Mel & I have released a new theme for WordPress.org users! Aventurine is a colorful theme with a focus on your content. As always, our themes are fully responsive & child theme ready (we might even have a color-swapped child theme in the works right now 🙂 ).
Psst, Want to help translate one of our themes? Or let us know about a bug? You can contribute to Aventurine through github.
I wanted to run some more interesting queries against the themes on wordpress.org, so earlier this evening I pulled down the theme data into a local database. Eventually I want to “feature” some nice but maybe not super popular themes, so I’ve run a few queries to find out how things are rated, what the number of downloads is, etc. So, here are some interesting results.
Bouquet, by Automattic, is the “best” theme — it has the highest rating/downloads combo.
Catch Everest, by catchthemes, is probably a better “best”, with the highest rating/number of ratings/download combo. Sequel, by ZGani, is the “best” child theme.
Interestingly, removing number of downloads doesn’t affect which themes are in the top ~5, just the order. Since number of ratings should correspond to downloads, this isn’t too surprising.
The average theme is rated 8 times, with a score of 60 (3 stars), and downloaded 47,957 times. If I remove the themes with no ratings, the average rating jumps to 88. So… is everyone too nice, or are wp.org themes just that great?
Automattic has the highest number of themes, at 54, followed by tskk (32) and InkThemes.com (27). If I remove child themes, Automattic is still in the lead (though only 48 now), followed by InkThemes.com (still 27), and ThemeZee (23).
The scatterplot above was just thrown together quickly, I wanted to see if the number of tags on a theme affected the number of downloads or rating. The chart has rating on the x axis and downloads on the y, with number of tags controlling the hue (red, fewer tags, blue/purple, more). It doesn’t seem to though, since most of the dots ended up green everywhere- which is about average.
Anyway, that was my exciting night (need to do something while Mel hogs the TV for Dragon Age 🙂 ) – look for some future posts on lesser-known awesome themes!
Mel & I have been talking about “doing some nature” basically all summer— whether that was going to a beach, or taking a hike, or kayaking… and it never happened. To be fair, between WordCamps and other conferences, meetups, and work, summer was pretty busy.
Now that it’s fall, and the conference circuit is slowing down (well, there’s another WordCamp this weekend…), we’re trying to do some of those things we didn’t do this summer. So we took the day and went up to the Middlesex Fells Reservation (what a trip, maybe we’ll get a car next time).
We probably hit at least 6 of the labeled trails, and 2 roads, trying to make our way from Oak Grove to the reservation headquarters at Spot Pond. It ended up being about 6 miles of walking through the woods, along rocky trails & brooks. We had lunch at the boat rental place (closed for the season, but had picnic tables) at the edge of Spot Pond. And then took a much shorter rout to a different entrance, so we could catch the bus home.
The slides from my talk at NERDSummit, WordPress and the Command Line.
How to use WP-CLI to manage your WordPress site via the command line. From basic management like installing & updating plugins and themes, to scripting a installation workflow, this tool is a WordPress DevOps’ best friend.
