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

[James Laws]

I think a guideline like this is far too subjective. How do you possibly
determine how many is too many? A theme uses jQuery UI and some jQuery
plugins to do some interesting stuff. That could had several additional
requests. How do you really say to a developer that their functionality is
no good because it has one file request to many?

At best I could see us asking for heavy http requests to be documented as
some server set-ups might not be able to handle some heavier themes. While
others have no issue. But setting a rule that says how many seems a little
off.

James

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 9:41 AM, Chip Bennett <chip at chipbennett.net> wrote:

> 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
>>
>>
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>>
>
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