I rarely, rarely take the time to comment in wp blogs. And this article is a perfect example why, disingenuous and self serving from start to finish, and with support from the usual wordpress.com proxies.

This article is so sensationalist in its tone and structure, that it actually makes me ill. As if this plugin is the only item ever to have come out of the wordpress ecosphere that has a fault! The wordpress core is replete with hacks over its history. Timthumb, once a darling of wordpress, the same thing. PHP, MySQL, all have needed patches and sometimes had critical vulnerabilities.

The cherry picking of quotes from Envato without context reminds me of grade school writing. I had forgotten grade school. Thank you not.

Your are all quite late to the party but boy are you each enjoying your moment of glory to stand on the pulpit and beat down the poor plugin authors, who do outstanding work by the way. They patched the vulnerability immediately after it being identified, and they reached out to every author whom they knew employed it in their theme. Responsible authors had the update included in their theme not long thereafter. I know of the trail of abandoned products some of you have in your background (I have on my desktop somewhere one of Sarah's abandoned plugins, i think to do with gmaps if my memory serves me correctly) and i find this very much a situation of the cat calling the kettle black.

One cannot force a site owner to update. Much of the blame for this falls onto designers who love to take a customer's money to build a site, and then leave them high and dry after completion - how many of you reading or commenting fit into that category?

This whole question of plugins bundled into themes is also I believe a "red herring". To a coder such as I and my team peers, a plugin is just another script, bundled in a potentially convenient way. Most often its better for the theme to have the script purely integrated. But buyers of themes purchase the same way they buy houses - they don't want the no-name brand kitchen cabinets, but instead the Thomasville, Kraftmaid or something else with brand recognition. They perceive added value to premium plugin integration, and one either provides that added value, or the sales go elsewhere.

And this is part of my reasoning for finding this article so disingenuous, as certainly the great Sarah Gooding, with all her vast wealth of knowledge building themes (?), websites (?) and understanding what the majority of designers and DIY users desire, had to have known why premium plugins appear in themes, unless of course...... well its the "of course" wherein lies the rub is it not?

But then what do I know. Our sole themeforest product only has 17K+ sales, and our private designer products yet much more. Hardly enough to know anything at all about the subject...... we really should spend more time pontificating by way of blogs, and less time coding, so we can learn what comprises a good wp theme!

I saw the quote by pippen. Sorry, we just don't agree. And we are theme builders. We outrank plugin authors. So when we publish our tweet (we have much higher sales and user rating) calling for more plugins to be put in themes will you provide equal exposure in your article to our tweet so as to provide some balance to your post? LOL. I don't think so as it won't serve your purposes will it.....

I remember when I was doing my first math degree. The very first course is calculus 101 (of course!), and the prof, wanting to put the fear of god into us started his lecture by telling us to look to the student to our left, and then to the student to our right, and if he were successful, both would have been weeded out by the end of the year. You all remind me of the student to my left and right. And why we ignore the wp "experts" and just go about the business of building themes and creating happy outcomes for our customer base(s).

PS Rev Slider Team - thank you for a great product with a superb record of ongoing support.