Comments on: New WordPress.org theme directory

By: Join the WordPress theme review team

Join the WordPress theme review team — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 17:42:29 +0000

[...] point last year, I had become fed up with the process of getting a theme up on WordPress.org. I had never really wanted my themes on the repository because I was generating my own traffic and had a solid user base. [...]

By: Joni Mueller

Joni Mueller — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:07:48 +0000

I’m a little late jumping on this bandwagon, but here goes.
1. What effect will this have on the way we currently get themes? Newbies to WP and to blogging in general will use the new repository as a jumping off point. This hopefully will stop a large percentage of the current problems I see on the WP Support Forums. A newbie getting his hands on a complex theme or a badly designed or structured theme and trying to work with it. At least we can be assured of some amount of functionality out of the box. On the other hand, someone who knows his or her way around CSS and HTML and who is just new to WP itself might go there and grab a theme or two, but likely won’t be content with it for long and will either search out independent theme sites (premium or otherwise) or roll his own.
2. Do you see this as a step in the right direction? I think it’s a big improvement over the former system and insisting on themes that conform to the new WP structure (e.g., tags, widgets, image styling) is a good move.
3. How will this change (if at all) the premium theme market (I imagine this is on a few people’s minds)? I think there will always be a market for premium themes if they are well designed and offer uniqueness that you can’t get elsewhere. There are a handful of premium theme authors (Brian Gardner comes immediately to mind, along with you, Justin) who consistently supply excellent themes well worth their asking price. Others are just, pardon my candor, trash.
4. Will this make it harder for new theme authors to get their themes out who don’t want to use the directory? I
think if you market your themes properly, you can get noticed without having to post your theme(s) to the directory. We had about a dozen themes up at themes.wordpress.net, but as WP continued its furious upgrade pace, our themes needed upgrading and we just never were able to keep up. Now with the new directory, there’s a chance for us to polish up our old themes to comport with WP 2.6 and beyond. And we’ll likely do that for a handful of themes, just to get our name out there. As for the GPL license issues, I’m with you. I am not too keen on turning my work over to someone so that it can be bastardized and passed off as another’s work. That’s against the spirit of what free themes is about, at lesat in my mind. So we’ll probably put out just a few themes in the hopes that those might drive theme-goers to our site for other of our themes. I can understand why the themes in the new repository have to be GPL. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Great post, Justin, and thanks for giving us something else to chew on.

By: milo

milo — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:19:35 +0000

What effect will this have on the way we currently get themes?
Judging by the download numbers it’ll be the only repository,
however the no1, Tarski works buggy, so you can’t tell for sure.

Do you see this as a step in the right direction?
Yes, it was time to do so after themes.wordpress.net died,
however I have no clue why they just don’t take all my themes over it… (themes.wordpress.net/author/milo317/)

How will this change (if at all) the premium theme market?
Premium will last, but Collis might kill them with his new FlashDen alike theme market. Just think of the followers of his other sites and check FlashDen, then you might have an idea.

Will this make it harder for new theme authors to get their themes out who don’t want to use the directory?
Yepp, definitely, if you don’t have a “name”, but then again there is WLTC for PR work.

By:

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:48:52 +0000

@groovy totally agree!

By: groovy

groovy — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:58:52 +0000

spot on Justin. What you have established here is a benchmark for other providers that needs to be followed not diluted.

By: jez

jez — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 10:22:20 +0000

thanks for your reply justin.
Currently I see no point in putting much effort in launching additional free themes to the community (e.g. my past themes were downloaded 225,000+ times) if people can just come around, copy and redistribute them on “premium” sites while I intended to have them spread for free.

I believe that with this license either little “upper segment and ‘made with love’” themes will appear in the wordpress theme repository (thus quality will suffer and wordpress will become similar to ‘blogger’(com)) or only designers with “additional income” or that are total angels to society will be posting there.

That’s my take on the situation and I am probably not the only one believing that for simplicity and attribution sake themes should not be GPL but CC (SA-BY and/or ND).

By: Justin Tadlock

Justin Tadlock — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:24:52 +0000

Squawk
I would like to be a rich man.

I’m working on filling those needs that bloggers have and definitely hope to do so with my new site.

Thanks for the input.

trendminders
I’m thinking of adding a few less advanced themes to the directory at some point. Put focus on design instead of all the extras with my main themes. Then, send support questions and users to my new site. It could be a great traffic builder and a way to introduce new WordPress users to my current theme collection.

I have a few ideas about how to make open-source, GPL themes very profitable, which I’ll be unleashing with Project M.

jez
Sorry, I’ve been meaning to reply. I’ve just been a bit busy this week.

Yes, if you license the entire theme as GPL, others can redistribute it and take credit for it. Then, there’s nothing you can do about it because you would have licensed it that way. I think the guys over at WP.org would help out with the policing of copying themes on their site, but there’s not much they can outside of that.

The best way to be sure that your stuff (images/css/scripts) aren’t GPL licensed is to add them as separate download packages (might annoy or confuse users). Or, create them for a different system first, then port them over to WordPress. Or, as I mentioned above, create basic HTML templates that work with your code and plug in the WP functions afterward.

Of course, if you’re adding it to the directory, then everything has to be GPL.

I’m opening a new site in the next week (my current Project M I’ve been blogging about), which will show what kind of things you can do with some of these ideas. Sorry, that’s kind of a vague description, but I think it’ll change a few things in how we think about WordPress themes.

By: jez

jez — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:48:21 +0000

I didn’t mean to kill the discussion here, so can anyone simply it?

By: jez

jez — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:11:16 +0000

Justin,

I am not yet digging the GPL license- what is the principle it operates on?
So far what I have read is that images, css and javascript as well as custom code can be “claimed as one’s creative property”, while the wordpress functions (such as listing pages, the loop, etc) is GPL and not ‘owned’ (so to say) by anyone?

For instance, if I were to release a theme under GPL, wouldnt that mean people could just rip and sell it without giving me a chance of getting back to them at all?

I can understand the argument that themes, as a ‘inherited product of wordpress’ must be licensed as GPL, however as a designer without any great knowledge of licensing I am stumbling to grasp “what exactly” this means.

Maybe someone can put it dead-stupid in a single sentence.
I see no great point in spending numerous of hours working on a free design (which I loved to do for the community) if someone can just come around and “claim it”, do stuff and re-sell it.

By:

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 09:18:07 +0000

1. What effect will this have on the way we currently get themes?
A lot of the previous comments has nailed this I think. The group should be separated into new users, and experienced users. It’s a fantastic resource for the new users right of the bat, and it can evolve into a fantastic resources for experienced users.

2. Do you see this as a step in the right direction?
Yep, it will be nice to see the theme part evolve in the same direction as the plugins have, with auto-update. Now we just need to do something about localization, since not all sites on the big internet is in English

3. How will this change (if at all) the premium theme market (I imagine this is on a few people’s minds)?
Not much I gather. Especially if the cool freemium themebuilders like yourself don’t put the themes up in the theme directory. Don’t get me wrong, I understand your stance, and I love coming here on this site, but on the other hand it’s a free outlet for your very cool themes, and it would also drive alot of traffic to your site.

I actually don’t see why you couldn’t say that all support-issues should be answered in your forum, that’s what a lot of the plugin-authors do.

4. Will this make it harder for new theme authors to get their themes out who don’t want to use the directory?
Yes I think so, the directory will serve as a de facto standard of Wordpress themes which will make it even harder for newcomers to enter the market.