Just wanted to get some advice here, I'm working on a theme that will be built to be used with certain plugins (Template conditionals, Mynetwork, and Myalerts). Basically I'm just curious, is requiring plugins to be installed for a theme to work correctly a bad idea, or something to help advance MyBB themes as a whole?
If it's a necessity for MyBB's modern theme line-up to be more advanced with features and efficiency, then I say why not? I also feel though the premium theme's plugins should be developed by the designers behind the theme - in case there was a conflict, the designers would have to fix it instead of a third party developer. It'd also be probably best that themes could in fact still run without plugins enabled - but functionality of the advertised features would be limited.
Thanks for the feedback, this seems to be a one or the other situation. Either release your own plugin with the theme so you can support both, or give the ability to use it with or without plugins (So if one of them quits getting updated, a person using the theme can just disable that plugin and still use the theme)
The first doesn't seem likely at all, but I'll definitely look into the second one. Still looking for opinions on this.
Also if a new version of MyBB's install came out, the designers could update the parallel plugin - for both professional and ethical reasons - as third party developers don't necessarily have to comply.
Why not? I think a lot of users have accepted many plugins as must-haves, so most will already be using them or wouldn't mind installing them. If its necessary to make your theme better, I say go for it.
As the others have said, go for it, it's good.
I was actually also wondering this. Releasing a theme with required plugins to work could be an inconvenience to some and may put them off, but I personally would have no problem with it.
I don't see an issue with it. Drupal does this with both themes and modules. But, they also have the system built in where prerequisites are active before they can be activated themselves.
As long as the required plugins aren't paid/premium plugins I don't see a problem. A theme requiring premium plugins could be a huge turn-off to some.
I would say it depends on the plugin. I love MyNetwork and the Post Reps system, but the Profile System really does not play well with other profile plugins so I would hestate to include MyNetwork profiles. If you really want a tabbed profile use yeti tabs or jquery, though I must admit I love the comments and activity tab from Tomm.