their own site specific theme from HTML and CSS. Like SSGs, these themes are targeted to at least minimally skilled developers.

Pull requests are accepted, if you wish to improve any of these base themes. Or, publish your own! The whole idea is giving Rocket that launch, however acheived.

Branding and individuality

Humans are crazy about individuality. Everything has to be "my" brand, my personality, nevermind other issues.

Without themes, the Rocket market could be temporarily trapped in a Henry-Ford-like "any color, as long as it is black" flavor of exclusivity. That would be unfortunate, because Rocket is a great tool.

Without themes, Rocket can still be individualized. It's just a bit less obvious, and that little bit can sometimes deter an early adopter.

Swappable

The biggest challenge with theming any codebase isn't the theme itself, initially. It's making it swappable.

When you write the first implelmentation of anything, especially something as ambitious as Rocket, you have to just blast through the process and get it done. You can't worry about stuff like "How is the next guy going to customize this header without copypasting the entire yada.css file into the _assets directory?". Uh oh.

So it was important for someone to try this first exercise, even if the result itself is not the primary objective.

Months of research have proved out: these themes have been proved to be swappable, I've already had to do so, several times. It worked, even when the first theme had already been customized. Git diffing in vsCode made it a pretty straightforward affair.

Customizeable

Again, contrasting these themes to the mature Wordpress market, each time you "implement" one of these themes, really what you are doing is copypasting in your own one-way fork. That's the bad news. I cover more of that here

The good news is that, now you've kicked off the customization process on steroids and made it super obvious. That can be helpful.

Theming Community

It is yet to be discovered whether a theming community should or could take root.

I'm not the most social person in the universe, so another person might have to help collaborate if that was to take place.