The official WordPress Theme Viewer has been the place to find WordPress themes for years. Recently, there was a flurry of activity when it was thought a blogger had faked some screen shots of a new redesign.
It spurred an entry at Weblog Tools Collection entitled Where You Download a Theme Matters. In that flurry, one major fact was overlooked while dolling out advice for readers to only download themes from the Theme Viewer or the theme authors’ websites. That’s good advice in general, except that part about downloading from the theme viewer.
Since the theme viewer was taken over by Automattic, and after the flurry of activity to remove all the sponsored themes and those which violated copyrights, the site has seen no more love; it’s been well over 7 months and counting.
New theme creators have no way of adding their themes and previous theme authors have no way of updating their themes. What does that mean for you? It means you should not download your themes from the official WordPress Theme Viewer.
Downloading a theme from the theme viewer (at least until it’s updated properly) means that you are potentially downloading an outdated and possibly insecure theme. It’s a great place to find theme inspiration and if you find a theme you like, visit the author’s actual website and download the theme from there.
In case you’re wondering, here are a couple other good sources (at the time of this writing) of WordPress themes:
- WPSnap — this site was created by the guys who used to run the official theme viewer before it was taken over by Automattic.
- WPDesigner — Small Potato has put his site up for sale, but in the mean time, you can find a huge assortment of fine WordPress themes.
Just note that I’m not the owner or manager of either of the above listed sites. At the time of this writing, they both provide and list WordPress themes which are up to date, but I take no responsibility for anything you download from them.
Thank you Teli. I have been updating the theme of my community blog and used the viewer -I will go now and check that the theme is up-to-date.
# March 20th, 2008
The one thing I can say for theme viewer that I can’t about some of the theme downloads I have made over the past few weeks looking for inspiration of my own is The Viewer doesn’t have any themes with embedded advertisers you won’t be aware of until you see it pop up on your screen. Many independent themes do. While it would be no big deal if someone had a single ad link they told you about, it is a very big deal when you find half of the adsense links aren’t yours, or you have some porn or warez DL site popping up.
This is really the best reason for creating your theme from scratch. I would much rather have a plain one I can keep working on than being surprised by the kinds of things that can happen when you don’t understand how that big long piece of javascript works or what it does.
# March 22nd, 2008
Brad, where you do think all those themes on the WP theme viewer came from? The Automattic crew created them all? No. All of those themes were created by an independent theme creator and then uploaded to the WP theme viewer.
Where a lot of the bad elements come from are the third party services that take those themes and add their own scripts and links to them — not necessarily the theme author.
If you’re concerned about finding advertising links within the theme itself, then download it from the author’s website directly rather than the theme viewer, otherwise you’re only setting yourself up to download an outdated and possibly insecure theme.
Or, as you already eluded to, create your own.
~ Teli
# March 22nd, 2008
Teli - No doubt the official WP themes came from independent users, that wasn’t the point. The point was once they were up there they were well reviewed, taken apart by anyone and everyone with the skins, and anything that was deliberately misleading was contained hidden ads and pop ups was quickly removed or altered. That isn’t the case with a lot of themes everywhere else. What is on theme view maybe dates, but you can pretty much guarantee it is safe.
# March 23rd, 2008
Um, no you can’t. That’s basically what I’ve been saying with this post.
You can be reasonably certain it won’t contain any third party advertising links or violate any obvious copyrights, but as for safe, that’s hit or miss. Remember themes, especially those with some fancy functionality, can introduce security holes.
Since the theme viewer hasn’t been updated in such a long time, it’s not certain which themes have those security holes, thus leaving your blog vulnerable.
That brings me back to what I’ve repeated a number of times already: Rather than download the theme from the viewer, when you find a theme you like, take the time to visit the author’s actual website and download the most up to date version.
~ Teli
# March 23rd, 2008
Ah, I was wondering why the place was so out-dated. I’m checking out the new resources now.
# March 29th, 2008
Talking about the theme viewer,
At WP.org whats happened we can’t view the themes?
It always seems to preview the same old bue default. Even Alex King.org his theme viewer does’nt change to a theme either lolol you can of course click any theme on his page.
K
# April 11th, 2008
Follow up to my Brad Hart discussion above:
Today, I received a link exchange request for another theme viewer type of site and decided to do a bit of research. The first theme I visited at the official theme viewer contained advertising links. (Yes, downloaded directly from the official theme viewer itself.) And not just one advertising link, but seven. They all lead to one domain, just various pages on the site using different anchor text.
This discovery puts to rest the “you can find advertising free themes at the official theme viewer” discussion. So, not only will you be downloading outdated and potentially dangerous themes, you still can’t be entirely sure it doesn’t contain advertising links.
Just some food for thought.
~ Teli
# April 13th, 2008