WordPress.org Theme Review Process is Broken

Update: The Eru­dite 3.0.2 is now live on WordPress.org.

I’ve already crit­i­cized the WordPress.org Theme Review process when it first launched. Things seemed to be improv­ing, but either the team is poor­ly orga­nized, severe­ly under-pow­ered, or both.

The Eru­dite 3.0 has been in review for 3 months, 3.0.2 since Sept 28. The review tick­et was assigned 5 weeks ago, but still no movement.

If you are savvy enough, down­load 3.0.2 from the project page. There’s a secu­ri­ty issue in the cur­rent theme that makes updat­ing a pri­or­i­ty. You’ll need to install and acti­vate the Options Frame­work to change any theme settings.

NOTE: you will lose your pre­vi­ous set­tings when upgrad­ing. Annoy­ing, I know, but the old set­tings frame­work was rick­ety and awful.

6 Comments

  1. Posted December 14, 2011 at 12:03 pm | Permalink

    Seems there should be some way to flag some­thing a *secu­ri­ty* fix, and get an expe­dit­ed review.

  2. Posted December 14, 2011 at 12:45 pm | Permalink

    You’re right, the review process is slow­ing — an inevitable result of Word­Press’s pop­u­lar­i­ty grow­ing quick­er than vol­un­teers are added (and, as you know, the entire theme review team are vol­un­teers, includ­ing Chip, Emil, Cais and the oth­er heavy lifters).

    I do defend the high bar of entry for the theme repo though (from your pre­vi­ous post). From the About page, its man­date “isn’t to have every theme in the world, it’s to have the best”; which means review­ing is a nec­es­sary, time-con­sum­ing process. There’s plen­ty of room for improve­ment though, includ­ing bet­ter doc­u­men­ta­tion (of the review process, require­ments and the team’s man­date) and bet­ter theme dev tools (Theme Check, Debug). All time-con­sum­ing, but all pos­si­ble with peo­ple chip­ping in.

    OK, I’m off to the request queue.

  3. Malik
    Posted January 22, 2012 at 7:42 am | Permalink

    Just want­ed you to know that I real­ly appre­ci­ate your theme “The Eru­dite”. It’s clean, ele­gant and focused. Pre­cise­ly what a theme should be.

  4. Alex
    Posted September 13, 2012 at 1:31 pm | Permalink

    I real­ly love “The Eru­dite” theme. It’s about the only theme I real­ly like, though I do wish the com­ment form includ­ed a web­site space. It is real­ly orga­nized and focused to any oth­er blog theme I’ve used.

  5. Posted November 25, 2012 at 6:03 am | Permalink

    Eru­dite is nice, I’m using it for my blog. But it has one annoy­ing point. I have to write the first para­graph in notepad first and cut and paste it in. Oth­er­wise, the screen freezes after the first large, hang­ing ini­tial and won’t do any­thing more. Apart from that, I rather like it. Thanks for design­ing it!

  6. Matt
    Posted November 26, 2012 at 11:06 am | Permalink

    @Eunice: as I say on The Erudite’s sup­port sec­tion, please report all bugs like this on the WordPress.org forums.