what are you working on this week?
share your website to get some traffic ↓
(I would choose 3 projects to feature in my newsletter, FromScratch + 2K subscribers)
If you use an em dash (—), it feels like it's written with AI. Because you can't really type an em dash on the keyboard. To insert one, you have to press Cmd + Shift + -. So, someone writing their thoughts in a natural flow suddenly pausing to press Cmd + Shift + -. Possible?
If you are a plugin or theme provider on Wordpress.org, Matt Mullenweg just stole all your backlinks and tanked your plugin website's organic SEO performance.
A recent update to the w.org repos has removed all links to author websites. This eliminates backlinks to plugin and theme authors from w.org and removes an important source of paid plugin purchases for third party developers.
Developers are now limited to links in the plugin or theme's readme file, which as of now still shows on the profile page. However, all of these links have a nofollow attribute applied by w.org. Thus, the website itself is telling you not to visit these links.
Wild.
@ciorici I totally agree with you. The whole “popular” thing has to go away from
Theme directory, it’s just making some themes get more downloads no matter what and new theme a get no exposure at all. We need to have “feature theme”, that features good and active themes weekly.
I cannot prove manipulation, but after tracking WordPress.org theme rankings for a long time, some movements are statistically hard to justify.
Several themes on the first 3 pages of the Popular Themes list repeatedly gain or lose 6 to 16 positions while showing the same characteristics:
- no updates for 1 to 2 years
- almost no reviews or a few bad ones
- no support topics
Examples:
wordpress.org/themes/envo-ro…wordpress.org/themes/envo-on…wordpress.org/themes/futurio…wordpress.org/themes/popular…wordpress.org/themes/spacr/
When you compare these side by side with neighboring themes in the rankings, the difference is obvious. Those other themes typically have frequent updates, dozens or hundreds of reviews, and active support forums.
Anyone who has built and maintained a WordPress theme knows how hard it actually is to climb this list. It takes years of consistent updates, ongoing support work, good reviews, and steady adoption.
Adding third-party usage data makes this even harder to explain.
Inspiro (my theme) has ~70k active installs on wp.org and is detected on ~10,000 real websites according to themesinfo.com.
Envo Royal has ~30k installs, yet is detected on only ~370 real websites ⚠️.
An enormous gap like this suggests that “active installs” do not reliably correlate with real-world usage.
At this point, a review of how these themes' jumps occur would help clarify whether the Popular list reflects real adoption, especially when compared to themes with active users and ongoing maintenance.
Since last 10 years only few themes in WordPress is in Popular and they dominate latest theme which just don’t get proper exposure.
Webflow in the other hand promote every new creators and give equal explore to every authors.
I contribute my template in both @webflow and @WordPress . What I like about Webflow is that there is nothing called “Popular”, rather they have something called “Featured, and every week random authors template is featured. I hope WordPress learn from Webflow.
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