The Theme Foundry today announced Make, a free theme that “takes the drag and drop page builder from Basis to the next level.” The fact that Make is a free theme is notable, as most of The Theme Foundry’s themes for the past six years have been commercial themes.
Make’s main focus is on the drag and drop page builder, which debuted with Basis last November. Included in the announcement today is a companion plugin called Make Plus, which adds such things as a WooCommerce section available in the page builder, Typekit integration, support, and other features.
Open for community contributions
Also notable is that the sales page for Make prominently links to the Github repository, encouraging people to fork and contribute to Make.
This is a good thing for a few reasons, in my mind.
First, it means that The Theme Foundry will potentially benefit from contributions made by folks outside their organization, which then makes their product even better.
Second, it builds goodwill in the community, as it’s yet another action that shows their dedication to open source.
Third, it makes the code that powers things like the drag and drop page builder freely accessible, which could result in further innovation, new products, etc. which have the potential to benefit the larger community.
Multiple demos and flexibility
Make comes built in with three demos to give users an idea of what can be done with the theme. They showcase a portfolio website, a more traditional use case, and a cooking blog. I like the way they did the different demos, as it gives a much better idea of the type of things Make can do.
Those of you who tried Basis when it came out will be familiar with the backend drag and drop functionality in Make. But it does include some significant enhancements that you may like to try again. Specifically, there is more flexibility for controlling the number of text columns, and a few other handy features.
Make Plus
Make Plus is the companion plugin The Theme Foundry is releasing alongside Make. At $99, it’s completely add-on functionality, hooked into the Make theme to add additional support for a variety of features.
