I meant to ask about theme and plugin QA process, if any… was sort of answered along the way but, really, adding the now conventional social rating features to theme and plugin will be really helpful. Especially if people can rate raters, too, and highly the ratings of rated raters take precedence over those of lower rated raters.

There are plenty of places for paid designers to promote their work. Putting them in the official Themes directory just made life complicated for all of us users trying to stay honest and aboveboard.

I say, “Good move.”

The thumbnail can look really pretty too!!

Personal I prefer to build my own

Sincerely,
Glen Barnhardt

In other words, if your theme is a modified version of Kubrick, or you pulled code from a GPL theme that someone else designed, you actually forfeit your right to ‘lock’ that code down. So, if you want to make a theme that you don’t want others to change, you need to at least construct it from scratch, without using any GPL-licensed code. In fact, that extends beyond themes.wordpress.net to anything released to the general public that was modified from GPL code. And honestly, you should probably do it with an engine other than WordPress, since themes are inherently tied into it, and it is itself a GPL work.

So, like it or not, Matt can really tell us all to just use GPL, or find another lightweight, highly-customizable, 100%-free and completely UN-licensed piece of blogging software. And that just seems kind of fair.

On the other hand, by all means put up a link to a good explanation of GPL. It is the theme publisher’s responsiblity to understand it, but that’s no reason not to make it easier to understand.

Oh and one more thing, you removed all sponsored themes, that was your decision, but I know a few people who started making themes with “Designed by” and “Coded by” links in the footer, guess what those links will be, just letting you know. If no sponsored themes are allowed, no should be uploaded.

Have a good day!
Kate

Firstly I was horrified by this spammers trick, when will we be free of them?

Happily Matt, numbers don’t lie and non-sponsored themes are really greater. Evenmore, how can we garantee that sponsored themes downloads are realy genuine downloads and not artificaly done to increase its popularity?

While I certainly have no issue with sponsored themes being removed from the WP Theme Viewer, I do have to take just a bit of an issue with the query method described in your post as a measure of “popularity” — mostly because you don’t mention the element of time.

I think a more accurate method of inferring quality by popularity would somehow account for the passage of time…after all, a given theme that’s downloaded once a day for two years would have 700+ downloads; and another theme that’s been available for only a few days could also easily get 700+ downloads. Which sounds to you like better one? This has always been in the back of my head as a nit to pick with “download counters” on various sites, but your post actually brought it to mind with much more clarity.

What I’d love to see are average downloads per week or something, and also perhaps some indication of developer maintenance over time (i.e. updates/year?). That might provide a better indication of quality (assuming one can measure quality by download rate, which might not really fit for outstanding themes like Sandbox that can be more complex to customize for new WordPress users) as well as a better indication of the long-term “health” of the theme by providing some kind of supportability metric.

Anyway, just my $0.02 from a user who wishes he had a lot more time to spend on his personal WordPress installation. Thanks for the great product and services.

Thank you for your response. However, I’m not sure you understood my original comment.

I said:

There needs to be a clear statement and link to a simplified version of the GPL somewhere on the Theme Viewer so that designers know what they are agreeing to when they submit their templates.

Please point to me on the Theme Viewer where it says that a GPL license is required in order to submit themes. If you are going to take me to task, please be sure that you have understood my original comment. Thanks again.

Anyway, I’m in panic mode trying to find one that will suit the graphics I’ve created.. I need to get my ads back up before moving cross country and losing internet access.

*now I am rambling*

I am THRILLED to know most of the themes with embedded links are gone.. is there a way to see if the remaining ones are compliant with the latest release of wordpress? Or are all the ones out there compliant?

Sorry if I’m not making sense. I’ve been sitting at my computer so long I’ve just about lost the use of my legs.

must. fix. blog.

Checking up on the licensing requirements is your job as the copyright holder. Explanations, simple and complex, of the GPL are easily found through some google magic.

More importantly, you don’t have to license your theme under GPL. You only have to do so if you want to be listed on themes.wordpress.org . You licensing your theme as GPL is payment for hosting, advertising, and bug fixing that being hosted by themes.wordpress.org gives you.

I am pretty sure you aren’t one of those people who would just take resources without giving resources back.

The argument is that you should be judging themes on quality, not on sponsorship.

The stats are skewed because of two reasons: Enormous amounts of sponsored theme spam (which is definitely a problem) and the extreme popularity of many free themes.

The basic idea put forward (by me on Performancing and others elsewhere) was to avoid throwing out ‘good’ themes with the trash when you threw out sponsored themes completely.

Is there anything I can bring, or do to help this weekend? I will be arriving Friday night, and leaving early Sunday afternoon.

If I don’t hear from you, I will see you there!
dk

I create WordPress themes because I love to design them. But to be honest, I put some of my designs out there for free not only because I wanted to contribute to the WP community but to also promote myself as a designer. It seems to defeat the purpose to create a theme and then have someone use it, strip out my copyright and go about their business as if I didn’t exist. Somehow that doesn’t seem fair but maybe I’m being selfish.

I agree. There needs to be a clear statement and link to a simplified version of the GPL somewhere on the Theme Viewer so that designers know what they are agreeing to when they submit their templates.

I would have just separated them into a different category/page…let the user decide.

Keep in mind that sponsored themes are a relatively new phenomenon…naturally there should be less downloads due to their age alone. In this light, the download numbers for the sponsored themes are quite healthy…it doesn’t mean that the non-sponsored themes are twice as popular.

I’m not a theme writer…I’m just leery of “Big Brother” telling me what’s good for me.