Can A Theme Developer Put Himself Out Of Business?

Over the weekend, I finally had a chance to sit down and beta test a new theme from iThemes called Builder. The theme aims to blow the walls off of Flexx and take theme development to the next level.

I won’t dive into a lengthy review here but in the Builder theme, users can easily build Layouts. In the time span of 5 minutes, I created a layout that mimics the one I’m using on WPTavern.com complete with the widget spots.

Created this layout in just a few minutes

After building my layout with clicks of the mouse and not having to touch one bit of PHP code, the only thing left for me to do is style the layout through CSS. This is the type of theme framework I can get behind which doesn’t require me to know hooks or filters, etc although I’m sure those are built in. One of my wishes for WordPress was to one day, be able to use a WYSIWYG theme creation tool where I could whip up a theme using standard elements. Although Builder and Elastic are not exactly what I had in mind, they are pretty darn close and both impress me quite a bit. They really empower the end user to create things instead of relying on a developer.

Between Builder and Elastic, I’m wondering if it’s possible for a theme developer to put himself out of business by creating and releasing something that for the most part, removes the developer from the equation. Let’s discuss.

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