18 Hugo themes Are Now Opensourced
Hi, it’s Mehedi, Creator of Themefisher, and a big fan of Hugo, Bootstrap and pixel perfect design.
Maybe you heard of Themefisher before, we currently have 18 themes in the Hugo themes directory https://themes.gohugo.io/tags/themefisher/. Most of them were released under a Creative Commons 3.0 license. Some were already released under the MIT license, like Northendlab and the Dot Documentation theme and they are very popular among the community. In the last few days I thought let’s break the barrier and move all our themes to the community and make them free and open source. From now on all of our themes in the Hugo directory are open-sourced. We choose the MIT license because Hugo itself is released under it.
List of themes that were moved to MIT license:
Our Journey with Hugo
At Themefisher we developed Bootstrap Themes since 2013 and we are a bit popular in the bootstrap community. Two years back (2018) in a Git repository someone tagged me with an issue. At that time I had no idea what Hugo is and how it works.
After getting tagged by the community I got interested in Hugo and thought why not convert a few of our bootstrap templates to Hugo themes for this community. Today we have more than 40 Hugo themes. We try to release at least two of our other Themefisher themes ported to Hugo per month. And there are more to come.
Idea Behind Moving our license to MIT
The idea behind publishing our themes under CC license was that designing and developing a theme takes time. And time is money. We hoped that our themes, when users wanted to remove our credits in the footer, would sell easier, to minimize our costs.
The results were not as we expected. People loved our themes but in return, we got small amounts of donations (sometimes less than a dollar). But with the themes, we already released under the MIT license the acceptance of our themes was much better. People loved them, thanked us and if they needed customizations they asked us to do that and paid for it.
In our original store, we had a few premium themes which we advertised in our free themes and we got a good amount of sales for them. This is another reason to now license these themes under an MIT license.
Further contribution to Hugo Community (Future Plans )
We will keep developing open source themes for the community and hopefully, we will release at least 2 themes per month. They all will be open source as well. In the meantime, we created a profile in https://spectrum.chat/themefisher where anyone can join, ask help for our themes and also request new themes categories or features. We will also be very responsive here in the Hugo Discourse Forum. We want to give back to this incredible community and help with our knowledge. In the meantime, if anyone wants to contribute to our themes please follow our Github repositories (https://github.com/themefisher). Let’s create great Hugo websites together!