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Sarah Gooding

Jetpack Introduces Theme Installation from WordPress.com, Sparks Controversy with Alternative Marketplace for Free Themes

Today Jetpack announced that its users now have access to a collection of 165 free themes from WordPress.com. Jetpack users can browse, preview, and activate themes by visiting the WordPress.com Theme Showcase. WordPress.com has also added the ability for Jetpack users to upload a theme from its interface as well, a feature that targets those who are heavily using Jetpack Manage instead of the WordPress admin.

Many of the free themes are already available from Automattic’s account on the WordPress.org Themes Directory, but the limitations of the preview functionality doesn’t present themes in their best light. The Theme Review Team added a new rule last year that theme authors can only upload one theme at a time and will have to wait for it to pass through the queue before submitting another. This severely restricts individuals and companies that are prolific theme authors, requiring them to wait months in the queue. Authors can realistically expect to only publish one or two themes per year on WordPress.org.

After Zerif Lite, one of the most popular themes on WordPress.org, was suspended for five months for violations of content portability requirements, Matt Mullenweg was one of the most vocal opponents of what he called “draconian requirements.” In 2015, Mullenweg went so far to say that he is “completely okay with having something in the directory that breaks every guideline, as long as it’s interesting.”

The Theme Review Team has not made significant changes that would give authors more freedom. Instead, much of the Team’s time seems to be spent looking for ways to reduce the queue. It’s no wonder that a company like Automattic, with the infrastructure of Jetpack Manage and WordPress.com, would choose to distribute themes via a more efficient route. However, this move has left some WordPress.org theme authors wondering if WordPress.org improvements will be less of a priority in the future.

“Today’s announcement is the glue that holds together Matt’s vision for the future .org experience, delivered via Jetpack,” WordPress.org theme author Matt Medeiros said. “Solving the dark cloud above the repo seems a lot less critical when we can throw Jetpack in front of users as an alternative. It’s a calculated measure to control the on-boarding experience of new users, which WP desperately needs for continued growth amidst a field of competitors like Wix and Squarespace.”

According to Jetpack team member Richard Muscat, WordPress.com has “no immediate plans to sell themes at this time.” Jetpack users have access to free themes but will not, in the foreseeable future, be invited to purchase WordPress.com’s commercial themes. The team also plans to continue its presence on WordPress.org.

“We have no plans to stop releasing themes into the .org directory,” Muscat said. “We just believe this makes an even nicer, more integrated experience for accessing the themes we offer on the WordPress.com side of things.”

Jetpack’s announcement has also reignited fears of what the plugin’s commercialization might do to the WordPress ecosystem. In the past, Mullenweg has identified both Jetpack and WooCommerce as “multi-billion dollar opportunities” that could each individually be larger than WordPress.com. If WordPress.org is failing to attract new users with its theme previews, then Jetpack/WordPress.com is likely to pull even more eyes away with its separate marketplace.

“As a small business (a label that’s critical) product creator, I see this as a motion in the direction to increase the visibility of Jetpack’s free/paid feature set, above the rest of us trying to desperately make a living out here,” Medeiros said. “Jetpack will be marketed as the one-stop-solution for all of your small business website needs, if that hasn’t already been woven into the fabric of it’s current messaging. It is ultimately positioning itself as the trusted source of functionality for new users, versus us ‘third-party’ plugins. After all, who wouldn’t trust the company ‘behind WordPress?’”

Ionut Neagu, CEO at Themeisle.com, and the author of Zerif Lite, shares Medeiros’ concerns about Jetpack’s more recent commercialization efforts.

“What worries me more is the speed at which Automattic is pushing Jetpack,” Neagu said. “The Personal plan was introduced, and yesterday I got a cold email from some company they work with promoting their affiliate program. Today themes were introduced. It makes me wonder how far they plan to go and how this will affect theme and plugin developers.”

However, Neagu takes a more optimistic stance on self-hosted users installing themes from WordPress.com.

“As a theme author, I am not that worried about this particular aspect. Right now those themes are quite hard to find (it took me 10 minutes), are more targeted towards people using Jetpack Manage, and as far as I can see lots of them are looking a bit outdated.”

Neagu sees a disconnect between what WordPress.org thinks users want and what they are actually looking for. Based on his research and experience selling themes, Neagu has found that users still expect complete solutions from themes. WordPress has grown beyond being just a blogging platform. Neagu said he hopes WordPress.org’s research for the new editor will reveal how many people are actually using the software for business.

“We run a themes directory as well and we did extensive heatmaps to understand what kind of themes/screenshots users click on/ like,” Neagu said. “Looking at the results of a ‘business’ query, I am quite sure that users won’t be excited.”

This is likely the first iteration, and data from more Jetpack users should help WordPress.com refine the queries to present a mix of newer and popular themes. At the moment it looks to be simply a way to offer all of their available themes without the red tape of WordPress.org.

Automattic Addresses Confusion Over WordPress.org Plugin Directory Guideline Regarding Executable Code and Installs

The news of WordPress.com installing and updating themes for Jetpack users gave rise to speculation about whether or not this move is a violation of the plugin directory guidelines. Discussions centered around guideline #8, which states that plugins may not send executable code via third-party systems:

Serving updates or otherwise installing plugins, themes, or add-ons from servers other than WordPress.org’s.

Jetpack representative Richard Muscat gave us the following statement on behalf of Automattic:

The guidelines prohibit _plugins_ from installing third party code directly but Jetpack doesn’t do that for this feature. The guidelines state that: “Executing outside code within a plugin *when not acting as a service* is not allowed.”

The service Jetpack provides with respect to themes is via WordPress.com which _is_ acting as a service. This is identical to how Akismet operates with respect to spam-filtering and other Jetpack services such as data sync and backup, content delivery (Photon), and plugin installation/updates.

We ask users to opt-in to WordPress.com services when connecting Jetpack and all our services follow established guidelines.

The public discussions also prompted WordPress.org Plugin Directory representatives to post an article clarifying that Jetpack is not in violation for installing themes.

“The trick here, and this is what is about to sound like hair splitting, is that it’s not the plugin UI on your site that does the install,” Mika Epstein said. “In order for Manage WP and Jetpack to work, you have to go to your panel on their sites and install the items.”

As SaaS products have not yet been used extensively in the WordPress ecosystem, developers are still figuring out how this type of implementation can interact with WordPress sites via plugins installed from the official directory. The plugin team clarified that if you are pushing plugin or theme installs or updates from a third-party service on its website, then it is no longer a third-party service but rather a first-party service where you are directly initiating those actions.

However, not all developers agree that this distinction makes any difference.

https://twitter.com/carlhancock/status/842485294863712256

Gravity Forms founder Carl Hancock contends that ManageWP is different in that it doesn’t provide users with themes and plugins – it’s just a service for managing your sites.

“You can install plugins from the WordPress.org plugin and theme repository, you can connect your Dropbox account and install plugins from your Dropbox account, or you can upload your own plugins,” Hancock said. “The key is it’s either plugins and themes from WordPress.org OR bring your own. Just like WordPress itself.

“They [ManageWP] do not provide an alternative repository of themes and/or plugins that competes with the WordPress.org repos.”

This is where much of the controversy lies for WordPress.org theme authors who depend on the official directory for distribution. Competing with equally free themes that are hosted on WordPress.com with a much better sorting UI and preview functionality is a new challenge they will have to embrace.

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48 responses to “Jetpack Introduces Theme Installation from WordPress.com, Sparks Controversy with Alternative Marketplace for Free Themes”

    • Hi Richard,

      we’ve received such a cold email as well (to three different email addresses…not sure how they got these addresses). It’s being handled by a 3rd party company (if you need the company name – just let me know) and the person sent two emails, apologizing for a cut and paste error as he forgot to replace the company name in the first email. :-)

      The email at first seemed to be spam, but the links in it were all pointing to Automattic services (without redirects or else) so we moved forward and applied for the program which has been approved by Automattic in the meanwhile.

      Seems Automattic has hired a marketing firm for this to contact theme developers and marketers in order to apply for the affiliate program. Nothing wrong with that, but it probably would have been better to send the emails from a Automattic company address, rather than a 3rd party.

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  2. I’m probably missing something but don’t well understand what’s “new” in this move and the purpose of this announcement.
    All Automattic themes are already listed here and accessible for everybody with a few clicks in a matter of seconds. So, what?

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    • Hi John, it is true that a lot of free Automattic and WordPress.com themes are available directly from the WordPress.org directory and that will not change.

      What is particularly new is the method and interface used to browse, search, and install themes. For the (many) users who manage WordPress sites both self-hosted and on WordPress.com the experience is now streamlined and consistent and as we improve our customisation and design tools both types of sites will start to benefit in tandem.

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    • I should clarify that this is not the case.

      The source of the themes themselves is always available to the user — and has always been as pointed out in the comment above. I’d argue that this makes it easier to gain access to the code for certain types of site owners.

      Additionally, both Jetpack and the WordPress.com admin interface are open source projects available on GitHub — and always will be.

      We welcome and include contributions in the form of bug reports, issues, feature requests, and pull requests on a daily basis.

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  5. I think for Automattic it’s just the right thing to do and it makes totally sense from a business perspective. In the end Jetpack is a WordPress.com marketing tool in order to get people create .com accounts and make them familiar with their products and offerings. Automattic is still a company and not a charity organization, although it’s bit of a special situation because of potential conflicts of interests when it comes to WordPress.org.

    However, what worries me more is that Jetpack replaces more and more plugins from independent developers and now is trying to push themes as well. It’s possible that the goal is to make people either create a site on .com or have a self-hosted site with Jetpack (which does basically everything) leaving not much room anymore for products from independent developers. This approach of course makes sense from a business perspective and increases the influence of Automattic on the WordPress ecosystem as it’s obviously hard or near to impossible for smaller companies to compete with that, especially if they are being hold back by draconian requirements on .org.

    All of this wouldn’t be much of an issue if WordPress.com would be more open for products from independent developers. But unfortunately they are still looking only for specific themes (which is understandable due to their standardized approach) and it’s a bit funny when Matt is talking about draconian requirements on .org while the list of requirements on .com is even longer and highly subjective as well (e.g. design).

    I hope that we won’t see a world where Automattic makes it very hard to launch products on .com while pushing with Jetpack more and more into the .org space, making it harder for smaller companies to compete with that. That would obviously lead to a market where Automattic rules the WordPress ecosystem, which by the way makes sense to compete with Wix and others, but killing the open source spirit where independent developers have freedom and a chance to make a living as well, without asking Automattic for approval first. :-)

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    • However, what worries me more is that Jetpack replaces more and more plugins from independent developers and now is trying to push themes as well. It’s possible that the goal is to make people either create a site on .com or have a self-hosted site with Jetpack (which does basically everything) leaving not much room anymore for products from independent developers.

      This.

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      • I’ve heard this argument for some time — what Jetpack typically does is provide a base level of functionality that’s enough to get people started and going with, but if they want to really dig into it, they may need to grow past what Jetpack provides.

        For example: Contact Forms.

        Jetpack provides Contact Forms, but it’s a limited implementation. There’s a lot of form stuff it doesn’t do. I don’t think anyone’s going to argue that it’s a true competitor to Gravity Forms or Ninja Forms or whatever the latest one is — because it’s not. It’s a base level of functionality that plays nicely with others and is actively maintained — enough to get folks started, but easy to grow out of.

        By providing that base level of functionality, we’re making it easier for the user to stick with and invest their time, money, and energy into WordPress as a platform, so they’re more likely later to see a commercial plugin purchase as a worthwhile addition when they need repeater fields or custom field types or SalesForce integration or something that Jetpack’s contact forms don’t offer.

        Jetpack tries to go broad but shallow. We do a lot, but none of what we do is all things to all people. That’s where commercial plugins that offer those tailored experiences can really shine.

        In my opinion, anyways.

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        • This is more of a last mile, or more like first mile, issue. Automattic is exploiting its position – both in the market and within the broader product ecosystem – in order to gain what feels like an unfair advantage.

          That said, the WP market is overly fragmented and too often filled with noise and nonsense (crap code, buggy products, wonky UXs, etc). How past “leadership” decisions helped foster this is another chat for another day. Let’s not go there right now. Perhaps this will lead to a better experience for the majority of users? But at what cost to everyone else? If new devs sense the best opportunities within the World of WP are past then they will look to other platforms, platforms that apprear to have more longer term up side.

          So yeah, this might be good for Automattic today but over the longer term it could be a shot in the knee – the foot already being long gone :)

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  6. Perhaps what we need is a plugin which allows you to select from themes outside of WordPress.org?

    It could be a list of only good quality themes which are maintained by community members and have the same selection interface as the built in theme selector.

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  7. All power to Automattic / WordPress.com. They’re just doing what they think is best for their business, same as everybody else. No reason to be afraid of competition. It’s a good thing.

    I’ve thought for a long time that WordPress.org should consider taking a page from WordPress.com’s playbook and act as a commercial marketplace. There are some things that would worry me about that (having a central entity with power to pick winners and losers) but I think it would make a lot of sense from the WordPress user perspective.

    At the very least, we need better .org theme demos and perhaps some way to help fund faster theme reviews.

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  8. At first, I misread the article, then I read it again and it this makes full sense for me from both users and business perspective.

    Now the question is: what are the requirements to submit a theme and how does the overall process look like?

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  9. Why wouldn’t Automattic release these themes on WordPress.org vs serving them up from WordPress.com? Seems like a decision made solely for the benefit of Jetpack/WP.com, which ultimately leads to upsells of premium services, instead of the WordPress community.

    WordPress.org is a backbone of the community and should be fully supported. Don’t fragment the audience and send them away to get the “good” stuff.

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  10. Not sure why this is such an issue. Must be missing something.

    -> Is JetPack built-in to the “self-hosted” version of WordPress (.org) now?
    -> Can we (WordPress Community) still elect not to install the JetPack plugin?
    -> If we (WordPress Community) decide to install JetPack, can we not elect which features to enable/disable?
    -> Did we (WordPress Community) loose the ability to upload plugins/themes?
    -> Can we (WordPress Community) choose not to use this new functionality?

    Granted, there are not any plugins/themes on WordPress.com nor .org written by our company and BAMAJR LLC doesn’t depend on either repo to be profitable, but why can’t the company responsible for WordPress (and JetPack) make their plugin easier to use and more intuitive for a specific group of users, while at the same time positioning their platform to be more marketable to the likes of Wix and Squarespace users? Not sure why anyone would use Wix and Squarespace, but if Automattic is loosing marketshare to them, why not create/improve something to make it easier for Wix/Squarespace users to return?

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  12. Well hey, if you’re Automattic, at least you don’t have to worry about going through the theme review process anymore since they can publish their own themes to their own repo and make them available for users whenever. I imagine that at some level of the decision making process, this was brought up as a benefit.

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    • We’re still going to be going through the Theme Review process and getting our themes up on WordPress.org — but because of how long it takes, and that we can only have one theme under review at any point, we wind up with a pretty big backlog that are waiting to be submitted (considering the rapid clip with which we release new free themes, for every one that’s reviewed, we have a handful of others waiting to get in line)! This way folks don’t need to manually download zips or snag them off our svn server.

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      • First, I don’t have any problem with the new addition to Jetpack.

        But it is dissapointing and discouraging that people feel that they need to come up with other solutions, rather than work with the Theme Review Team to improve the .org submissions for all theme authors.

        Whats hurtful is that once again the TRT are portrayed as the “bad guys” that stand in the way. This is not what we want.

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        • But it is dissapointing and discouraging that people feel that they need to come up with other solutions, rather than work with the Theme Review Team to improve the .org submissions for all theme authors.

          Agree with this. The way Jetpack provides themes via its own channel looks like a trick to bypass the theme review process.

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  13. Themeisle should focus on their terrible customer support. I had an extremely straightforward refund (theme was removed from site) and it took 10 days to get the refund correctly applied.

    During that time I was monitoring their twitter and looking at what other people’s issues were…most of us in the same boat. Needed refunds and repeatedly being told day after day that help was “coming soon ™.”

    Themeisle’s terrible CS system (it’s woefully obvious that it’s understaffed and poorly trained) is the sole reason I’d never consider any theme from there.

    I for one gladly welcome Automatic venturing into the theme marketplace. At least it will be run professionally.

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    • Hey Gavin,

      I am sorry to hear about your experience, I won’t say we are under-staffed for support, we are just people and we do mistakes, is not an excuse, you are obviously right to be frustrated.

      In this case the issue was that we had only one person with access to the billing details, so we realised that this one person is not working the delays can go quite long, so after the last issues, we gave access to more people to this part, so this won’t happen anymore :).

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  14. JetPack could be the death of WP for quite a few devs, and Calypso will be pushed onto devs so they will make addons for that instead of WP itself. Thats what Matt says we should do anyway. Thats the real reason for the whole “learn JavaScript deeply” skit.
    Automattic seem to want to kill off the competition by using a thousand cuts. Create a closed Apple system. So I suppose the competition needs to step up in order for that to not happen.

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  15. You can’t make an add-on for Calypso without also making it for WP itself — the key is that WP will be more of a API provider, and the UI will live in Javascript that can live inside Calypso, or embedded in wp-admin before we transition to a full JS interface.

    I’m surprise the themes in question are a big deal because (1) they’re all GPL and open source (2) they’re all available publicly already (3) they’re all on the directory or in line to be submitted.

    A big goal of Jetpack is to make it smoother and easier for someone leaving WP.com to have the same experience, and using the same theme is part of that. I don’t see how making it easier for someone to go from .com to self-hosted is shrinking the market for anybody. :)

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    • So what plugins have you launched that work both with and without Calypso( and JetPack)? Looking at plugins tagged calypso and result is zero on .org.

      A big goal of Jetpack is to make it smoother and easier for someone leaving WP.com to have the same experience, and using the same theme is part of that. I don’t see how making it easier for someone to go from .com to self-hosted is shrinking the market for anybody. :)

      A even bigger goal is to increase the dependence on Automattic for endusers even if they leave or not even come to wp.com. There is nothing wrong with that business wise but saying a big goal is to make it easier is not the whole truth though :). The primary goal is to make as many users dependent on the services that Automattic provide. Again nothing wrong with that, but don’t make JetPack some noble thing, it’s just business.

      The more features you put into JetPack given your marketing resources etc the harder it is for other devs to compete. Same goes with WooCommerce. The strategy looking from outside is to replace as many offerings currently in the market with services that are controlled by Automattic. Soon we will probably see even bigger focus on a page builder solution. It will be on wp.com first I suppose, then in JetPack. Don’t think it will be included in Customizer in core.

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    • I’m surprise the themes in question are a big deal because (1) they’re all GPL and open source (2) they’re all available publicly already (3) they’re all on the directory or in line to be submitted.

      It’s not really about those themes. It’s about this whole approach. The more you integrate .com into .org, the more people will need to create .com accounts to use Jetpack properly and the more potential customers you get, who possibly will leave .org at some point (especially if not tech-savvy) to create a site on .com where they basically can log in with their existing account and start building their site.

      This wouldn’t be much of an issue if .com would be more open to developers to participate as well, but as it is now, it’s quite an exclusive party where it’s extremely hard to even get a theme launched. That means users who leave to get a site on .com are lost users for indepenent devs that build stuff for .org.

      Another thing is that the more functionality is built into Jetpack, the harder you make it for plugin devs to compete with that. Sure, they can cover a niche that isn’t (yet) covered by Jetpack or build a massive plugin that by far exceeds what Jetpack offers. But in the end this leads to a higher entrance barrier for devs because basic plugins for related posts, infinite scroll or whatever are no longer really needed. Who wants to install xx plugins if just installing Jetpack is enough? Most people will go for Jetpack, especially the ones that are not tech-savvy as they won’t be actively looking for an alternative plugin (which even may be better).

      A big goal of Jetpack is to make it smoother and easier for someone leaving WP.com to have the same experience, and using the same theme is part of that. I don’t see how making it easier for someone to go from .com to self-hosted is shrinking the market for anybody. :)

      This is funny. :) I would argue that it’s either the other way around. In my opinion SaaS is the future and so you already have lots of benefits with .com over .org. It’s of course much easier to compete with Wix and others if you run a company where you just can get things done than having endless discussions in the open source community before things happen (if they even happen at all) and if something happens, then it’s also not sure if that really is what the market needs.

      So .com is already in a much better position than .org and when comparing the UX of .com with .org, it’s a lot different and more convenient. That in combination with the SaaS approach makes it much easier to attract users, for example through Jetpack or the new affiliate program, which both goes in the same direction, user growth, which both makes absolutely sense of course.

      But saying that this whole trend isn’t affecting independent devs or smaller companies who are working hard (and not have the budget of Automattic) to launch their products for .org is not accurate in my opinion. Of course there is a competition with Automattic and it’s a bit like David vs. Goliath. This isn’t much of an issue yet as the .org market still is big enough to run a very healthy business.

      But it would be interesting to see how that will be in a few years from now when SaaS is the key to success. Of course you can argue that anyone can create a SaaS business, but I doubt that any sane person will invest tons of money to create a SaaS business and compete with .com – good luck with that on the long run.

      Of course niche SaaS businesses can be very successful, but that usually still will only be suitable for users that run self-hosted sites (e.g. theme or plugin as SaaS) but I doubt that anyone with a simliar WordPress business model like .com can compete with Automattic, at least not without an insane budget.

      So basically the more you put Automattic in focus to people who run self-hosted sites, the more you’re basically killing .org. It’s not much of an issue today, but in my opinion we’ll see that coming. Unless we’ll see a complete turnaround on .org with completely different onboarding process and UX, but honestly, I don’t see that happen in the near future, especially because people still won’t have a one-stop solution like on .com. But we’ll see. :)

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      • So .com is already in a much better position than .org and when comparing the UX of .com with .org, it’s a lot different and more convenient.

        IMHO the UX of .com could use some improvement. Even though familiar with WordPress.org I find the WordPress.com interface confusing.

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  16. I’ll admit I’m a little confused by this. If JetPack can basically give you access to a marketplace via a plugin you install from WordPress.org, why cannot any theme or plugin author do the same thing?

    I’m not comfortable with “marketplaces” being provisioned via a WordPress.org theme or plugin. There are too many ways that could be abused.

    What am I missing?

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    • They can and kinda do, (which is why in another comment here I called it a very mild issue if an issue at all, but guess tavern has rules against critisising their titles and tht comment was zapped lol). Theme forest has a plugin that enables you to auto update from there and theme shop do similar thing.

      Now the difference is, that till this day it was all “pull” and sometimes required extra effort while this feature is “push”. To have this kind feature you need some personal information on the user that other players just didn’t imagine they should ask for.

      I can see themeforest imitating such a feature, same with plugin that sell extensions…. maybe even some debugging facility dropped in to ease support.

      But I do hope no one will actually go for the remote install option as it is just insecure to have such a feature, as any automattic employee can now install whatever he wants on their server. The themes probably are not even tested to work with old PHP versions or funny server setups.

      It is just one (big?) step into the “you think it is your blog, but it actually belongs to automattic” future jetpack tries to bring upon us.

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  17. “Today’s announcement is the glue that holds together Matt’s vision for the future .org experience, delivered via Jetpack,”

    What does this mean, exactly? How is the .org “experience” going to be “delivered via Jetpack”? Does it mean that any WP site in the future will be required to use Jetpack?

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  18. The big glaring monster here is theme Forest and code canyon. When was the last time I can remember using a theme from the general repository? Don’t recall. My projects and clients almost always require something I’ve developed from _’s or something from theme forest. Now, plugins are still quite competitive. But not themes.

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