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.
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Hi I am Jeremy Schoemaker and ShoeMoney.com is my blog. 99% of the post here are done by me but you will see others occasionally make guest posts. This blog is fun to write but for my day job I run several online companies.
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I like that they are scanning them for exploits, pretty clever.
Excellent…it’s about time. I am going to head over there now.
Nice…I’m glad WP is finally doing this.
This is awesome
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.
Looks really good but I miss a live demo…
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?
This is Good..
Good news from WP org, time to get good themes directly from there.
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.
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.
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.
I have 2 developer themes from Woo Themes, but can’t resist looking at new themes and have several other sites to set up.
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.
Looks like they’ve added the live preview feature you wanted (or it was always there and you may have missed it)
Bryn,
It is worth it going with UBD. You will be happy.
Why did they get rid of the themes gallery in the first place?
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.
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.
I’ve never really cared for most wordpress themes, they seem lackluster for the most part.
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.
cool, but i like to make my own !
I like to make my own too, but I’m not very good at it!
Yeah, that scan is crucial, fortunately there haven’t been too many themes with exploits.
Thats good news!
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.
I think because it was a lot of spam and junky template right there!
Sweet – we look forward to seeing the new themes
I don’t suppose they’ll be allowing any adult themes, unless perhaps they open an adults only section, but unlikely.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?!
1 link is acceptable, i just dont like 3-4 footer links..
i am sure the new site will get lot of visitors.
There are just 3 themes right now.
well,it just launched…I would say to wait for a couple of weeks until the directory gets some more themes.
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.
I wish they had a better way to search through the themes
This will be great. Much easier to find themes now
this is great… ease and convenience for everybody…
Hoorahhh !!! I love new themes. Thanks for keeping me in the know.
I agree – I expected a much more intuitive interface. Meh.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even if they don’t, someone else will very shortly.
New themes is very good. WP forever!
Time for me to submit my themes with a single link as designer link. A good move by the wordpress guys
yes thanks for sharing. Much easier to find themes now
I like this scan idea. Sounds good.
Thanks for sharing this. I’d never know otherwise. I am already lurking through different themes at the moment.
Chetan…you make themes too?
absolutely. And that DUM DUM theme on the featured list. I love it. Time to add to my blog soon probably
9 themes, 6,659 downloads, and counting
They are 9 now.
there is a preview option in the themes. I think that serves the purpose of live demo?
This should have happened earlier
I think its about time, we are looking for trust worthy themes.
Its a great way to protect their brand.
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.
I agree Unique Blog Designs (UBD) make some of the most impressive themes.
There should be some sort of voting or complaints so that this does not happen, only quality themes should be allowed.
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.
I’ve never found a theme that i liked, so i dont care…
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!
This is where I got the theme to my blog.
I submitted some of my themes and they did not answered so far. It’s been over a week. What is going on?
this is a blessing for those of us who need to depend on programmers.
I guess this is going on top of my ‘To Blog’ pile
thats y wordpress rox