Hello everyone,<div><br>I'd like to discuss a philosophically-bureaucratic point that has been stuck in my head for the past 2 or 3 months. It's regarding the themes in the WPORG repository and their structure and guide list.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I know that guidelines have been polished for a very long time and we keep discussing new rules on a regular basis. However, I took part in 3 different theme-related projects with working themes (i.e. published for free on authors' websites and used by users) that keep being rejected on Trac for some guidelines that I would probably agree with if we would speak about blog themes but not about ones being used for other reasons.<br>
<br>This one wraps several delicate questions, such as:</div><div><br></div><div>- different theme categories in Extend, i.e. 'blog', 'corporate', 'portfolio' with the general purpose of a theme. (or beta/unverified versions)</div>
<div>- easier rules for working themes</div><div>- turnaround time for revisions </div><div><br></div><div>The three themes I took part in (after reviewing about 70 or more themes on Trac) ended like that: one of the themes got in after 3 months and 3 revisions, second is still there since December (3 revisions and many remarks) and the third client gave up the idea of submitting and published on other free theme markets. </div>
<div><br>The problem is that theme authors building non-clones of twenty-ten and twenty-eleven have to spend tens (if not more) hours to keep all the rules in place, such as defining classes for byauthor and sticky and many many more irrelevant for themes being used as web site templates. What I want to stress on is that WP (as everyone here knows undoubtedly) is no more a blogging tool only but a powerful CMS that keeps millions of sites online. Still, great theme developers building website themes have to take care of a serious amount of rules to get into WPORG.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Am I the only one who noticed and got concerned about that? I think that our rules here would end with blog themes cloning 2010/2011, no fresh and innovative functional new themes due to the guidelines strict policy. In my experience no more than 3-5% of the themes get approved from the first review. 20-30% eventually pass with the second one. Taking into account that these 3 iterations take about 3 months more or less, this is demotivational for authors. </div>
<div><br>I agree we need to care about the overall quality of a theme. The theme unit test data has different cases to be reviewed, although most of them are blog-related. I cannot disagree that we need to be precise about licensing and security and stability (i.e. lack of errors and thrown notices). This covers about 1/3 of the guidelines. How about the other two thirds? </div>
<div><br></div><div>Since I don't want to be destructive only, I'd like to propose a discussion on the review process for themes that are not specifically blog-related. This could be done in two ways: adding a new queue in Trac, reviewed separately (kinda like the BuddyPress themes) or adding to /extend categories OR beta section, for let's say working themes that don't cover all guidelines. It could be done for beta testing and many developers would like to test these themes as being free and working greatly in 98% of the scenarios. The rest is extension.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Regards,</div><div><br>Mario Peshev<br>Training and Consulting Services @ DevriX<br><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/mpeshev" target="_blank">http://www.linkedin.com/in/mpeshev</a><br><a href="http://devrix.com" target="_blank">http://devrix.com</a><br>
<a href="http://peshev.net/blog" target="_blank">http://peshev.net/blog</a><br><br>
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