Bad templates for WordPress
I am a big fan of WordPress. I like its versatility and power. Also, I love the fact that there is a big and lively community of people using it, with great discussion sites. Furthermore, there is a huge number of people that develops templates (or “themes”), plugins, and widgets. A lot of the stuff people produce is marvelous!
What I don’t like is the near total lack of quality control on the WordPress site. There’s a lot of stuff being published that simply does not work they way it should. Plugins that don’t work, themes that may look alright, but have severe flaws. I run several blogs, and have tested out a number of themes. I have encountered a number of different types of bugs and problems. Sometimes I report these, sometimes not. When I do, they are usually not fixed anyway, so it doesn’t much matter one way or the other.
The most annoying to me is themes where columns simply drop down. This happens with a lot of the templates. I’ve tested them using IE 6, IE 7, Opera, and Firefox. Some produce the same errors in all of these, so it simply isn’t possible for the authors and WordPress to not know about the errors. The only guy that I have found so far, that seems to be able to shore those columns properly up in his designs, is Brian Gardner.
So, that leaves me - grumpily, I admit - wondering why? To me it would seem that a little bit of quality control would benefit all of us. For developers, it can’t be all that good for their reputations to publish flawed designs. For WordPress it can’t be advantageous to be competing for users with stuff that doesn’t work right. And for users, a little quality control would save a lot of time. Finally, for readers of the blogs, columns that drop down look annoying and displeasing.
Does anybody else know of stable, reliable and good WordPress themes? And have links?
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