[theme-reviewers] This is becomig a JOKE!!!

[// ravi]

On Jun 9, 2012, at 8:43 AM, Philip M. Hofer (Frumph) wrote:
> I wouldn't call him that, I think he's just frustrated over the process as it stands where it takes a long time and all that.  It's totally understandable - although could be handled a bit better.
> 

True. Dustups such as these are unfortunate: [free] theme developers spend time and energy to build their themes, the availability of which, IMHO, was a significant factor in the success of WordPress (I remember switching from Nucleus and B2Evolution to WordPress almost entirely for: a) availability of themes, and b) ease of building a new theme; more on (b) in a minute). Theme reviewers, most of whom I assume are volunteers [?], too are going to a fair bit of trouble to not just evaluate themes but also provide valuable feedback to the authors. Given that, there should be a good deal of resonance between these activities.

A theme is the personal output of a person (or a small group of them). As with any creation there is pride in the work: the design and the code. Awareness of this on the part of the reviewer, and of the fact that all code or design has its good bits and poor bits, and avoiding the appearance of talking-down, would go a long way to assuage any sense of rejection the developer might feel. I would also advocate less pedantry (one theme reviewer took issue with my using uppercase for all HTML tags in my CSS. Why? It has no impact on security, performance, behaviour, feature compliance, etc). I write all of this with great appreciation for the effort that theme reviewers put in. Some thick-skin on the theme author side would help as well — after all, having reviewed many themes, the reviewer does indeed have more insight and productive thoughts on WP theme code/design.

On a larger note, I wonder if theme development has become a much more difficult affair today, both in terms of the effort (compliance, feature support, etc) and the coding (including knowledge of WordPress internals such as architecture), than it was 5-6 years ago. That’s bound to happen with all software, but a unique strength of WordPress was the power it put at the hands of theme developers at very little cost to them. If I am correct, I wonder what that means for WordPress[.org]… effects could be: lesser number of themes, greater theme ‘decay’, less feature-rich themes (relative to WP core capabilities).

2 cents,

	—ravi