[theme-reviewers] Questions regarding theme review process

[Philip M. Hofer (Frumph)]

While timthumb has been banned, that doesnt mean other internal functionality will ever be banned as such.     You might come across recommendations that said functionality should be a plugin, but it is only that a recommendation.

To answer your list.

1. Fine - recommend plugin
2. Fine - recommend plugin 
3. Fine
4. Definately Ok.
5. Absolutely Ok.
6. Fine - recommend plugin

While the push for developers to strive to utilize as much api and plugins that do the load of the work that you are describing, there's nothing that you wrote there that would be not-accepted;  however, that being said it is in the developers interest to utilize as much of the plugin to theme control as possible and more importantly the WordPress API itself.

Frameworks at this time are finalizing the guidelines for it.  Chip is probably the best person to respond about that. - as for integration as you speak of, that one client doesn't justify the large number of possible users to the theme that might want a different functionality from a plugin instead.   It is in my opinion better to cater to the wider audience then the single one, giving the audience which uses the themes/derivatives/child themes a wider variety of possibilities goes quite a long way.

On a side note, I used to believe integrating everything was the right choice as well.. .until something occured with an update of WordPress which made one single function not behave as it should which ruined the theme for everyone who upgraded.

^ My 2cents, nothing more.




  My concern is, for our next theme, which is actually our internal base-theme (sort of framework) and contains features like:
    1.. Social bookmarking/Sharing controls (twitter/facebook/etc buttons) 
    2.. Advertising options (like Google AdSense/BuySellAds/Kontera etc)
    3.. Typography options (font-faces/font-sizes/etc) 
    4.. Layout Options (2-column/3-column/etc)
    5.. Content Options (Thumbnail size/summaries/read-more settings) 
    6.. Other options like feedburner integration, favicon/logo upload
  There were SEO options also which we plan to retire in favor of wordpress-seo plugin by yoast.


  To give you better ideas, just think of themes at themeforest which provides theme-options.
  We have many clients on themeforest for which above said internal framework has been maintained and continuously updated from a year.


  Now question is - if we decide to release our framework in open-source, which features we need to remove (if any) to maintain compliances here?


  Also, can we upload themes we have developed for themeforest here? 
  Will there be any extra regulations regarding features & options themes at themeforest provides? 
  Just a note - themeforest publishers are very aggressive. On one instant a client sent us list of 30+ plugins which he wanted to integrate in a wordpress-theme! 

  We have many themes in our repo, originally developed for themeforest but never launched for various reasons (most common is client defaulting payment). 
  We are owners of all graphics/code which we want to release on wordpress theme repo, of course under GPL :-)


  ==


  My second question is regarding parent-child theme.


  Here is what we want to achieve.
    1.. Our base theme (framework) is common across all our themes [Parent] 
    2.. Each theme has its own set of local changes [Child]
  We want to leverage power of parent-child theme to push updates. If there is any change in base-framework - all child theme users should get a notification about new update of parent theme.


  Not sure if possible here, specially as SVN access is not available on theme-repo (like we have access to SVN on plugin-repo).


  Regarding release - should we release parent and child theme separately? Is there any extra guideline on parent-child theme release.


  Also while answering please consider 3-level relationship => parent-child-grandchild as well!


  ==


  The only purpose of asking all questions in advance here is to save our development efforts and also precious time of theme review team.


  I hope to get some good suggestions/guidance/inputs here. 


  Thanks All,
  -Rahul



  --
  Rahul Bansal | Founder & CEO | rtCamp Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
  Mobile: +91-9860501882 | Web: http://rtcamp.com/




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