[theme-reviewers] Proposal for a new guideline and plugin function

[Chip Bennett]

Setting aside (for the moment) the proposition to add guidelines regarding
max HTTP requests/page speed, I want to address quickly your last two
points:

URLs are not permanent. The Theme URI was verified to exist and to be
appropriate at the time of Theme approval. We can neither control, nor
effectively police, URLs post-approval. (In this case, Justin Tadlock
simply moved his own Themes back to his own domain, justintadlock.com, when
we divested himself from DevPress. Nothing underhanded going on there.)

Also, repository-hosted Themes are not required to be offered with support,
through the WPORG support forums, the developer's site, or anywhere else.
Offering commercial support for a free, 100% GPL Theme does not violate
WPORG policy or Theme review guidelines. (In fact, a developer having a
vested interest in providing support for a repository-hosted Theme will
generally provide a *better* support experience for end users.)

Having addressed those two points, I'm curious what others think about your
proposed guidelines...

Chip

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 6:36 AM, Robb Shecter <robb at weblaws.org> wrote:

> I propose a guideline for maximum number of http requests generated per
> single-post and index views. The plugin can test this via a custom YSlow or
> Page Speed suite. We can have minimum scores for inclusion in the directory
> as well as the "featured" list in the Admin theme installer.
>
> The reason: I had a disastrous experience with one of the featured themes,
> News. I installed it on a brand new blog. Each page visit caused 47 http
> requests to the server. A moderately popular link from Reddit crashed my
> entire server. (Details are in my blog post:
> http://www.g33klaw.com/2012/04/the-hidden-dangers-of-beautiful-themes/ )
>
> Furthermore, the "theme homepage" link on the wordpress.org site is
> broken, and support seems to only be offered via a for-pay forum. These
> should also be grounds for exclusion from the directory and featured lists.
>
> Robb
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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/20120424/c9c43a9a/attachment.htm>