Toivo was not approved in WordPress.com

I was so thrilled when Mina Olen theme got accepted in WordPress.com. It has not been huge success but 5200$ in a year is a good start for me. I had vision to crow my land of themes so that 4-6 theme would be cool to have in there. I doubt that’ll never happen.

I knew that Kuorinka theme would probably be rejected, and I was right. That was no surprise. It was time to roll up my sleeves and start working with Toivo, my last Hope! I honestly think that I am much better theme developer than I was one year ago and I was very happy how Toivo came out. It’s my best one so far. The code is rock solid and design was spot on.

I send the theme in WordPress.com and waited their answer for a while, that’s never good is it:) After three days jury had reached the verdict: it was not good enough for WordPress.com.

They were nice enough to tell me the reasons. They didn’t write it like this but this is how it felt, and probably this is how they were feeling about it too.

• Bad design
• Lack of focus
• Front Page Template sucks

I was little disappointed. But I wasn’t crying! My tears were coming from watching “Valley of Sigh”, our students amazing play.

I hope I can prove them wrong in WordPress.org version of the theme.

Future of WordPress.com themes

I really don’t  know where WordPress.com themes are going right now. They might have lost their focus like I did. First they opened their marketplace for everybody and now it’s closed again. It seems that they have been pushing really hard for publishing free themes, that’s a good thing for users. But for commercial themes I’m not so sure what’s the goal.

• They basically stopped marketing commercial themes. They do tweet about new themes though.
• We have a private blog for themers but other than that, there isn’t any conversation between developers or WordPress.com staff. They did send a enquiry a while ago so that might help.
• Mike from Array.is mentioned that review process takes months for commercial themes. Sounds like .org review process:)
• They seem to want really simple themes with simple design decisions. That’s fine by me but isn’t that kind of “forcing” the end user like certain type of themes if they don’t have any options?
• I would have wanted more accessibility-ready themes in WordPress.com like mine but it seems that isn’t priority.

It would be interesting to know what other new theme shops thinks about WordPress.com marketplace? I’m not on the same page with them so I’m just gonna turn the page.