What Kind Of Theme Is This?

With all of the various theme names these days, it’s getting harder to define what exactly a premium theme is. Andrew Rickmann over at Fun With WordPress tries to give us a better understanding of what premium means now a days as well as providing a valid argument that perhaps it’s time for the theme repository to have a grading system.

Making the distinction between premium themes and the degrees of theme beneath them really only lets the less than premium themes get a free ride.

So now we have premium, freemium, non-gpl, gpl, child, parent, free, commercial, *proprietary themes. Hey, at least we don’t have to worry about grand child themes!

My head hurts already from trying to think of the various classifications for a WordPress theme. By the way, proprietary is starred because that’s what Matt calls non-gpl pay for themes. At this point, I would say that themes you pay for is what I think of when I hear the word premium but after seeing Andrew give the lowdown on the top five themes on the repository, I’m beginning to think premium is just a means of describing a theme that is above par and something you don’t ALWAYS have to pay for. As if parent/child themes were not complicated enough, now we have about 50 different classifications for themes. Who’s responsible for this?!

So what do you think about a grading or classification system on the theme repository? What do you think about all of the various terms used to describe a theme?