[theme-reviewers] Theme Review for blog and business (CMS) themes

[Mario Peshev]

Listing several comments from trac reviews and the theme review page:

REQUIRED: Theme options must be added to the database via a single options
array, rather than separately - I know that it is a good-to-have, but I
wouldn't personally reject a theme for that reason.

Recommended (highly) is the support of all add_theme_support features.
Well, for some themes this might be obsolete. Let's take super minimalist -
clean classic themes (no post thumbnails) or specifically business themes
or anything else (no custom backgrounds, headers).

Our theme test data advices us, as authors and/or reviewers, to test the
site with very long titles, headings, anything that could break the layout.
This is normally good-to-have and very hard-to-achieve. This leads to
limited design creativity actions as reviewers keep declining theme
submissions by testing with a blog title with 150 characters or the
super-large-title-test-post that is in the test data.

wp_link_pages and pagination hooks might not be used as well. I think that
the pagination in WordPress with next/prev only is not useful and normally
use custom or third-party solutions so having this as required doesn't make
sense to me. Especially for a corporate/business site that doesn't even
need news (pages only). SInce I've bought around 80 themes from ThemeForest
for clients and friends and so, a percentage of them doesn't use news or
blog.

The required CSS classes or HTML tag stylings are a common reason to reject
a theme as well. .wp-caption, .wp-caption-text, .gallery-caption, .sticky,
.bypostauthor are classes I add specifically for a theme before submission,
never used in my demos or sites otherwise.

Some themes are rejected due to: 'this is not described in readme.txt'. We
should probably define a template to be filled for every theme, for a
standardization. In addition to that people won't google the markup styling
for readme files, common thing for themes and plugins on WPORG.

There are other remarks as well, but these are a few I just found out.


A quick offtopic, this is not working:
http://themes.trac.wordpress.org/report/14 , outputs:

*Trac detected an internal error:*

KeyError: 'numrows'


Mario Peshev
Training and Consulting Services @ DevriX
http://www.linkedin.com/in/mpeshev
http://devrix.com
http://peshev.net/blog



On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 6:41 PM, Edward Caissie <edward.caissie at gmail.com>wrote:

> I agree with all of Chip's point here ... especially the following
> statement:
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 12:36 PM, Chip Bennett <chip at chipbennett.net>wrote:
>
>> Ultimately, though: any discussion such as this one should include
>> specific Guidelines that you want to see changed or removed. I'm not sure a
>> wholesale change in philosophy is either plausible or prudent at this point.
>
>
> As much as we are open to discussing the guidelines, it is much easier to
> deal with specifics and review those than to take a run at the whole gamut
> of what the guidelines entail.
>
>
> Cais.
>
> _______________________________________________
> theme-reviewers mailing list
> theme-reviewers at lists.wordpress.org
> http://lists.wordpress.org/mailman/listinfo/theme-reviewers
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wordpress.org/pipermail/theme-reviewers/attachments/20120319/220b2077/attachment-0001.htm>