themes.wordpress.com : what happened?

This is the current state of play of the Wordpress theme library.

Themes suspend

There are two areas where I think Wordpress is in danger of losing out to other user-friendly CMS style web design packages.

The first is that choosing a template is becoming harder. Seems like because Wordpress is an open-source project there’s no ownership and nothing to sell.

As a result, it doesn’t seem to matter that there’s no way a designer can get an overview of all the themes available. Go to the new themes page and you’ll find that no-one’s thought of putting a ‘view all’ option on the page. Same if you go to the plugins page.

The second area is in how badly documented everything to do with Wordpress is. I’ve said it before but there’s a growing ‘how-to’ information gap. In fact, it’s become a canyon and if you’re a newcomer, it’s too big to jump across.

The problem with the information that does exist is that it’s written by people on the wrong side of the canyon: the developers who made the stuff. And they seem to have lost the ability to see things from the point of view of someone who doesn’t know what they know.

Yesterday, in trying to work out why the simplest plugin ever - ‘list category posts’ - wouldn’t work for me, I discovered it uses something called a ’shortcode’. That was the first time I’d ever come across that expression. What was it? I searched in the Wordpress codex. I got a long, in-depth article aimed at fellow-developers that was no use at all.

Is this the fate of ‘open-source’ tools? That because there’s no money to be made and no frustrated customer to deal with nobody has to think outside of their own viewframe?

August 25, 2008 | Filed Under GRRRR!!!, feedback 

Comments

Leave a Reply