WordPress Theme Viewer — Still Crippled

It’s been 5 months since WordPress decided to close access to theme designersuploading and updating their themes on the official WordPress Theme Viewer, and the longer it stays closed, the worse the entire situation gets for WordPress Theme users and designers.

Every once in a while, I check out the sites that use my themes, both the ones I’ve released here, and the ones I did at RockinThemes.com.

I recently updated one of my most popular themes, RockinBizRedand I released it here at NathanRice.net. I then updated all the links at RockinThemesto reflect this new version.

However, to this day, I continue to see new incoming links from the older version, the buggy version, from RockinBizRed on the WordPress Theme Viewer, the official site for WordPress Themes, a site which continues to be closed to WordPress Theme authors and designers for updating their designs.

I feel so horrible for those still downloading this popular WordPress Theme, not knowing it’s got some code bugs and security issues. For instance, I saw this sitepop up in my incoming links today. Take a look and cringe. The sidebars are seriously screwed up and I’m sure they are blaming me for bad web design when this issue was faced a long time ago.

This really isn’t fair to the user of that theme. It’s not their fault the official WordPress Theme Viewer, a site they trust, delivered them an out of date, buggy theme.

And that goes for the rest of my vulnerable themes that are still sitting out there in the theme viewer, and believe me, there are plenty. I know I’m not the only one with multiple out of date or vulnerable themes sitting on the official WordPress Theme Viewer, because it has been closed since July to theme designers needing to updated their badly out of date themes!

We
NEED access to this site in order to update our themes!

The lack of access to the WordPress Theme Viewer not only hurts my own reputation, but it hurts the users too and could potentially be dangerous! Think about it …

There are plenty of themes out there with security risks. Without the authors having the ability to upgrade, users are put in danger by using the WordPress Theme Viewer, because users trust WordPress to handle this more than they do any other theme distribution site. Many themes are restricted to WordPress version 2.2 and below. Most people don’t have the ability to upgrade a theme themselves, so they are stuck. There could be a higher rate of theme related questions in the support forum, due to authors not being able to upgrade their themes. Theme authors have to answer the same email and comments over and over about why the theme doesn’t work, because the user can’t upgrade it! Frustrated users may decide to go to alternate download sites to get their themes, some of which are very shadyand dangerous! Users are generally unhappy at the quality of the themes on the viewer – think they have a good reason?

I’m not blaming anyone for this. I’m sure it’s no single person’s fault. In the end, the users lose if we don’t open up the WordPress Theme Viewer soon. I certainly hope, for their sake, the Theme Viewer is back up and running soon. Seriously, 5 months … and as far as I’m concerned … that’s long enough.

Please! Open the Theme Viewer back up to designers to update our themes! As long outdated themes remain on the Theme Viewer, everyone loses.

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