WebDevStudios announced today they have officially acquired the StartBox WordPress Theme Framework from the creator Brian Richards. WebDevStudios will now be actively developing and improving the theme framework. Richards has been working with WedDevStudios as a developer since July 2012 and will continue to lead the StartBox project, but will now have an entire team dedicated to contributing to the framework core and also creating custom child themes and plugins specifically for StartBox.
StartBox was originally released in 2010 as a commercial (paid) theme, however despite being a feature rich quality theme framework, never really took off or gained much traction in the commercial theme marketplace. This was possibly due to the limited number of unremarkable child themes available for the framework, the subscription pricing structure, over promising and under delivering to members, or the stiff competition with existing theme frameworks. In 2011 the subscription model was abandoned and the StartBox framework was released for free. WebDevStudio have promised StartBox will remain 100% GPL and 100% free to download on Github.
I’m glad to see WebDevStudios have acquired the StartBox framework and will be actively developing it and creating more child themes for this underrated but really very good WordPress theme framework. I look forward to see the direction they take with it and wish them all the best as they push into the commercial WordPress theme space.