The big news, although now ancient (two days old), is the reborn WordPress Theme Viewer at themes.wordpress.net, which is really quite lovely. Thomas did some fantastic work with some others (read the official announcement) to make something truly useful. And that is quite an accomplishment.
First of all, note the ample use of negative space. I’m going to avoid calling it “white” space because it’s not always necessarily white. I think it’s great that there are download links right there on each page—no need to travel through layers just to get the damn theme.
Also: permalinks. This is nice. For example, if I mention how you can comment/vote on themes, I can also say, Hey, go and vote for blog.txt, Simplr, Barthelme, veryplaintxt, plaintxtBlog, etc. You get the idea. Very useful for theme authors.
Observations
A couple comments are warranted too. While the design is really wonderful, just the kind of site I enjoy, there is something that I envision differently. For example,
Looks great, right? Well, it does. But I see a thumbnail and wonder what this theme is. Have I seen it before? Is that a new Hemingway theme? And so on.
The theme title is shown (1) in the link title and (2) on the theme page. I can argue, however, that the name of a theme is its least important detail. Well, it is. Is the mouse-over text suffecient? Probably.
My final observation is related to the ever-so-cool permalinks. Let’s say my Simplr theme needs an update.
So I write a nice e-mail to Thomas with the new theme ZIP attached. Let’s say version 1.4.1. He updates it. Everything is beautiful—except the permalink. For example, the Simplr permalink is http://themes.wordpress.net/columns/1-column/23/simplr-11b/, but the current version is actually 1.4.1.
However! I can just use the permalink http://themes.wordpress.net/columns/1-column/23/, sans the theme name/version, to get the same result.
Overall, well done Thomas.
2 Comments
thomas’ design is gorgeous, indeed.
i’m happy enough with the name as the link title, but then again, my theme has a graphic header.
i noticed the permalink naming thing as well, but i see that more as a safegaurd than a real issue. thomas has been updating the post title for each theme, so when you arrive at the page, it won’t be confusing. permalinks are generally only for SEO, anyway, most people don’t actually look at them. and using the version number allows him to have multiple versions of a theme (rounded corners V2, K2, and other ’sequel’ themes)
Good point with the sequel themes. Yes, the permalinks really don’t matter. It would be cool if they could be written so the theme ID number was only necessary, like
/theme/383.But wow, in function and form, what a huge step forward from the last site.