Hello Theme Designers!

Erstwhile Framework is looking for open source theme developers who can help us provide bundled themes for our framework. We are also looking for people interested in helping us define our standard tag specifications for UI elements to help ensure interoperability between different themes.

If you’re interested please shoot us an email to discord@restlessdev.com and we’ll send you an invite to our Discord. Please feel free to give a little background to your theme experience or links to themes you’ve built in the past. If you don’t have any, that’s also fine!

How do I build an Erstwhile theme?


You can find a description of how Erstwhile themes (and components in general) work by clicking here.

In general, it’s not too difficult to change any Bootstrap-based theme into an Erstwhile theme. Each theme has a directory structure, a theme Javascript file, all of the assets needed to display the theme, and a set of component directories for each component that the theme defines.

We also have a sample application called Todos which has a barebones theme included in it (called Mazer) that you can use as a starting point.

Would I get paid for building a theme?


No, we unfortunately don’t have the funding for that.

As Erstwhile is an open source framework, we require our bundled themes to be open source as well so that our users feel confident in building with them. You would get credit for your contribution though, and a link to your website for anyone looking for customization or other consulting work.

What is a tag specification?


Erstwhile components are essentially custom HTML tags which you can use inline with your HTML code when building out your applications. Like other HTML tags, they have a set of valid attributes and/or child tags that can be used to give them data that they use when rendering themselves.

We would like to create a specification for the attributes and child tags for a set of standard components so that theme designers would know what to implement to make a compatible theme. This would encompass everything from simple <TextInput> tags to more advanced <Datatable> or <Autocomplete> tags.

You can switch themes in Erstwhile by changing a string an a configuration file, so the idea is that if a series of themes all support these standard components you can switch between them really easily.