By the way, I found this website. Is it a official blog of wordpress?
http://wordpressfoundation.org/

Just my two cents
Towfiq I.

You’re welcome to join us, and help take care of that backlog!

Anyone know what the criteria are to judge the ‘WordPress theme review Experiment’ are?

Long-term, what the Theme Review team really needs is more volunteers. In addition to the sheer volume of Themes submitted, we also have to deal with the complexity of some Themes. Speaking for myself personally, I’m not particularly expert in JavaScript/jQuery/etc – so it takes me longer to perform a proper review of a heavily scripted Theme. Also, we get a fair number of BuddyPress themes – and we only have one person on the Theme Review team who has much expertise with BuddyPress.

Hopefully, the addition of more automated checks during the upload process, and general education about the guidelines, as well as the overall ironing-out of the review process, will make things easier for everyone, moving forward.

As for Simon’s Theme-Check tool, it’s available for anyone to use. We’re in the process of incorporating most/all of its checks into the Theme Repository uploader tool. Hopefully that should all be ironed out within a week or so!

Version 3.6.5 of Suffusion went live today. Actually first 3.6.4 went live, then some users pointed out a rather serious flaw, then I immediately patched it. The theme approvers, who have really improved their approval process a few notches up approved it rather quickly too.

So obviously themes previously approved are getting the “frequent flier” privileges, which saves a lot of time.

I guess overall once the speed issues are ironed out this will be a really great process. I know for sure that Suffusion is much more adherent to good design guidelines as per WP recommendations and if all themes follow the same rigorous approval method, the overall quality of themes on WP will go up significantly.

BTW, Simon’s tool sounds pretty interesting. Is that a variant of the current upload checker (or is this already in action)?

Thanks for taking the time to respond here.
Sayontan.

Great feedback on the Theme Review process (even if I’m a few months late to this post – I just discovered it today). I just wanted to post a bit of a response, and a follow-up.

First, in defense of the Theme Review team: it took us a couple months really to get up and going. First, we had no good, objective list of review criteria by which to ensure that all of us would be conducting fair, objective, and consistent reviews. It took us at least a month to develop such guidelines.

After that, the Theme Unit Test data needed to be updated (the previous XML file was from 2008).

Even then, each of us had to conduct several reviews – making several missteps in the process – before we really felt like we had our feet underneath us. Joseph Scott had done yeoman’s work in handling all this by himself before forming the team! We found that we had a considerable learning curve before we were really performing good, consistent reviews.

Your point about cycle time for Theme review and approval is an ongoing problem. The sad reality is, the Theme Review team only has 3-5 people who come anywhere near approaching an average of 1 Theme review per day, while Themes continue to be submitted at a rate of around 10 per day. It is a constant struggle, and we’re continuing to find ways to expedite the process. To that end:

1) We have implemented a couple of the things you suggest here:

First: tickets for already reviewed Themes are prioritized ahead of tickets for newly submitted Themes, and rather than a full-blown review, are given a review based on the diff between the approved version and the new revision. This way, bugfixes and other improvements to already approved Themes should happen much more quickly.

Second, for all tickets, if a newer version is submitted before the existing ticket is reviewed, the new ticket takes the original ticket’s place in the review queue. This way, bugfixes and other improvements do not cost the Theme its place in the queue.

2) The Theme Review continues to add tools and helps for Theme developers:

First is Simon Prosser’s Theme-Check tool, that will check Theme .zip files for issues that would cause the Theme to fail the review.

Second, the Codex pages are continually improved, and the Guidelines continually revised, based on Theme-developer feedback.

3) We’ve attempted to improve the submission and review process, by making better use of the tools available to us. We continue to improve our use of Trac, adding version-diffs for previously approved Themes, adding the Theme developer to the ticket by default, to ensure email notifications work, and have created the review prioritization reports. We are right now in the process of improving the Theme uploader script, to ensure that it checks for more criteria, and outputs all results in one pass, rather than requiring multiple passes.

If there is anything else that anyone can think of to help improve the Theme Review process or guidelines, we’re always open to feedback. We’re trying to do our best, but please let us know where we can do better!

Thanks,

Chip

Regarding the speed of the back-end I am aware of it. The issue there is that the humongous number of options are all loaded into JavaScript variables, slowing things down a bit. I have already submitted version 3.5.9 of the theme with significant improvements in the admin panel speed, so hopefully the theme reviewers will approve it soon; it has already spent quite some time on the review queue.

Sayontan.

ps the only think we could add really is the need for a little more speed in the admin area but it sure is not a show stopper.

Rgds Chris

We have a question for you. When the Suffusion theme is used in conjunction with Buddypress the sidebars get pushed underneath the Buddypress content but only on Buddypress Pages. However the sidebar reverts to its correct position when navigating back to non-Buddypress pages. Do you have a nice and easy solution to that problem please? Thanks and wow what a fantastic job Suffusion is. Think you will soon pass the other contenders with your ratings.