Hi @Polly,

When I read this line I thought "Really?!?"

Respected professionals in the WordPress community have been calling on theme authors to keep plugins separate for years. This situation has renewed the debate:
.@envato This is why you should never permit bundled plugins in themes: http://t.co/XFAU1anKef - no exceptions— Pippin Williamson (@pippinsplugins) September 5, 2014

Of course I'm always willing to admit I'm missing something so I read Pippin's tweet and then tweeted him to ask him why. He replied which then turned into a long Twitter exchange followed by an even longer Skype discussion (to keep my followers from getting a 1000+ tweets!) It took a while for me to discover but I think that it appears you misunderstood Pippin's tweet like I misunderstood his tweet. I now understand that he was only talking about commercial plugins and that he meant:

"This is why ENVATO should never permit bundled plugins in themes:…"

Instead of:

"This is why YOU should never permit bundled plugins in themes:…"

As Pippin repeated to me that themes should not bundle plugins I pointed out it wasn't a technical issue causing the problem but instead a business decision. As he said (effectively): "No buy, no updates", and he mentioned that Gravity Forms has the same problem and policy. I replied that I thought both he and Gravity Forms were being short-sighted; more on that in a bit.

He also said that the theme vendor sending the customer to buy the commercial plugin was the "right" thing to do and I pointed out that "right" was a values judgment and that values are subjective (and also often biased in the favor of the value holder, though I didn't mention that part at the time.) So we agreed that "right" vs. "wrong" was not a good way to approach this issue.

Back to the "short sighted" part: I said I thought it was short-sighted of commercial plugin vendors to view themers that bundle their plugins as being the problem and instead that I believed the plugin vendors would be much better off viewing the themers as valued channel partners. If plugin vendors actively encouraged bundling but also included an updater that would give one free update in exchange for registration then the plugin vendor would benefit greatly from wider brand exposure and the theme buyer would get all current patches.

Once the theme buyer registers for their update the plugin vendor would then have a sales opportunity to give the theme buyer a one-time offer for a slightly discounted "support" agreement that could, for example, include upgrades for a year and security patches for 2 years. With this plugin vendors would likely get sales from people they previously would not sell AND would grow their prospect database significantly for future upgrades and new products. It seems so much like a win-win to me all around that I'm surprised that Pippin did not appreciate the value of growing a large database of future prospects with little to no effort on his part.

But although I think Pippin grudgingly agreed I think primarily he was still focused on business-as-usual where the concern is that the theme buyer had not paid him anything "so that person didn't deserve support." (But it is very possible that I misunderstood his position so don't take this as gospel.)

Pippin also said that it was a support issue because the customer would be confused about who to go to for support but my take is that an appropriate configuration and update process could easily make that clear. We didn't really belabor this issue, though.

Finally, we did agree that the real problem is Envato not putting down guidelines that address these issues. I personally don't blame Envato for the past as hindsight is 20/20, but would expect them to address this issue post haste.

But we diverged again in that Pippin also thinks Envato should deny bundling whereas I think it would be better for everyone if Envato were to ensure bundled plugins that work with a script they provide that ensures all plugins are updated unless the buyer was unwilling to agree to the terms of update (i.e. plugin registration.) Then Envato could work with leading plugin vendors to rally support for the "one update in exchange for a registration" policy.

Note that I ran a catalog mail order retailer for 12 years that sold software components and tools for Visual Basic and later for .NET with $12 million in annual revenue at peak. Basically we were the Envato of the Visual Basic era, so I do have a bit of relevant experience here.

In summary, I strongly disagree with the assertion that "theme authors should keep plugins separate" is a "best practice" and the above explains why.