Welcome to the 20th edition of our monthly transparency report (for September 2016). In this series, I focus on different aspects of running a WordPress theme business, including our strategies, methods, wins, and struggles. In short, this is where you can learn what’s been going on behind the scenes at Themeisle and CodeinWP. Click here to see the previous reports.
Our most popular free theme, post WordPress.org
If you’re following the blog, you might have noticed that our most popular free theme – Zerif Lite – got suspended from the WordPress.org directory mid September.
A couple of days after that, I published our transparency report, where I covered the whole thing somewhat. By “somewhat” I mean that I tried to focus on the theme directory itself, and present how we can all improve it to serve theme developers better … or at least what sort of changes we could propose to make it so. I didn’t want to focus on the fine details of the suspension itself and turn this into a “their fault vs our fault” kind of exchange.
Another couple of days later, WordPress Tavern picked up the story and published their own piece describing the situation. And THAT story turned out to be a really lively one, to say the least. There have been 145 comments so far. Many of them good and empathic. Many of them negative.
