Comments on: Not All Themes Are Created Equal

By: CSS Envy | asker

CSS Envy | asker — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:45:58 +0000

Great articles & Nice a site…

By: Jewels

Jewels — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:19:02 +0000

I think anyone that’s creating a blog and does not know php and css well needs to get someone to take a careful look at their theme setup. This, of course, is if they are serious about there blog. There are so many sneaky tricks, it’s not worth taking a chance.

By: nicole

nicole — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 18:33:42 +0000

Wow, that was unexpected

By: Adii

Adii — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 05:52:55 +0000

Since it was obvious that Patrick highlighted some code in my WP-Polaroid theme, I thought I’d just pop in here as well to state my case. No need for a long comment as I left on Patrick’s original post – as that post explains the situation in detail (so read that, before going on a witch hunt).

@ Jeff – Yep. Lesson learned! The theme has been cleaned up and updated by the way as well.

It’s always funny how a honest mistake (in the WP community especially) is always construed as a malicious act by a serial offender… But nothing ventured, nothing gained…

By: Jeff Chandler

Jeff Chandler — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:06:11 +0000

Looks like Adii stopped by that post and gave his explanation as to what happened with his theme. I have yet to see the other theme authors explain what happened. All in all, looks like a lesson was learned by many people both by theme authors and theme users. Theme authors must make sure that the stuff they leave in the theme is taken out before it goes public and end users now have to double check the themes code/template files to ensure no hanky panky is going on.

Geeze, it was much easier just downloading the darn theme from the repository since those themes were scanned through already.

By: Anto

Anto — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:24:28 +0000

Posted over there, he makes some good points like. lol, Adii gets mentioned everywhere, aint he popualr?

Nope!

Well yes for the prices, but thats neither here nore there

By: Andrea_R

Andrea_R — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:58:04 +0000

At best, it looks like an oversight, which still isn’t good because it says the designer couldn’t be bothered (forgot, whatever) to clean up the code. At worst, it looks really really bad.

I have used and looked at literally hundreds of themes, and in most cases stuff like that is not in there. If it is, it’s usually obvious forgetful stuff. That particular example is the worst I’ve seen.

And from the standpoint of designing themes – who really wants that much hard-coded content in there? *Especially* for release?

By: zinni

zinni — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:49:58 +0000

I think that this just means the market may be changing. Maybe themes are going to have to be bought to ensure that they are not filled with malicious code. The whole situation kind of makes me glad though maybe it will have some impact, and they trustworthy designers out there like myself will start getting some more blog design work at a fair price.

By: Mike Robinson

Mike Robinson — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 10:58:18 +0000

There has always been, and always will be, dodgy themes and templates and scripts (plugins). Of course the average free theme user won’t really notice this until it’s too late. It’s our job as blogging/wordpress/cms enthusiasts and reputable web developers to weed out the bad and publicly point out the risks, in order to make sure people are aware of them.

Theme directories could do with not only listing high quality themes, but providing a wall of shame for those themes that have malicious code as part of their original source. They obviously have to quality checks on any submissions, so it’s not difficult to take it a step further by letting people know what’s wrong.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 10:54:35 +0000

I’m very much in favour of giving people the benefit of the doubt; this could just be an oversight.

I have often uploaded things and forgotton to remove, or add back in, codes and links.

Having said that, the sooner themes can be offered in a way equivalent to plugins the better.