Follow-Up: Theme Obsolescence Guideline

I haven’t yet seen any discussion of this point in Phil’s post below, so I wanted to highlight it again:

Some of the review team have brought it up that there should be a time limit for non-updated themes, our general consensus is 2 or 3 major revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. of WordPress before suspension for not keeping themes updated. What this means that currently we’re on WordPress 3.0 previous to that was 2.9, 2.8 which is 2, 2.7 being 3 revisions previous, all themes that are prior to 2.7 (or 2.8) should be suspended as being currently obsolete.

To be clear, the Theme Review Team is formally proposing an obsolescence Guideline, that any Theme not updated within 2 (perhaps 3) major releases of WordPress be automatically suspended, until a current version is submitted and approved.

For example, if this guideline were put into place with a timeline of 3 major WordPress releases, when WordPress 3.1 is released, all Themes not updated since before the release of WordPress 2.8 (i.e. since June 2009) would be blanket-suspended.

Or, if this guideline were put into place with a timeline of 2 major WordPress releases, when WordPress 3.1 is released, all Themes not updated since before the release of WordPress 2.9 (i.e. since December 2009) would be blanket-suspended.

We very much want input and feedback on this proposal. Would this guideline generally help or hurt – improve or worsen – the Theme Repository? Is the proposed timeline (2 or 3 major WordPress releases, which translates into, generally speaking, 6 or 9 months) reasonable?

#discussion, #guidelines, #obsolescence