Some recent discussions in the community have indicated that the Theme directory is too “blog” focused, and that the Guidelines actively discourage non-blogging Themes from being submitted. There are some things that are true, some things that are untrue, and some things that are simply outside of the control of the Theme Review Team, in terms of the Theme directory and “non-blogging” Themes.
One thing that is true is that the current stance of the Theme Review Team is that the “CMS” use case is not significantly compelling for a Theme to omit support for a blog. From a coding perspective, the differences between a post loop The Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post. https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop. and a static page loop are minimal. From a user perspective, there is no real reason to restrict a “CMS” Theme’s user base only to users who don’t intend to use the core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. blog functionality.
Another thing that is partially true is that the current Theme Unit Tests appear heavily blog-centric. But that’s mainly because the unit tests are presented as blog posts. Some things – taxonomies, posts navigation, post formats, etc. – only apply to blog posts; but most of the rest of the Theme Unit Tests apply equally regardless of post type. The Theme Unit Tests are designed as test-every-reasonable-use-case data: to push edge cases and boundaries, to ensure that Themes accommodate the widest possible range of use cases and to see how Themes respond to break points. Generally speaking, the entire suite won’t apply to any given Theme (for example, most Themes don’t add support for all post formats; so the unit tests for unsupported post formats wouldn’t apply).
By contrast, one thing that is not true is that there is no recourse for hosting a non-traditional Theme in the Theme directory. Want to submit a Theme intended to be used as a support ticket system, a knowledge base, or a presentation slideshow? Those are all welcome in the Theme directory. We refer to these Themes as “niche” or “custom use” Themes, and we already have a mechanism in place to “whitelist” those Themes so that they can bypass non-applicable upload script tests. All we ask is that developers email the mail-list and ask for an exemption, along with explaining the justification.
But there are many things that are outside of the control of the Theme Review Team, including anything that deals with the infrastructure of wordpress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org//themes itself. We have one Theme directory to work with. We can recommend filter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. tags to be added, removed, or modified; but we don’t make the final call on them. We have no control over the each Theme’s page in the directory, the ratings/review system, the algorithms for trending Theme lists, or pretty much anything other than actually marking Themes as “live” in the directory, after completing a review. There are many ways that these things could be improved, but we are dependent on other people who have much higher priorities in the grand scheme of the WordPress project and website.
I would love to have the ability to host Theme frameworks (in the classic, non-marketing sense of the term: a drop-in code library that facilitates Theme development) in the directory, it would greatly simplify review for Themes that use frameworks such as Hybrid Core and the like; but we currently have no infrastructure to do so. I would love to have the Theme’s directory listing page parse the Theme’s readme file the same way that a Plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party’s listing page parses its readme; but that’s something else that isn’t possible at the moment.
I would love to explore the idea of having multiple Theme directories, or some sort of “tier” system; but we just don’t have that infrastructure. And that’s one of the primary reasons that we have what appears to be a “one size fits all” approach and mechanism for Theme submission, review, and approval – but that doesn’t mean that we can’t or won’t accept submissions for Themes that don’t fall strictly within the “blogging” genre. If you have an idea or question, mail the Theme Reviewers mail-list and ask. It can’t hurt anything, and you very well may be surprised by the response.
#discussion, #guidelines