WordCamp Events Friday

Asides

There are two events happening before WordCamp officially kicks off on Saturday. Tomorrow at 1 PM there is a meetup at Crossroads Cafe which should be a lot of fun. And then at 6:30 there’s a dinner meetup organized by Niall at a neat place called Taylor’s Automatic Refresher, which is an outdoor beer and burger place at the Ferry Building. (Same place we met last year.) It’s cafeteria style, and we’ll be outside chatting. San Francisco evenings tend to get chilly near the water so bring a jacket.

Screencast and Videoblogging

Asides, ,

The Show in a Box project has made a screencast called How To Install And Setup WordPress. According to Jay Dedman, “Showinabox.tv is our new project to help videobloggers simply download a folder, install, turn on plugins, and choose a theme. All open source. Basically make the “ultimate videoblogging platform using WordPress”. It’ll showcase videos using vPIP, build a visual archive, help with categories, and offer a community funding mechanism.” Cool!

Theme Quality and Downloads

Uncategorized

There’s been a common argument that sponsored themes are higher quality because they were paid for and removing them from the theme directory will make it suck. While I find this argument insulting to the designers who have put their work out there without sponsorship, and having personally looked at hundreds of them I had a general feeling that most sponsored themes were junk, I didn’t really have any data.

Well I ran a few queries against the theme viewer DB a few minutes ago and found out some interesting stats:

  • We’ve removed 2,107 themes so far, or a bit under 60%. Those themes had 2,243,735 downloads total, or about 1,064 downloads per theme.
  • There are 1,737 themes still in the directory and those had 3,480,244 downloads, or about 2,003 downloads per theme.

(There may be some spam themes still left in the 1,737 number, but I think we’ve gotten most of them. The reports have slowed to a trickle.)

So if you assume downloads are a measure of the public interest in a theme, then non-sponsored themes are about twice as popular as sponsored ones.

Of course you might not accept that assumption, and the data is fuzzy, and there are certainly a handful of sponsored themes that are very high quality, but overall the indications are that they were a net drain on the site. Rather than making one-off exceptions to the no-sponsored-themes policy and being accused of favoritism or of having ulterior motives* I’d rather spend time doing things to reward and encourage the people who are making high-quality themes without embedded advertising.

* Which we get enough of already.