<div dir="ltr"><div><font face="arial, sans-serif">"</font><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Basically, don't use custom post types, taxonomies, or metadata to allow the theme's users to create content."</span></div><div><font face="arial, sans-serif">This should be covered mostly with the latest update of Theme Check</font><br></div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></span></div>"Maybe our focus should be on building tools for theme authors to submit better themes."</span><div><font face="arial, sans-serif">I know people are working hard on the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/docs/theme-developer-handbook/">Theme Developer Handbook</a>. Perhaps we could make a page which is specifically for theme authors what they should so before submitting a theme.</font></div><div><font face="arial, sans-serif">Also the <a href="http://wptavern.com/theme-checklist-helps-prepare-developers-to-submit-a-theme-to-the-wordpress-theme-directory">Theme Checklist plugin</a> looks like something that could be useful to recommend.<br></font><div><br></div></div><div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">"The content of the guidelines are fine, but finding a specific guideline kind of sucks."</span><br></div><div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">I am working with Sam to improve the </span><font face="arial, sans-serif">guidelines. I have also created a custom search that we could add to the guidelines. <a href="https://www.google.com/cse/publicurl?cx=015032766720193378129:vtk5vhovo90">https://www.google.com/cse/publicurl?cx=015032766720193378129:vtk5vhovo90</a></font></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 12 October 2014 21:51, Justin Tadlock <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:justin@justintadlock.com" target="_blank">justin@justintadlock.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div>Personally, I'd love to make things a little more consistent and fair. But, I want to make something clear to everyone. We're not here to promote your theme or to make sure your theme gets its time in the spotlight. What we do here is for the benefit of WordPress users. Your reasons for submitting a theme don't necessarily need to be altruistic, but we have to treat it as such. </div><div><br></div><div>With that said, there are ways of making things more consistent. This all starts with reviews. The reason we (the admins) get backed up is because we're still having to perform full reviews on themes that are already approved. In a more ideal scenario, we'd do a check to make sure things look pretty good and mark the theme live.</div><div><br></div><div>But, we don't have an ideal scenario at the moment. I can't remember the last time I didn't reopen an approved ticket. Our initial reviews are overlooking major things, even just outright broken code. I rarely have to activate a theme to see these problems. I just open up the theme files, and they're right there in my face.</div><div><br></div><div>If we want to talk about "fairness" and so on, let's talk about the real problems first. What can we do to improve our review process? Any improvements here will trickle down and improve the entire system.</div><div><br></div><div>A few of the areas I see that both theme authors and our reviewers could improve in are:</div><div><br></div><div>1) Security. This is particularly relevant with theme options and custom widgets. Is there something we can be doing to improve this area? It's a major blocker for themes. If it were up to me, we'd ban anything that didn't use the theme customizer (except in special cases). I believe that would cut back on so many problems because it'd limit a lot of custom code used to build settings pages.</div><div><br></div><div>2) Understanding the difference between "content generation" (plugin territory) and "content presentation" (theme territory). Basically, don't use custom post types, taxonomies, or metadata to allow the theme's users to create content.</div><div><br></div><div>3) License/copyright. We've improved leaps and bounds in this area, but there shouldn't be any reason one of the admins should be reopening a ticket for a license/copyright issue. This is probably the first thing reviewers need to look at.</div><div><br></div><div>And, these are just some of the major things. I'd love for us to be at a point where we're pushing for better things like proper translation support, accessibility, and so on.</div><div><br></div><div>Let's focus on continuing to improve the overall process. Are there tutorials that y'all would like to see to help improve things? I'd be more than happy to write those or dig an existing one up. Can we make things clearer in the guidelines?</div><div><br></div><div>Maybe our focus should be on building tools for theme authors to submit better themes. Any plugin ideas to help with this? Or, are we simply not putting the existing tools into theme authors' hands?</div><div><br></div><div>Other things I think we need to improve is the theme guidelines themselves. The content of the guidelines are fine, but finding a specific guideline kind of sucks. I don't even know what page each guideline is on. I just happen to know most of them by memory and rarely need to look them up.</div></div>
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