The team has created tickets, asked for help, and have generally awaited a champion to push innovative ideas - or any ideas - forward. Not to mention that, as far as I know, plugins don’t do post-reviews, they do pre-reviews the first time a plugin is uploaded and post-reviews for updates (which is exactly what happens in themes too).” There would need to be lots of changes in systems and meta. Theme reviews are public while plugin reviews are private and closed. Plugin authors have access to their plugin’s SVN while themes don’t. “And, in fact, it’s something we’ve all been asking for years, but there are many technical challenges because they are built fundamentally differently. “Having the themes directory work like the plugins directory would be great!” said Themes Team rep Ari Stathopoulos. More than anything, they just need the help to make any significant change. I’d like it to work just like the plugin directory, with direct access for authors, and most reviews being post-review vs. “That has all the same potential issues and has been working pretty well. “Why couldn’t it be more like the plugin directory?” asked Mullenweg. It is a choice between two ends of the spectrum that are tough to pull together as the gatekeepers to the official directory. On the other hand, the call for stricter accessibility requirements, for example, are popular with others in the community. When the project lead asks for things to be more open, many members rally around that idea. The team sometimes gets pulled in two different directions. However, it can be hard to know where the line should be placed.” If we want to encourage creativity then more freedom to express it would likely be a good way to start bringing it back.

If it were the only guideline we would see a lot of things that might not be best suited here. ‘Don’t do bad things’ is the overarching guideline for the theme directory, but that can be viewed very subjectively.

“Creativity has not prospered in the directory, and I think a large part of it is the barrier of entry. “I actually agree with this in a sense,” said Themes Team rep William Patton. However, its members lack direct control over the system outside of the guidelines. The Themes Team agrees with at least some of it. There is a lot to unpack in his statement. org theme directory rules and update mechanism have driven out creative contributions, it’s largely crowded out by upsell motived contributions. org theme directory is particularly bad when you compare it to any half-decent commercial theme marketing page, or the designs available on other site building services or Themeforest directories. Matt Mullenweg, WordPress co-founder and project lead, posted the following on the Post Status Slack two weeks ago: But, how do we balance that with providing value - which is subjective, I know - to the free theme directory? How do we transition the theme directory to something flowing with more artistic or even experimental ideas? Guidelines and Stumbling Blocks When WordPress developers and agencies are successful, it benefits the whole ecosystem. This is not the start of an anti-commercial theme rant. While they are fully functional - the Themes Team’s rules have been strict on this requirement - the real value of the theme is in the upsell. Others are stripped-down versions of what you would typically see from a starter theme. Some of them are well-designed themes that provide value to end-users at no cost. Most of what we see today are “lite” themes. However, the term does not represent the majority of themes submitted. It was one of the more blatant abuses of the free themes directory I had seen for a profit.

To define crippleware: some themes blocked core WordPress features and made them available via the “pro” versions. However, there were real cases of crippleware submitted to the directory when I wrote that. Justin Tadlock via TwitterĪs I think back on that tweet from 2019, I realize how unfair it was to refer to the themes coming into the directory as “crippleware.” At the time, I was a part of the Themes Team (formerly the Theme Review Team). I suppose it was inevitable given its reach, which can be worth $1,000s/month for theme authors. The theme directory is becoming little more than a crippleware distributor.

Wordpress free themes 2019 artist