[theme-reviewers] Webmaster Tools IDs - plugin territory?

[Dane Morgan]

The simple fact is that the vast majority of people do not understand 
that when they uninstall their theme their analytics quit working, or 
that all of their 'buttons' will become ugly, unlinked code. When they 
realize it has quit working a few days later they don't instinctively 
understand that it was the change of the theme that made those changes.

I make my living making themes for live WordPress sites for small 
business owners, and fixing the messes that are made of them by things 
like this. I deal with these users on a daily basis. They don't know how 
any of this works. If they did, they wouldn't need us.

The WordPress repository has, on several occasions, made changes in the 
requirements for themes that resuslted in some themes being removed from 
the repository and in each instance this has been a net gain for the 
*end user*. In each instance a vocal group of designers and developers 
cried foul and unfair. This time is no different. The repository needs 
to be fair to the end user, not to the developer. Ultimately these are 
the same goals, because abusing the end user is not in the long term 
best interest of the developer.

The best interests of the end user are in removing content cunctions 
from themes and defining only the presentation of the content in them. 
If you find this a dismissive idea, and think that 'it's nothing but 
css' and think that css is not a real tool or that presentation cannot 
be as important and as diverse as content manipulation, I have to wonder 
why you are writing themes and not plugins to start with.

I tend to think that this will ultimately go down with plugin territory 
removed from the themes because that is the direction WordPress has 
always moved and because it is more in line with established best 
practices, not only for WordPress, but for web development as a whole. 
Modular development will set you free.