May 5, 2009

I have lived in a premium theme world for some time now. The theme I use is premium, the themes I read about are premium, the buzz is all about premium. So can we just drop the ‘premium’ and assume that all themes are appropriately optioned up?

There are two ways of looking at this question:

1. Most decent themes have some premium features (the option for adding code into the footer for example); or
2. Most decent themes don’t have it, premium are still a cut above.

In either case using the ‘premium’ to refer to enhanced feature sets and quality code is letting other theme authors off the hook. In the first instance we need to be highlighting the bad themes, not the good. There need to be themes, and decorations. It either meets a certain level, or it doesn’t.

In the second instance we need premium themes to be the baseline, to make it clear that the expectation is there. No longer will we decide whether to look for premium themes or themes, we want all themes to be on a level. If you can’t theme to that level then that offer a child theme skin of someone else’s base theme. If you can’t do that? Then stop.

The most popular 5 themes right now on WordPress.org are:

1. iNove Downloaded 9,245 times
2. Pixeled Downloaded 7,773 times
3. Atahualpa Downloaded 7,092 times
4. Fusion Downloaded 5,833 times
5. Gear Downloaded 5,522 times

All of these themes make some attempt to offer extra options to manage the theme from the back end with a greater or lesser success:

iNove

• Use Google Custom Search Engine
• Pages or Categories on the menu
• Boxes to insert HTML in strategic places (presumably intended for adverts)
• Show or don’t show author, categories, and tags on posts
• Feed URL and e-mail subscription URL

Pixeled

• Customisable welcome panel
• Feedburner override

Atahualpa

• Way way way too many to list, here are a few though:
• SEO options
• Body text and link styling
• Fluid or fixed width, with variable width columns
• favicon control
• Header styling and logo control
• header image styling with transparent overlays and rotating headers
• feedburner overide with a choice of icons and subscriptions options
• menu bar styling and content control
• category menu styling and content control
• and that just scratches the surface

Fusion

• Custom logo option
• Options to disabled a number of aspects, e.g. the default home page link and search box
• choose which side the sidebar goes on
• Fixed or fluid width
• Disabled jquery enhancements
• Add custom CSS without editing the css file.

Gear

• Standard or wide layout
• 14 built in background options
• 3 built in header images
• Exclude pages from the menu (using their ID)
• Built in optional logos for the header and banner
• Show or don’t show the welcome banner
• Banner text HTML box
• 7 Banner backgrounds
• Relabel or hide the Home link in the menu

I certainly wouldn’t classify most of these themes as premium, however, it is clear that the community is moving in that direction so some action is needed to spur things along. Making the distinction between premium themes and the degrees of theme beneath them really only lets the less than premium themes get a free ride. For the good of the community I think it is time to stop using the ‘premium’, and start using ‘Themes’ to mean well designed, well created, well thought-out themes produced by competent coders and designers. Everything else should be a skin, decoration, or wallpaper.

Update:It occurred to me after hitting publish that a grading system on WordPress.org would be really useful so we could tell the difference in intent.

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