What Is RocketTheme and What Happened to It?

Updated

RocketTheme was a commercial provider of premium themes and extensions for Joomla, WordPress, phpBB, and Grav, along with the Gantry theme framework that powered its templates. It operated from 2005 until June 30, 2025, when the mission officially concluded. The club, member downloads, and support forum closed with the site, and no new memberships or renewals are available. What remains is a record of the closure plus pointers to free, open-source archives and the successor projects run by the same team.

What RocketTheme actually offered

Over twenty years, RocketTheme built:

  • Premium themes and extensions for Joomla, WordPress, phpBB, and Grav
  • The Gantry theme framework, the underlying system behind its templates, from the earliest Joomla templates through the final Gantry 5 releases

Access to these was tied to a membership model — the "club," member downloads, and a support forum. That model ended with the site on June 30, 2025.

What is still available

The archives that remain are free and open source. Two entry points matter most:

Resource What it is Where
RocketTheme on GitHub Free Gantry themes, RocketLauncher installers, and developer tooling from the RocketTheme years github.com/rockettheme
Gantry Framework The open-source theme framework for Joomla, WordPress, and Grav, now stewarded by Tiger12 and still actively maintained gantry.org

If you were looking for old templates, this is where they live now — not behind a login or a subscription, but in the open repositories.

Where the team went

RocketTheme's founder and team continued building. Several current projects trace directly back to the original studio:

  • Trilby Media (trilby.media) — the studio behind RocketTheme, now offering Grav CMS consulting, custom development, managed hosting, and what it describes as the only official Grav SLA.
  • Grav CMS (getgrav.org) — the open-source flat-file CMS that started at RocketTheme in 2014; no database, fast out of the box, now shipping as Grav 2.0.
  • KahunaCart (kahunacart.com) — ecommerce built into Grav, with products, orders, and customers kept in your own database on your own server, licensed once.
  • SkulkWorks (skulkworks.dev) — native Mac apps from RocketTheme's founder, such as Riffle for diff and merge and RasterFox for image optimization; no subscriptions.
  • YetiDevWorks (yetidevworks.com) — open-source developer tools and experiments in Rust and PHP.

How to decide what to do next

  • You need an old RocketTheme template or the Gantry framework → go to the GitHub archive or gantry.org. Gantry is still maintained, so existing Gantry-based sites have a living upstream.
  • You want commercial support or custom Grav work → Trilby Media is the direct continuation of the original studio.
  • You are choosing a CMS for a new project → Grav is the project that grew out of RocketTheme and is now at version 2.0.
  • You need ecommerce on Grav → KahunaCart is the option built by the same team, with a one-time license and self-hosted data.
  • You want Mac utilities for design or web work → SkulkWorks apps are sold without subscriptions.

One thing to be clear about: nothing on the RocketTheme site is a live membership product anymore. There is no renewal path and no new sign-ups — the value now is in the open archives and the successor projects.