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[tom_laan84 Friend tom_laan84Join date: June 2008Posts: 348Downloads:142Uploads:30 Thanks: 88 Thanked: 67 times in 11 posts]

#1011366

Hi Arvind,

I like to know where are the rest of the 2016 templates we were promised? You guys have been focussing on too much side things and not keeping up with the 12 templates a year we as developers need to be able to offer our customers some diversity.

Up till july everything was ok.

• Januari JA Playstore
• Febuari JA Elicyon
• March JA Moviemax
• April JA Medicare
• May JA Resume
• June JA Megastore
• July JA Intranet
• August? JA Restaurant
• September? JA Brickstore

Well i am missing 3 templates.. Since i am missing 3 out of 12 templates Me and i guess all other members would like to get a refund of 25%.

Kind regards, Tom

[Arvind Chauhan Moderator Arvind ChauhanJoin date: September 2014Posts: 3835Downloads:74Uploads:92 Thanks: 1240 Thanked: 1334 times in 848 posts]

#1011588

Hi Tom,

I will try to answer this one in detail and before jumping to any conclusions, try to understand what we have been trying to do.

1. JA Simpli was also released, in spite of it being free, it is a release for all including club membership. Our free products get the same attention as our commercial ones.
2. JA Pokemon was canceled midway, we could have modified and released it but we shelved the whole template as it was not what member’s had in mind. From our point of view, to work on something that is trending is worth giving a shot. Failures or success happen only when we try to do something. Sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. Who knew Purity III would be a hit or any of our other templates in that matter?
3. JA Pokemon got us delayed by 15 days.
4. JA Intranet and JA Restuarant templates too took more time to develop as the features were more and integrations with multiple extensions took time. We chose to focus on quality and features.
5. JA Builder is our featured project for 2016 and we have taken a different approach in building it and it took us lots of resources to bring it to this stage. Now with the structure and workflow in place, we can provide more blocks and ready to use pages for members.
6. Builder will have a premium version too and will be available for free to JATC and JA Developer.
7. Just look at this example. This whole site is builder based, I am sure you can imagine the possibilities when a bigger library of blocks and pages are made available.
8. Builder is way bigger and powerful than a regular template, one can not deny this.
9. Members wanted us to release more of Uber layouts and blocks instead of monthly template, if we look around in the forum we can see many such requests. But ACM module has limits, Uber itself has limits and then the framework. Builder is what the next Uber template would have been but we did it in such a way that it can be used to build multiple templates.

Now, for what I am going to say next can be easily misconstrued, while we release monthly templates, we do not list the number of templates a year we will be releasing, you can check the pricing page or terms of use for this information. This is in place for over a year and a half, when we upgraded JoomlArt.com to new systems in November 2015. Now, let me answer the questions you may have:

Q. Why we did not announce the above? A. Because, we have no intentions of stopping monthly templates, as long as Joomla is doing well in the competition it is facing from WordPress and other players. I do not want to go into details but it is a fact that Joomla has been consistently losing its market share to other players for the past 3 years and it is more evident when you see extensions developer or template developers selling WordPress versions of their popular Joomla products.

Coming back to your question of missing 3 templates. With JA Simply counted, the missing templates are 2 for last year and given the time devoted to developing Pokemon, Intranet, Restaurant template and Builder tool, which alone I am assured is worth much more than 2 templates and as I have stated earlier also in few of the replies in this forum I again reiterate that we will work and release more templates this year.

The decision to make JA Builder premium version available for Free to JATC and JA Developer members is based solely on the trust, patience and understanding members have bestowed on us especially when we had to delay template releases to focus on Builder tool, which makes templating easier for members, is light and simpler to understand. Template frameworks have gone too complex and we can’t close our eyes to the reality we face in this fast changing tech age. Some tough decisions were required and I made the decision to delay one monthly template to get JA Builder done rather release Uber III with more ACM blocks.

With Builder RC release yesterday, I shall have more resources to work on monthly templates concurrently with building blocks and pages library for JA Builder.

T3 Framework is due to major rehaul and refactoring but that means T4 framework and that opens pandora box with backward compatibilities, upgrades, migrations. I want to avoid that vicious cycle which has frustrated us all for years.

We at JoomlArt take criticism in good spirit and it challenges us to develop products that our members can effectively use in their projects. We would not be here if it wasn’t for our members.

I hope this reply of mine will help to clear the confusion.

Regards

Arvind
COO, JoomlArt

4 users say Thank You to Arvind Chauhan for this useful post

1. Hong Le
2. Css Magician
3. tom_laan84
4. Pankaj Sharma

[tom_laan84 Friend tom_laan84Join date: June 2008Posts: 348Downloads:142Uploads:30 Thanks: 88 Thanked: 67 times in 11 posts]

#1011628

Arvind thanks for replying and trying to explain it. Let me reply to your response by number so we won’t get confused.

1. JA Simpli was a BONUS template. never have free templates been used in place of a monthly premium template. and Simply is so bare bones it shouldn’t count as a paid template. I already thought you would say this. But it is not true. There were 2 templates released in April. JA Healthcare and JA Simpli. It states JA Simply is a april template so it never counted to a "monthly template" else it would’ve been released in a month where we should’ve gotten a paid template. It didn’t. So that is not correct.

2-3-4. Delays: we shouldn’t be the victims of your understaffing or misplaced priorities. Either catch up or refund us for the delays? I need those twelve templates to offer my customers enough diversity.

1. JA Builder is still in development so that can’t count for monthly templates since there is no product ready. Also JA Builder is not interesting for us developers. It is a consumer product not a developer product. JA Builder is just a copy of Uber and ACM with even less overriding posibillities!

2. I don’t hear anything or see anything about a premium version and what that is different from a free version. Also they are not here yet so can’t count to the template total we expect each year.

4-7. The demo JA Builder site looks exactly like EVERY UBER website out there. There is no difference in styling. Just in locations of the content blocks. All content blocks have same style. I can’t sell the same styling to all my clients can i? Bootstrap already made the web look a lot the same. But JA Builder and Uber take that to the next level.

1. Bigger and Powerful is true. But not better. My customers and i are not looking for an all-in-one solution that makes every website we create look exactly the same. We need diversification like you used to do with the templates. So we can make a choice for a style and functionality and use that in our project. Override it with the "local" folder and be able to customize the .less files and put them in local folder. That is what the developer members need.

2. Yeah we wanted more ACM styles for sure because they all look the same. And in JA Builder they still look the same. Also i wonder how many of your highly paid Developer members really are wanting this JA Page Builder. I know i am not looking for this stuff and my clients either. For people with no coding and css styling skills it is ok. But please people go get yourself a website from jimdo.com or something. And if you do see a future for JA Builder don’t let it hurt the Developer members and make it a seperate thing from the templates. Not a very poor replacement for the templates.

Looking forward to see more templates this year for sure. Also very interested in what T4 is going to offer because indeed T3 is not the latest greatest system for a while now.

Please hire some more folks because it seems you are trying to do too much with not enough people and it has been hurting JA quality since november 2015.

Also please take the Developer Members into account when building new stuff. We want to be able to override as much as possible and not with an ancient custom.css file. I always like the way of placing a copy of the edited file in the "local" folder. Unfortunately T3 has still a lot of files that don’t look for a edited version in local folder. for instance the assets.xml file in etc. i guess on update that will get overriden again.

Kind regards,
Tom

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