Earlier this week, WP Theming‘s Devin Price announced a partnership with French translation specialist Fx Benard on a new theme shop aimed at the French-speaking WordPress community. Hexagone is now open for business with four products available – two commercial themes and two free themes.
The duo plan to expand to offer more “products, support, content, and documentation in the language of Molière.” Price joined forces with Bernard after successfully working with him on translation workflows and French translations for DevPress themes. The shop’s name is derived from “l’Hexagone,” which is often used to describe France’s geographical shape.
Price and Bernard are aiming to make Hexagone the leading source for WordPress themes and tutorials in French. “There aren’t too many companies in this space yet, and we’re hoping a great company that’s devoted to the ideals of open-source can do well,” he said. “There’s 75 million native speakers of French and about 338 million total.”
While the vast majority of theme shops conduct business and support in English, the number of non-English speaking WordPress users is on the rise. Hexagone’s founders believe that the market is ripe for a theme shop that can provide French language-specific products, documentation, articles, and support. “If it takes off, we’d love to hire some writers and developers to work with us full-time,” Price said.
Hexagone published a detailed writeup of the technologies used to build the online storefront. The site is powered by Easy Digital Downloads, Stripe, Gravity Forms, and their Reunion theme. The article offers insight on the different types of plugins and technologies useful for selling digital products with WordPress.
If Hexagone is successful, it will demonstrate that there is room in the wide world of WordPress themes for more language-niche theme shops. WordPress’ continued international success depends on the ability for non-English speakers to be able to find documentation and support in their own native languages. Hexagone is setting out to prove that the French market is ready for it.
Sure, there’s a market for it. Really, absolutely no surprise here.
There was already a quite popular German-based (free) theme directory around 2006/ 2007. That was discontinued for a lot of reasons (as of my knowledge), but surely not because of language-based reasons.
I hope this new shop will be a success and many more language and/or niche-based shops to follow!
Congrats to all behind this initiative! :)