Designers and developers who have worked with any of the major CMS platforms like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal over the last few years, might be familiar with Artisteer – A desktop editing program that lets you visually create a theme for your preferred CMS and export the files to upload to your site.
Overall it was not a bad program if you wanted to build basic themes but was also not a great product. Somewhat limiting and clunky to work in, users were somewhat forced into one of a few basic site looks.
Now, after 3 years of development, Artisteer has launched a product called Themler. This innovative new piece of software can be used to create responsive web designs for content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Drupal and PrestaShop and template design for e-commerce plug-ins like wooCommerce and VirtueMart that work with WordPress and Joomla.
Themler is the first of its kind to offer template creating for this many CMS platforms, but the improvements over Artisteer only start there. It also gives users access to an extensive library of over 200,000 stock photos and graphics that users can use when building their themes and templates.
One of the coolest new features is that it is not only a desktop program but can be uploaded right into your CMS of choice and built and previewed in real-time. Desktop options are only available for Windows at the time of this writing, but Mac and Linux options are in development.
If you are not feeling creative, Themler comes with a library of over 4,000 web templates for WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Drupal and other CMS and e-commerce systems.
People who a little more ambitious can build and tweak out ever aspect of the templates they create, giving full design freedom to create even the most complex themes. The built-in drag-and-drop features make it easy for even the most inexperienced user to create great looking responsive CMS themes.
Artisteer has put over $2 million and 3 years of hard work into Themler, believing it will change the way developers and designers produce designs for the new wave of CMS-based websites. Based on what I have seen so far, this definitely appears to be a game changer for theme developers. Since you can not only build and deploy these themes to your site, but you can also build and sell your themes. Themler gives an export option that lets you download your creation for backup purposes or to sell.
Themler is currently available at www.themler.com at prices ranging from $49 to $199, depending on the desired features.
