Templates for third party components.

Hi guys, greetings from suburbia of Novi Sad again

I dont know did you already make this in some of your indeed great templates, but how do you feel about creating a theme with included overrides for popular third party components so they can blend in actual design of a theme.

Im sure you are perfectly aware that average Joomla based site is not only about Joomla, but about extensions too.
Its a tedious process to adjust them according to template design every time, because they never look good with own skins.
Take a look at Kunena on this site for example.
It just jumps out from design

I know that can/would increase the workload in the template making/updating process, specifically when new version of respective component is available, but you can take the Rocket Theme approach where they style 3pd components in their template.css file, not touching the component template files at all thus, ensuring the compatibility in a long terms.

Do tell me what are your toughs on that?

My Best
Sinisa

VirtueMart is a component that we have templates for. In such templates (Furniture Store and eCommerce, more to come...) we created exactly what you suggested: styling for 3rd party component (css mostly).

There are over 6000 extensions for Joomla available and we can't cover all of them, of course. Regarding the forum component, many people like Forum to be completely outside the main site (many people uses phpBB, SMF, vBulletin...), that's one approach, however, we tried to integrate our forum in the main site, and I think it's integrated well.

Development of Forum styling is complex and even if we decide to offer such things in future, I think they will be sold separately. Just like the RT that has a separate club for phpBB.