[theme-reviewers] Submitting a One-Page Placeholder Theme

[Otto]

On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 3:31 PM, Ryan Frankel <ryan.frankel at gmail.com> wrote:
> The main difference I see is just from a user perspective.  Personally, if I wanted a landing page I would install WordPress and immediately look for a landing page theme with all of the styling and options I want.  Since the design/look/feel of the site itself is centered around the idea of a landing page it seems logical to me to have it as a theme.  I don't see any reason that it couldn't also be a plugin but plugins in general (for me) are much more difficult to incorporate stylistically to a theme.  Since so much of a landing page is also the stylistic aspect and not functionality it seems like it falls under a theme.

I agree with this in principle. A specialty theme would be
differentiated from a plugin in that a plugin is designed to be useful
regardless of the theme, whereas a specialty theme would have the
functionality and the display tightly knitted together. For example,
you couldn't easily make a ticket tracking system into a plugin,
because the display of that ticket system is not generic.

Although this is often a judgment call. The new bbPress plugin does a
pretty darned good job at including a theme compatibility layer to
make it work with most any theme, but as you can see from using it for
a while, a theme that is explicitly designed for bbPress capability
just works and looks better.

I think one principle that might be useful is to consider whether a
user would expect the same sort of functionality to work with a
different, generic, theme. If not, then a specialty theme makes sense
as a theme instead of a plugin.

A "landing page" is a bit generic though. Depends on the specific
features. If you define it one way, a "landing page" can be any site
with only one Page defined and no Posts anywhere.

-Otto