[theme-reviewers] Decaying of older themes and mass emailing users pre 3.0 to update their theme.

[// ravi]

I am one of the guilty parties: I have three themes on the WP.org/extend site that are sorely in need of an update. I am also one of the theme contributors who has a day job that is entirely unrelated to WordPress (and add two kids to that list :-)). Each time I sit down to update my themes to make them current, I put in a good bit of time and effort to bring it close to conformance, but then I get diverted into other urgent tasks. When I return, there is not only a need to relearn the new stuff, but often the threat of a looming new release of WordPress (as is the case right now!).

I wouldn’t hold it against WP if my themes were to be removed due to the lack of updates. And I am not sure there is any lesson to be learnt from my personal story above (other than the personal lesson that perhaps I need to abandon WP theme development until the kids are older). I do wish however that there were or had been theme developer oriented release notes, especially from the angle of what is/was intended with a new feature or architecture, e.g: template parts (there probably are/were, but I couldn’t find them).

FWIW,

	—ravi