Child Themes, Coming to a WordPress.org Theme Directory Near You
Late last year, I asked whether child themes should be listed on WordPress.org. Today at WordCamp Savannah, Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) announced that he would be releasing a couple of his old blog designs as free WordPress themes in the WordPress.org theme directory.
One of the sentences in Matt’s announcement post caught my eye.
The second theme, Mazeld, is actually the last from-scratch original design I did here on Ma.tt (then photomatt.net) and is built as a 2010 child theme.
I downloaded the Mazeld theme from WordPress.org and confirmed it was indeed a Twenty Ten child theme (as the stylesheet has the line “Template: twentyten” present) and tweeted Matt for further clarification.
Conclusion
So in conclusion, there has been a child theme sighting on WordPress.org theme directory although judging from Matt’s response, it doesn’t seem to be currently possible to submit them until the installer and UI are fixed.
Hopefully child theme inclusion in the WordPress.org directory will be a reality for theme developers very soon, this is definitely a big step in the right direction.
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Buddypress child themes off the default have also been allowed in for a while now.
Thanks for the info, wasn’t aware of that. According to this I guess all you have to do is tag it with “BuddyPress” while submitting.
‘Bout time! This is great news. Let’s just hope that fixing the installer and UI is a quick process. I assume this is all part of the 3.org phase, so it’ll likely be coming down the pipeline fairly quickly.
Yep, let’s hope. Now that I’ve heard BuddyPress child themes are already in the directory, maybe a lot of the functionality and code necessary is already there.
This is great news, I’ll upload some Hybrid child themes when it will be possible
Sweet, just curious, have you released your Hybrid child themes elsewhere already?
Hey that’s cool news! That theme directory has been pretty bad for a long time… good to see them working on that in their core code-break
Hey Chuck, how has the theme directory been “pretty bad” in your opinion? Not arguing, just genuinely curious.
I’ve heard some complaints about their search leaving something to be desired, as well as complaints on the quality of themes present there.
Leland
Stop Arguing with me!!!!! lol.. j/k man.
So ‘pretty bad’ essentially referring to the search and the lack of the better themes residing on there. It was useless to me and google was always a better way to find good themes before the “theme houses” started popping up and centralizing them.
I’m glad the team is taking time to focus on this and other stuff outside of core – MUCH needed
This is super super duper news!
About frickin’ time for this to happen!