7 ms·

Show HN: I built an easier way to browse ThemeForest

78 points by polyfractal 15y ago

polyfractal 15y ago
I built ThemeSquirrel since I really like ThemeForest, but absolutely hate the browsing method. I don't want to mouse over every thumbnail to see the larger preview. ThemeSquirrel was directly inspired by Scrollsy, the infinite scroller for Etsy that another HNer created recently (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3458214 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3458214)
- JonathanBouman 15y ago
  Founder of http://scrolldit.com http://scrolldit.com and http://scrollsy.com http://scrollsy.com here. Great job! Love the design. You may consider to preload the first x designs in the html directly, its better for the seo. What about fixing deeplink urls when people click your menu? Just use a hash. Will take a look.at your Js tomorrow, got to sleep now.
adambard 15y ago
It works really well. But, I consider anyone who finds the dense grid display easier than browsing down a list a savant; I have trouble focusing on just one thumbnail in the sea of others. Wasn't there a recent article about the merits of list vs box display? Anyhow, if I narrow my window down, it looks great and my complaints go away, so good work.
- polyfractal 15y ago
  I've begun to suspect the same thing. I'd love to read that article if you can find the link. I'll add "Single-column mode" to my to-do list. I think I will also make the "Large preview mode" default as well for much the same reason. I built the whole thing thinking a lot of thumbnails would be awesome. Which is funny because, now that it is built, I agree that it can be distracting. Oops!
  - shawnc 15y ago
    I love the idea, and if you default it to those I agree it will be better. I had the same thoughts of 'i can't focus, nothing looks good to me'.
  - prsimp 15y ago
    User westiseast posted a blog post[1] about A/B testing a grid vs. list product displays on his online tea shop, Min River Tea, which lead to a pretty good discussion on the topic[2]. [1] http://westiseast.co.uk/blog/product-listing-ab-test-results/ http://westiseast.co.uk/blog/product-listing-ab-test-results... [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3223092 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3223092
- mattypants 15y ago
  I feel the same way, it's nice on my smartphone because the thumbs are pushed into one column. Themeforest is great, and I browse their templates weekly, if not daily, but what's with 99% of web themes having 400px high sliders on the index pages, sheesh!
- libria 15y ago
  > Wasn't there a recent article about the merits of list vs box display? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3223092 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3223092
byoung2 15y ago
Looks cool, and a nice way to get some affiliate revenue. I would suggest adding some filters (like sort by number of purchases, price, etc.), and search parameters.
- polyfractal 15y ago
  Already on the to-do list for the next version! :) Unfortunately, Envato has a rather poor affiliate program. You only make money when A) a new user signs up to their service and B) deposits money into their account. Since most people using a tool for ThemeForest probably already have an account I don't expect to make much money. But that's ok, this was mostly built for fun and as a portfolio piece.
  - byoung2 15y ago
    Unfortunately, Envato has a rather poor affiliate program Yeah, this is an ongoing issue on the Envato forums. Most new users coming to the site probably don't make a large deposit to start. Like me, they started out with a deposit large enough to purchase a single file, or around $35. Later, when they decide they like it, they'll deposit more, but that doesn't reward the affiliate. I think they should have a smaller percentage, but spread out over the first X months, or X deposits.
    - johnb 15y ago
      We built the referral system long before we had buy it now, and a higher minimum deposit. The last serious re-visit it got was close to four years ago. It's one of those made sense at the times things that continue to work OK. Keeping on top of referral fraud is a bit tricky too, and gets worse the more complex you make the referral system. edit I also remember that way back then when the code was redone there was no themeforest, just flashden and audiojungle. We were heavily focused on finding new customers more than directing people to specific files. So that might give you a bit of context.
epikur 15y ago
It would be nice if clicking a thumbnail went straight to the live preview. Or, if each thumbnail had two links visible, one for the info page and one for the live preview. I guess this might not work as well with your referral code though. If you switched to a 1-column grid, the rest of the screen could be a frame that displayed the live preview inline. E.g. Alien Blue for iPad's UI.
- aibon 15y ago
  checkout http://thethemelist.com http://thethemelist.com, which provides that. and a real screenshot of the theme
  - polyfractal 15y ago
    That's a pretty slick site. To be honest, I think they pulled it off better than I did. Thanks sharing it!
alpb 15y ago
Just wondering, do you earn anything out of this? Does Themeforest have an affiliation model, if so, is it per click or purchase?
- polyfractal 15y ago
  Theoretically, yes, I can earn some money. ThemeForest's affiliate model kinda sucks though. Users have to click through and then A) sign up for a new account and B) deposit money into their account.
  - justindocanto 15y ago
    I'm sure they would love to hear an affiliate talking about their company like this. And this isn't requirements of users who come in via affiliate links, that's how their entire website works... you have to have an account and deposit money in order to buy anything.
47 15y ago
Will be great if you can filter down to sub category let say Admin Templates
- polyfractal 15y ago
  You can! Click the white acorn to expand/collapse each sub-category
  - roryokane 15y ago
    It is not obvious that the acorns are actually disclosure arrows – they look like just list bullets. I think using the standard triangle shapes would be better. Or perhaps acorns in the shape of triangles, and pointing right or down like disclosure arrows.
  - jrberger 15y ago
    i didn't even notice the acorns until you mentioned it. don't sacrifice usability for better looks.
  - jrberger 15y ago
    Drilling down to some categories yields some with no results. (Maybe grey out and don't provide a click-thru to the category if it has no items..)
  - polyfractal 15y ago
    Thanks for the usability comments guys, I'll switch the acorns to something a bit more obvious :)
jpdoctor 15y ago
Much faster browsing. I would like some way of grouping and also upvoting. I know, we're never satisfied.
- polyfractal 15y ago
  Sorting options (sort by name, price, rating, etc) are on the short list for me to implement. I actually have a lot of that data in my database right now, just no code to implement it yet client-side. Upvoting is interesting though: do you mean voting on ThemeForest "through" ThemeSquirrel, or some kind of rating system that is local to my web-app?
  - jpdoctor 15y ago
    Up voting thru your app (plus comments) might be an interesting value add.
XLcommerce 15y ago
Great site, however hate the infinite scroll. Makes it impossible to bookmark your place in the list (and is very disorienting). Also the animations of new tiles coming in are choppy and distracting. Would work much better as a simple paged list with an option to set page size for people who prefer more options/page.
ilovezombies 15y ago
I apologize in advance if this isn't the correct place to ask, but how were you able to create a page crawler like this? What does your stack look like?
- polyfractal 15y ago
  ThemeForest was scraped using a simple PHP script that fed the data through a regular expression to pull out the data. I used Baobab[1] to create the hierarchical nested-set model for categories. Another PHP script provides the JSON API interface. It takes category ids and spits out JSON for the client-side script to consume. The script itself is predominantly jsTree (the navigation on the left) and jQuery Masonry (the elements in the middle). I have a 512 Linode acting as the origin server, with CloudFront providing most of the static assets (gzipped scripts, css, images, etc) [1] http://www.sideralis.org/baobab/ http://www.sideralis.org/baobab/
aculver 15y ago
Great idea, however one of the things I most dislike about ThemeForest that is still present here are the marketing images for each theme. I'd rather just see a picture of what the template looks like.
jrberger 15y ago
would it be possible to have a display mode where: at the left would be a single-column scrolling list of the templates as they currently are (thumbnail + title), then to the right would be scaled down version of the live preview. then, at the top of the live preview frame, have a previous and next nav items so a user can just continuously view "near-live" sites as quick as possible. (edit: http://imgur.com/50JSp http://imgur.com/50JSp)
- polyfractal 15y ago
  I think this would be very doable using iFrames. Not sure how well the live-preview sites would look inside of an iFrame, but it is an intriguing layout. I'll look into it!
justindocanto 15y ago
Why is this on the front page? This isn't news, innovative, attractive, useful... none of the above. This is basically a tumblr of theme photos that have affiliate links to make you money. This is just an affiliate landing page with a wood texture. And as somebody who spends thousands a year on TF, this site is not useful to me. Sorry, just... this doesn't seem like Hacker News to me.
- bootload 15y ago
  "... Why is this on the front page? This isn't news, innovative, attractive, useful... none of the above ...this doesn't seem like Hacker News to me." You've been here for 25 days and yet your sure this article isn't worthy? I've been stumbling around for 1797 days and I still can't work out exactly what articles are "interesting to hackers" [0] Here's a hint. I find it interesting because @polyfractal displays a "HN" favourite, showing, instead of telling. If you've got experience using TF do @polyfractal a favour and explain why, instead of venting? The backbone of HN is hackers building something, showing, getting some useful feedback & rebuilding. Lead the way. [0] "What to submit" ~ http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - justindocanto 15y ago
    I've been reading HN for almost 2 years now. I just recently made an account to comment. As somebody who has beenprogramming for 5 years & has been an avid user of theme forest for the last year... i still dont find this front page worthy, down vote or not. Somebody scraping a site and making a less useful and less attractive version is not news to me. Websites like this making the front page on Hacker News make it equally as interesting & useful to me as say... Pintrest. Had envato sold Theme Forest, ok... that's front news worthy. But a thin, scraped, less useful version of a site that already exists? I continue to hold my stance.
    - nedwin 15y ago
      I actually find this more useful. I've spent countless hours trolling through trying to find .psd templates, admin panels, keynote templates and quick and dirty Wordpress themes for MVP's. This will greatly reduce the friction in scouring all of the files. Seems like I'm not the only one who has found it useful and interesting.
motyar 15y ago
Cool.. but stop the "Sorry no more item".. I think you got it.
nhebb 15y ago
Your site is much better than most of the scrolling preview sites (e.g., thethemelist.com is stylistic but too visually overpowering and cluttered for my eyes to parse). I say this as someone currently looking for a template. Using your site with large previews, the images were clear and easily scanned. I was able to find two potential templates and bookmark them within a few minutes.
nedwin 15y ago
Considering the amount of incredible tech talent at ThemeForest I'm surprised they haven't built a better way to consume all of their content. Same goes across the whole Envato company. Hopefully they're planning a hack day or similar for this exact purpose.

78 points by polyfractal 15y ago

I built ThemeSquirrel since I really like ThemeForest, but absolutely hate the browsing method. I don't want to mouse over every thumbnail to see the larger preview. ThemeSquirrel was directly inspired by Scrollsy, the infinite scroller for Etsy that another HNer created recently (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3458214 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3458214)

JonathanBouman 15y ago
Founder of http://scrolldit.com http://scrolldit.com and http://scrollsy.com http://scrollsy.com here. Great job! Love the design. You may consider to preload the first x designs in the html directly, its better for the seo. What about fixing deeplink urls when people click your menu? Just use a hash. Will take a look.at your Js tomorrow, got to sleep now.

adambard 15y ago

It works really well. But, I consider anyone who finds the dense grid display easier than browsing down a list a savant; I have trouble focusing on just one thumbnail in the sea of others. Wasn't there a recent article about the merits of list vs box display? Anyhow, if I narrow my window down, it looks great and my complaints go away, so good work.

polyfractal 15y ago
I've begun to suspect the same thing. I'd love to read that article if you can find the link. I'll add "Single-column mode" to my to-do list. I think I will also make the "Large preview mode" default as well for much the same reason. I built the whole thing thinking a lot of thumbnails would be awesome. Which is funny because, now that it is built, I agree that it can be distracting. Oops!
- shawnc 15y ago
  I love the idea, and if you default it to those I agree it will be better. I had the same thoughts of 'i can't focus, nothing looks good to me'.
- prsimp 15y ago
  User westiseast posted a blog post[1] about A/B testing a grid vs. list product displays on his online tea shop, Min River Tea, which lead to a pretty good discussion on the topic[2]. [1] http://westiseast.co.uk/blog/product-listing-ab-test-results/ http://westiseast.co.uk/blog/product-listing-ab-test-results... [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3223092 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3223092
mattypants 15y ago
I feel the same way, it's nice on my smartphone because the thumbs are pushed into one column. Themeforest is great, and I browse their templates weekly, if not daily, but what's with 99% of web themes having 400px high sliders on the index pages, sheesh!
libria 15y ago
> Wasn't there a recent article about the merits of list vs box display? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3223092 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3223092

byoung2 15y ago

Looks cool, and a nice way to get some affiliate revenue. I would suggest adding some filters (like sort by number of purchases, price, etc.), and search parameters.

polyfractal 15y ago
Already on the to-do list for the next version! :) Unfortunately, Envato has a rather poor affiliate program. You only make money when A) a new user signs up to their service and B) deposits money into their account. Since most people using a tool for ThemeForest probably already have an account I don't expect to make much money. But that's ok, this was mostly built for fun and as a portfolio piece.
- byoung2 15y ago
  Unfortunately, Envato has a rather poor affiliate program Yeah, this is an ongoing issue on the Envato forums. Most new users coming to the site probably don't make a large deposit to start. Like me, they started out with a deposit large enough to purchase a single file, or around $35. Later, when they decide they like it, they'll deposit more, but that doesn't reward the affiliate. I think they should have a smaller percentage, but spread out over the first X months, or X deposits.
  - johnb 15y ago
    We built the referral system long before we had buy it now, and a higher minimum deposit. The last serious re-visit it got was close to four years ago. It's one of those made sense at the times things that continue to work OK. Keeping on top of referral fraud is a bit tricky too, and gets worse the more complex you make the referral system. edit I also remember that way back then when the code was redone there was no themeforest, just flashden and audiojungle. We were heavily focused on finding new customers more than directing people to specific files. So that might give you a bit of context.

epikur 15y ago

It would be nice if clicking a thumbnail went straight to the live preview. Or, if each thumbnail had two links visible, one for the info page and one for the live preview. I guess this might not work as well with your referral code though. If you switched to a 1-column grid, the rest of the screen could be a frame that displayed the live preview inline. E.g. Alien Blue for iPad's UI.

aibon 15y ago
checkout http://thethemelist.com http://thethemelist.com, which provides that. and a real screenshot of the theme
- polyfractal 15y ago
  That's a pretty slick site. To be honest, I think they pulled it off better than I did. Thanks sharing it!

alpb 15y ago

Just wondering, do you earn anything out of this? Does Themeforest have an affiliation model, if so, is it per click or purchase?

polyfractal 15y ago
Theoretically, yes, I can earn some money. ThemeForest's affiliate model kinda sucks though. Users have to click through and then A) sign up for a new account and B) deposit money into their account.
- justindocanto 15y ago
  I'm sure they would love to hear an affiliate talking about their company like this. And this isn't requirements of users who come in via affiliate links, that's how their entire website works... you have to have an account and deposit money in order to buy anything.

47 15y ago

Will be great if you can filter down to sub category let say Admin Templates

polyfractal 15y ago
You can! Click the white acorn to expand/collapse each sub-category
- roryokane 15y ago
  It is not obvious that the acorns are actually disclosure arrows – they look like just list bullets. I think using the standard triangle shapes would be better. Or perhaps acorns in the shape of triangles, and pointing right or down like disclosure arrows.
- jrberger 15y ago
  i didn't even notice the acorns until you mentioned it. don't sacrifice usability for better looks.
- jrberger 15y ago
  Drilling down to some categories yields some with no results. (Maybe grey out and don't provide a click-thru to the category if it has no items..)
- polyfractal 15y ago
  Thanks for the usability comments guys, I'll switch the acorns to something a bit more obvious :)

jpdoctor 15y ago

Much faster browsing. I would like some way of grouping and also upvoting. I know, we're never satisfied.

polyfractal 15y ago
Sorting options (sort by name, price, rating, etc) are on the short list for me to implement. I actually have a lot of that data in my database right now, just no code to implement it yet client-side. Upvoting is interesting though: do you mean voting on ThemeForest "through" ThemeSquirrel, or some kind of rating system that is local to my web-app?
- jpdoctor 15y ago
  Up voting thru your app (plus comments) might be an interesting value add.

XLcommerce 15y ago

Great site, however hate the infinite scroll. Makes it impossible to bookmark your place in the list (and is very disorienting). Also the animations of new tiles coming in are choppy and distracting. Would work much better as a simple paged list with an option to set page size for people who prefer more options/page.

ilovezombies 15y ago

I apologize in advance if this isn't the correct place to ask, but how were you able to create a page crawler like this? What does your stack look like?

polyfractal 15y ago
ThemeForest was scraped using a simple PHP script that fed the data through a regular expression to pull out the data. I used Baobab[1] to create the hierarchical nested-set model for categories. Another PHP script provides the JSON API interface. It takes category ids and spits out JSON for the client-side script to consume. The script itself is predominantly jsTree (the navigation on the left) and jQuery Masonry (the elements in the middle). I have a 512 Linode acting as the origin server, with CloudFront providing most of the static assets (gzipped scripts, css, images, etc) [1] http://www.sideralis.org/baobab/ http://www.sideralis.org/baobab/

aculver 15y ago

Great idea, however one of the things I most dislike about ThemeForest that is still present here are the marketing images for each theme. I'd rather just see a picture of what the template looks like.

jrberger 15y ago

would it be possible to have a display mode where: at the left would be a single-column scrolling list of the templates as they currently are (thumbnail + title), then to the right would be scaled down version of the live preview. then, at the top of the live preview frame, have a previous and next nav items so a user can just continuously view "near-live" sites as quick as possible. (edit: http://imgur.com/50JSp http://imgur.com/50JSp)

polyfractal 15y ago
I think this would be very doable using iFrames. Not sure how well the live-preview sites would look inside of an iFrame, but it is an intriguing layout. I'll look into it!

justindocanto 15y ago

Why is this on the front page? This isn't news, innovative, attractive, useful... none of the above. This is basically a tumblr of theme photos that have affiliate links to make you money. This is just an affiliate landing page with a wood texture. And as somebody who spends thousands a year on TF, this site is not useful to me. Sorry, just... this doesn't seem like Hacker News to me.

bootload 15y ago
"... Why is this on the front page? This isn't news, innovative, attractive, useful... none of the above ...this doesn't seem like Hacker News to me." You've been here for 25 days and yet your sure this article isn't worthy? I've been stumbling around for 1797 days and I still can't work out exactly what articles are "interesting to hackers" [0] Here's a hint. I find it interesting because @polyfractal displays a "HN" favourite, showing, instead of telling. If you've got experience using TF do @polyfractal a favour and explain why, instead of venting? The backbone of HN is hackers building something, showing, getting some useful feedback & rebuilding. Lead the way. [0] "What to submit" ~ http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- justindocanto 15y ago
  I've been reading HN for almost 2 years now. I just recently made an account to comment. As somebody who has beenprogramming for 5 years & has been an avid user of theme forest for the last year... i still dont find this front page worthy, down vote or not. Somebody scraping a site and making a less useful and less attractive version is not news to me. Websites like this making the front page on Hacker News make it equally as interesting & useful to me as say... Pintrest. Had envato sold Theme Forest, ok... that's front news worthy. But a thin, scraped, less useful version of a site that already exists? I continue to hold my stance.
  - nedwin 15y ago
    I actually find this more useful. I've spent countless hours trolling through trying to find .psd templates, admin panels, keynote templates and quick and dirty Wordpress themes for MVP's. This will greatly reduce the friction in scouring all of the files. Seems like I'm not the only one who has found it useful and interesting.

motyar 15y ago

Cool.. but stop the "Sorry no more item".. I think you got it.

nhebb 15y ago

Your site is much better than most of the scrolling preview sites (e.g., thethemelist.com is stylistic but too visually overpowering and cluttered for my eyes to parse). I say this as someone currently looking for a template. Using your site with large previews, the images were clear and easily scanned. I was able to find two potential templates and bookmark them within a few minutes.

nedwin 15y ago

Considering the amount of incredible tech talent at ThemeForest I'm surprised they haven't built a better way to consume all of their content. Same goes across the whole Envato company. Hopefully they're planning a hack day or similar for this exact purpose.