It’s no secret I love doing theme reviews. When I get a chance. The past couple of weeks though I’ve only been able to do one a week if I’m lucky. I do read the theme-reviewers emails when I open my inbox but of course that just isn’t enough.
Background
If you didn’t already know for the last year I’ve been stating that I am working on a theme to submit. Yes and no. The biggest thing I’ve actually been working on is a personal theme. for this site. I’ve looked at many themes and have even thought about purchasing a theme from an established, and reputable theme foundry. As you can tell I chose to use the Displace theme.
For the time being I like and it does the job. I’ve thought about modifying it but want to create my own. Maybe down the road. We’ll see. I’m getting a little sidetracked so we’ll talk about the issue at hand. Updates and the review process.
Uploading a new theme
The process is actually quite simple. One of the first things you want to do is go to the themes directory. As you can see from the image on the right hand side the welcome screen showcases a few featured themes and on the right hand column there are three sub-sections: Popular, Newest and Recently updated.
You will want to login with your WordPress.org username and password. After you have done that you have, and I mean have to, read more about having your theme hosted in the repository. I cannot emphasize that part enough, either. In particular the guidelines to getting your theme accepted.
That little about page is very crucial and does look a little like:
Yeah, it does seem a little daunting but it is fairly simple and straight-forward. Some information about theme-tags, guidelines and why you would want your theme in the repository.
So, you’ve signed in and want to upload your theme. You go to the upload section by clicking the Theme Authors link and you are taken to the upload screen. This is the crucial one you will want to store not only in your bookmarks but in your head as well. This page is what will create a new Trac ticket with your theme so that an actual human being will go over your code and give you feedback and hopefully approve your theme.
A ticket?
You read that right. A ticket. You will receive an email confirmation with that ticket number. If that doesn’t happen you may want to contact the theme-reviewers list and I’m pretty sure at least one person will be able to help you out.
The next stage is the review process. When I started doing reviews it was a little tedious, to say the least, only because so much of the process wasn’t as automated as it is now.
What a reviewer would do is login to the Trac for WordPress themes, go to the report, as demonstrated in the next image, and see if there were any other tickets that have been submitted using the same username/theme and close the tickets. The reviewer would then conduct the review with the most current version of the theme.
What next?
The next thing you will be getting is feedback. Good, bad and maybe even some ugly. We don’t always like to hear the truth but let’s face it. We don’t always do our best the first time around. I know I don’t.
From here on out it will be a human being, an actual living, breathing, eating, human being that will read over your lines of code. That person will read every character and see every image you used to create that WordPress theme. And hopefully, just hopefully it will pass inspection. The key here is communication. Get a dialogue between both you and the reviewer. A great example is a review I did a few weeks ago to the Customizer theme as seen on the image to the left.
Now, I know you’re wondering why such a long list of tickets that developer has. At least those that looked at the image. That was because some of those are updates. If you’re not asking how you update your theme then I’m not sure we can keep talking. In real life. I kid of course.
In order to update not only your theme in the repository, but in the theme trac you will want to visit the upload page once more.
After you have signed in, naturally, you will head back to the upload page, make sure you bump the version of your theme in your stylesheet and you will be on your way to sharing with the WordPress community.
Final thoughts
As I said the key is communication. Talk to the person conducting the review and the developer. You would be amazed about what both parties can learn and you also may make a new connection in the end.