On Wednesday, WordPress executive director Josepha Haden Chomphosy posted the next steps forward for themes and reviews for the official theme directory. In the post, she describes the tools and types of access the Themes Team needs. She also laid out some other goals for the system. The timeline is to have much of this…
The WordPress.org theme directory is becoming little more than a crippleware distributor. I suppose it was inevitable given its reach, which can be worth $1,000s/month for theme authors. Justin Tadlock via Twitter As I think back on that tweet from 2019, I realize how unfair it was to refer to the themes coming into the…
Yesterday, the featured themes page was quietly removed from the WordPress theme directory. Previously, it was the primary page users would see when visiting the directory. It has now been replaced with the popular themes list. This change is only reflected on the WordPress.org website and not directly in the WordPress admin for end-users. This…
If you’ve ever wondered how the WordPress Theme Directory identifies and ranks the themes that display under the popular tab, you might be surprised to learn that it has nothing to do with ratings. Popularity is a somewhat subjective quality to measure in the first place, but WordPress.org has an algorithm in place to give…
The WordPress Theme Directory will soon be rolling out new and updated tags for filtering the 3,800+ free themes hosted there. After a year of discussion and preparation of core and meta trac tickets, the Theme Review team finalized its proposal for overhauling the tags. Theme authors are now encouraged to update their themes to…
One of the main items on the agenda for the Theme Review Team this week was to finalize what type of upselling is allowed in themes hosted on WordPress.org. With the requirement of using the customizer for options, theme authors have gotten creative with upsells and will sometimes include panels and sections that are inoperable…
The admin themes browser has been updated and modernized in recent years to make it easier to search through the 3,800+ themes available on WordPress.org. One aspect of the interface that has lagged behind, however, is the list of tags for filtering themes. The tags have gone untouched since back in the day when users…
Earlier this year, the WordPress plugin directory was redesigned. As part of the redesign, download counts were replaced with the number of Active Installs to reflect more accurate data. The WordPress theme directory has finally followed suit by replacing download counts with the number of Active Installs. As you can see from the above screenshot,…
The WordPress Theme Review Team (TRT) is currently seeking feedback via three separate surveys on the review process, themes, and the directory. After weathering several months of increasingly negative community feedback, the team is now looking to users and theme authors to help shape its roadmap for the future. The team’s controversial decision to require…
WordPress.org is making strides towards fully localizing the project’s official theme and plugin directories. Dion Hulse posted this morning that he has enabled localized theme directories for all Rosetta sites. For example, the Romanian themes directory is available at: ro.wordpress.org/themes/. Theme filters, directory sub-navigation, info and download buttons, and other aspects of the details page…
Aaron Jorbin, who contributes to WordPress core on a regular basis, has published a script called WordPress Theme Directory Slurper. The PHP based script downloads and updates a copy of the latest stable version of every theme in the WordPress.org theme directory. Devin Price put the script to good use and has published a series…
WordPress.org launched a new design for the Theme Directory just over a month ago and the meta team has continued to fix bugs and add enhancements. Preliminary stats and feedback indicate that the directory improvements have had a positive impact on users’ ability to hunt for themes. WordPress.org contributor Konstantin Obenland reports that user engagement…
The new design for the official WordPress Theme Directory is live today. Contributors on the WordPress Meta team released a preview of the design in early January and worked quickly over the past month to resolve any outstanding issues related to the new plugin that powers the directory. In addition to an updated design, the…
The WordPress Theme Review team is welcoming Justin Tadlock as an admin. Justin is signing on to help with the final audits of new themes that have been approved during the review process. Creator of Theme Hybrid and co-author of Professional WordPress Plugin Development, Tadlock knows WordPress theming inside and out. His expertise will be…