jQuery And The Theme Review Process

There is an interesting discussion taking place on the Make WordPress Themes site which is the home to the theme review team regarding jQuery and themes. There are three points that are being discussed:

1. The first point for discussion is that Themes should always use the current version of jQuery as bundled with WordPress, so as to avoid core/Plugin breakage due to an unexpected version (whether older or newer than the WordPress-bundled version).
2. The second point for consideration is that, if Themes should always use the current version of jQuery as bundled with WordPress, then Themes should not bundle their own version of jQuery, and should instead enqueue the core-bundled version, via wp_enqueue_script( ‘jquery’ ).
3. The third – and likely, most controversial – point for discussion is that Themes should not deregister the core-bundled jQuery, in order to register a CDN-hosted, minified version of jQuery, as such functionality is better-left to the end user, via Plugin.

While I don’t personally have any thoughts on any of the topics discussed, I figured most people may not keep an eye on this particular site so I needed to spread the word.