The WordPress.com theme directory received a facelift yesterday, as well as some functionality changes.
New design
The new design isn’t a big stretch from the previous one, but it is cleaner and more modern.
One item to note is that premium themes are now less obvious, as the “new” and “premium” banners of the old directory have been removed, in favor of a simple price shown in the bottom left hand corner.
It also appears that “new” themes are not filterable any more.
The WordPress.com advanced theme search tab has also been improved quite a bit.
New data visibility and organization
The more interesting changes to me are the data.
First off, the default tab for viewers is now “Staff Picks”. This is a good change. Most of the staff picks are quite nice. The previous default was “trending”, which I’m not sure how that was calculated, nor how it was particularly different from the “popular” tab.
The “premium” filter has also been removed from the categories to choose from, and is now its own taxonomy. So a theme browser can view themes both by category and by whether it’s a free or premium theme.
Finally, WordPress.com themes no longer will show the popularity of a theme by the numbers on the singular theme page. Previously, you could actually see how many people were using a particular theme (even commercial ones), as well as how a theme ranked against others in popularity.
This change is a real bummer to me. Not only do I wish the ranking was still there, but I previously really loved seeing the number of websites using a particular theme.
I can understand it may be irrelevant or difficult to understand data for an end user (especially since premium themes will naturally have lower numbers), but as an observer of the WordPress.com theme market, I really valued that data.
The new design, in all, is quite nice. I wish the data that was removed was available elsewhere, but it appears Automattic has decided that information is better off not being public. I’ll hold out hope that the data will be available upon request or perhaps in another location.
If you have a user account, you can view the new theme directory right now while logged in. The old version is still the default view for non-logged in users.
Correct, and you named the reason right there. We didn’t feel it provided much context for users and saw it as an opportunity to simplify an area that is already packed with information.
We are working on making this information available to theme authors however, and giving them an opportunity to check out sites that are using their themes.
I’ve been bugging Lance about finding out what sites use my themes – and more stats is good! Looking forward to these changes Konstantin.
Hi Ben! If you go to the Themer Lobby dashboard, you should see a “Blogs by Theme” admin menu just below “Theme Sales”. Each of your themes will be listed in this section with links to view URL’s of each site using the theme. I just found this content the other day and have spent far to much time perusing users sites.
Nice write up, Brian! I didn’t notice the update as I was still using the a bookmark with the old themes directory layout:
http://theme.wordpress.com/
That said, it looks like (for now) you can still view themes via the old theme URL’s, too. These pages still show the popularity of a theme overall under the Site & Info section, but do not show how many sites are using it. The old theme URL’s look something like:
http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/soundcheck/
As opposed to the new URL’s:
http://wordpress.com/themes/soundcheck/
I really like the new facelift made to WP.com, especially the filtering capabilities on the archives page. The WP.com site overall is really well done, IMO.