Its been about 8 months since wordpress.org stopped accepting themes from designers. During that time most designers have started releasing themes on their own websites and its made it really difficult to find a theme…. especially one that supported the newer features.
Well good news! Wordpress.org announced today that it was starting the theme directory. As of right now there are only 3 themes uploaded but I have a feeling that will change soon.
All submitted themes will be human reviewed and also scanned for possible exploits. I would highly suggest you submit your themes before the que gets huge.
As far as links within the theme go… it is ok to have a link (1 link) to the designers homepage with the name of the company or person who made the theme. If you get spammy odds are its not going to make it in.
July 18, 2008 at 6:36 am
I like that they are scanning them for exploits, pretty clever.
July 18, 2008 at 6:44 am
Excellent…it’s about time. I am going to head over there now.
July 18, 2008 at 6:51 am
Nice…I’m glad WP is finally doing this.
July 18, 2008 at 7:04 am
This is awesome
July 18, 2008 at 7:05 am
It looks good but it would be nice if I could get a live demo of the theme before I went to download it. Sometimes that thumbnail image is not very helpful.
July 18, 2008 at 7:07 am
Looks really good but I miss a live demo…
July 18, 2008 at 7:23 am
Wordpress sure doesn’t rest on their laurels. It is going to be a huge ask for another product to emulate and/or surpass them. Are these themes going to be for free, or purchase? Is the directory meant to be more of a service pointing potential users to a theme appropriate to their needs, or a hard sell?
July 18, 2008 at 7:25 am
This is Good..
July 18, 2008 at 7:27 am
Good news from WP org, time to get good themes directly from there.
July 18, 2008 at 7:34 am
Good stuff, although I think I am going to just get a custom theme made by UBD in a few months. But this is definitely good for the low budget user.
July 18, 2008 at 7:46 am
I think this is the biggest advantage to this directory and the reason why people will want to acquire themes from here (other than the fact that it’s from the official wordpress site). Knowing that it’s free of vulnerabilities is huge to the average blogger.
July 18, 2008 at 7:47 am
Has anyone else considered uploading a theme in order to get link juice? The theme I’ve made has a “Designed by Shamess” link to my website in the footer, and hopefully some people either won’t remove it, or won’t know how.
July 18, 2008 at 7:48 am
I have 2 developer themes from Woo Themes, but can’t resist looking at new themes and have several other sites to set up.
July 18, 2008 at 7:48 am
Yeah I can’t wait for them to get more themes. It’s always a hassle looking all over the place to find the right theme and I assume most designers will submit to wordpress before going to any other site to submit their themes.
July 18, 2008 at 7:49 am
Looks like they’ve added the live preview feature you wanted (or it was always there and you may have missed it)
July 18, 2008 at 7:50 am
Bryn,
It is worth it going with UBD. You will be happy.
July 18, 2008 at 7:53 am
Why did they get rid of the themes gallery in the first place?
July 18, 2008 at 7:54 am
Yeah I have seen nothing but god things come from them so it should be worth it. I just need to work on the funds for it. Kinda rough being a student only working part-time to come up with money.
July 18, 2008 at 7:54 am
I wonder how descriptive they will allow your footer links to be? Like shoe said – if the anchor text is too spammy, they may not let it through.
July 18, 2008 at 7:56 am
I’ve never really cared for most wordpress themes, they seem lackluster for the most part.
July 18, 2008 at 8:17 am
Excellent. I think it’s still better to take the time to learn how to design and code your own, but this will be nice for beginners. 1 link and no exploits is also very good.
July 18, 2008 at 9:07 am
cool, but i like to make my own !
July 18, 2008 at 9:31 am
I like to make my own too, but I’m not very good at it!
July 18, 2008 at 10:10 am
Yeah, that scan is crucial, fortunately there haven’t been too many themes with exploits.
July 18, 2008 at 10:47 am
Thats good news!
July 18, 2008 at 11:14 am
Good news! Im not a designer or template maker but It will be great for us to find quality themes and browse them easily.
Thanks Wordpress and Thanks Jeremy.
July 18, 2008 at 11:15 am
I think because it was a lot of spam and junky template right there!
July 18, 2008 at 11:27 am
Sweet – we look forward to seeing the new themes
July 18, 2008 at 11:33 am
I don’t suppose they’ll be allowing any adult themes, unless perhaps they open an adults only section, but unlikely.
July 18, 2008 at 11:38 am
there are many tutorials that teach you how to do it, or how to implement an already made template into wordpress…you just need to have some ambition and time
July 18, 2008 at 11:42 am
searching the right theme on dozens of sites is time consuming…now if they could put all the themes in one place, carefully categorized, would be really useful.
July 18, 2008 at 11:44 am
go put it on wordpress…you don’t have anything to lose. Look at the designers websites and you will see that lots of them have a high PR, thanks to the links on their customers websites.
July 18, 2008 at 11:46 am
Having a collection of reviewed themes is going to be really great. Spending time scrolling through theme sites filled with themes that really aren’t that great is not very fun.
It would be great if WP posted some information about what it is that they are looking for when they review themes for security vulnerabilities, or even better, if they posted a series of articles about how to ensure that themes you design are vulnerability free.
July 18, 2008 at 11:48 am
look what happened to MovableType…once they became commercial, they lost their popularity. As long as WP remains free, nothing can surpass them, at least for the next years.
July 18, 2008 at 12:10 pm
I don’t think it’s working. I get this message – “Only zip files are stupported.” even though that’s exactly what i’m uploading?!
July 18, 2008 at 12:19 pm
1 link is acceptable, i just dont like 3-4 footer links..
i am sure the new site will get lot of visitors.
July 18, 2008 at 12:50 pm
There are just 3 themes right now.
July 18, 2008 at 2:20 pm
well,it just launched…I would say to wait for a couple of weeks until the directory gets some more themes.
July 18, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Plus with the upgrade to 2.5 and now 2.6, perhaps a lot of the themes may not be compatible with the new versions of WordPress.
July 18, 2008 at 3:32 pm
I wish they had a better way to search through the themes
July 18, 2008 at 4:07 pm
This will be great. Much easier to find themes now
July 18, 2008 at 5:25 pm
this is great… ease and convenience for everybody…
July 18, 2008 at 7:35 pm
Hoorahhh !!! I love new themes. Thanks for keeping me in the know.
July 18, 2008 at 9:49 pm
I agree – I expected a much more intuitive interface. Meh.
July 18, 2008 at 9:52 pm
I don’t know that they can’t be passed, but it’s certainly an uphill battle – really, what features are missing from WP that someone else could tout sufficiently to make people switch? I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Their concept of WP as platform, with the ability for users to extend functionality through plugins makes it tough to beat. They have such a HUGE community of developers and designers doing work for them for free.
July 18, 2008 at 9:53 pm
Yeah, most of the templates were lousy. It made it a big challenge to hunt down anything that was half-decent. They needed to clean house.
July 18, 2008 at 9:53 pm
Yeah, but now you can benefit even more from making your own by making them available to others. The inbound link benefit can be fairly substantial.
July 18, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Not a bad idea for a site – search engine of WP themes, user tagging to help make more reliable search. The problem is how to pull the data from sites that don’t standardize their designs (offering a data feed of those items). You basically have to screen scrape them.
July 18, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Even if they don’t, someone else will very shortly.
July 19, 2008 at 2:33 am
New themes is very good. WP forever!
July 19, 2008 at 2:44 am
Time for me to submit my themes with a single link as designer link. A good move by the wordpress guys
July 19, 2008 at 9:44 am
yes thanks for sharing. Much easier to find themes now
July 19, 2008 at 10:47 am
I like this scan idea. Sounds good.
July 19, 2008 at 10:47 am
Thanks for sharing this. I’d never know otherwise. I am already lurking through different themes at the moment.
July 19, 2008 at 10:48 am
Chetan…you make themes too?
July 19, 2008 at 10:49 am
absolutely. And that DUM DUM theme on the featured list. I love it. Time to add to my blog soon probably
July 19, 2008 at 10:49 am
9 themes, 6,659 downloads, and counting
They are 9 now.
July 19, 2008 at 10:50 am
there is a preview option in the themes. I think that serves the purpose of live demo?
July 19, 2008 at 10:49 pm
This should have happened earlier
July 20, 2008 at 4:48 am
I think its about time, we are looking for trust worthy themes.
July 20, 2008 at 4:49 am
Its a great way to protect their brand.
July 20, 2008 at 4:53 am
I think that there should be a combination of free and paid options. Like a directory of trusted themes and companies that sell the themes.
July 20, 2008 at 4:54 am
I agree Unique Blog Designs (UBD) make some of the most impressive themes.
July 20, 2008 at 4:58 am
There should be some sort of voting or complaints so that this does not happen, only quality themes should be allowed.
July 20, 2008 at 5:03 am
Well said Chris. Show us who to use and then why it is that they believe that we should use them. teaching us to choose the better provider.
July 20, 2008 at 7:35 am
I’ve never found a theme that i liked, so i dont care…
July 21, 2008 at 6:57 am
Love it! Wordpress are leading the way by miles, and are just pulling further and further away. As of this morning there are 9 themes, and over 14,000 downloads between them already!
July 21, 2008 at 5:09 pm
This is where I got the theme to my blog.
July 23, 2008 at 10:47 am
I submitted some of my themes and they did not answered so far. It’s been over a week. What is going on?
July 23, 2008 at 10:32 pm
this is a blessing for those of us who need to depend on programmers.
July 27, 2008 at 7:27 pm
I guess this is going on top of my ‘To Blog’ pile
August 27, 2008 at 3:40 pm
thats y wordpress rox