WordPress Theme Review Team Launches Trusted Authors Program

In an effort to further streamline the review process and take some of the burden off of reviewers, the WordPress Theme Review team has launched a Trusted Authors Program.

The program is for authors who consistently submit themes that follow the WordPress theme review guidelines and have three or fewer issues in multiple areas. Applications and approvals will be handled by team leaders only.

To apply for the program, theme authors need to select a ticket for the team to take into consideration and submit it as a comment on the announcement post. This can either be a recently approved theme or a ticket in the new or final queue.

In addition to following the guidelines, the theme must meet the following conditions.

Escaping/Sanitization with a maximum of three issues.

Needs to be 100% GPL with a maximum of three issues. This includes all of your products on your site or third-party sites.

Can not create content and demo content must be used correctly.

The theme must not contain any PHP or JavaScript errors, plugin territory functionality, correct use of prefixing, enqueue, translations, and advertising.

Theme authors can submit a theme for review once every two weeks, must have at least one approved theme in the directory, and can not apply using a child theme. The privilege is non-transferable and themes that are approved can only be transferred to other accounts after six months.

As with any program, there are consequences for breaking the rules. The announcement notes that the team will not take into consideration active installs counts, how old a theme is or a theme author’s financial distress and that suspensions will be given without hesitation.

The team has already demonstrated their ability to enforce this thought process. Last year, Zerif Light was suspended from the directory for five months, affecting 300K users and costing its parent company, ThemeIsle, $75k/month in lost revenue.

If you have any questions or concerns about the program, you can contact any of the team leads on Slack.