Featured community themes

Ask

Can we start the process of picking two or three themes as featured community themes (maybe on an annual or semi-annual basis)?

Who this is for

I can do development but I just want to be (mostly) an end user of flexible and quality themes, and I don’t want to have to wade through source code (or more importantly the end result that appears in the browser) of hundreds of themes to figure out what is quality code rather than ‘spiffy but broken’.

Who is not the target

Those who wish to develop their own theme or per-site custom layouts or mix and match modules. Those are fun things to do for someone who is a frontend developer, but I am not such and I am finding myself drawn into a tar-pit of projects that aren’t really my ‘core mission’.

Why

As mentioned in more than a few threads as an end-user finding themes one can count on is daunting and time-consuming at present. The themes showcase is more a directory of themes that have been submitted (which is useful as a development community, but no so much for someone who just wants to use a little configuration (and maybe at first, and once in a while, tweak the general appearance/skin), images, Markdown, and minimal per-page front-matter, to present what they wish to present to the world (or intranet, or members) and be confident that underlying layouts and microformats are sound (no validation, SEO, or related issues).

Questions

  1. What criteria should be used to choose the two or three themes?
  2. What types of sites should they be aimed it (i.e. blog, documentation, portfolio/resume, other?)
  3. Is there anyone with the willingness and time to do this?
  4. I think this should be limited to themes that neither cost money nor are proprietary (i.e. are open source)
  5. Process:
    1. Who submits proposals?
    2. Who evaluates?
    3. How are the results announced/shown?
    4. Is there likely to be an excess of blowback from those theme authors not selected.

Conclusion

I think there is general support for this in the user community. Can we make it happen?

EDIT: I’m willing to be the one to ‘drive’ this, if that is what it take, and folks are okay with that.

2 Likes

Even a minimal addition of “Last updated” for each theme would be gold compared to the current situation. I have moved on from Hugo (but remain on the mailing list) because of the theme situation.