Wordpress Themeviewer – maybe the community can help?

By: jez

17-01-2008

WordPress Themeviewer – maybe the community can help?

On December 11th, 2007 Matt (or whoever he employs to run the WordPress Themeviewer) announced that updates are in progress. The short news post goes on by stating that “they were sorry for the lack of updates and that a subversion system would be installed and tested at the moment”.

Questions over questions… I find it really sad that the Themeviewer has been closed to Updates for such a long time.
I have fixed my Rainbow Feather Theme in August 2007 already and still people get the old version from the Themeviewer. I manually contact every single Rainbow Feather user and tell them to get the fixed version which takes care of the Internet Explorer 6 png-transparency issue. Also it is now valid xhtml and css, a good feature that many themes lack!

If the people at the official Themeviewer need help, why not address to the always helping community?
There are so many bright heads out there that fix WordPress bugs everyday without any pay – people developing plugins, people posting news and so on. Still, the Themeviewer is closed down. If you were to ask for help, I would volunteer and I am sure some 100 other people would, too! You can discuss this matter in the official WordPress Support forums

Obviously, some changes are being made: for instance was the theme download counter reset – but not for all I believe. This is weird and I hope Matt can shed some light onto this change. Personally, I have had some 50,000+ downloads in the past 6 months for my WordPress Themes (that look different) – these 50,000 downloads is in so far realistic, when looking at my Technorati Authority and Rank (26,000+ reactions, 390th ranked website) – so this leaves me stumbling, why are some counts reset and others not.
Or were all themes reset and my themes are simply not that well demanded nowadays? Another possibility of course… I must admit!

Look at the following figures for clarity: