About
A Short History
The original Theme Viewer was located on Shadow’s site and started out with approximately 60 themes. However, this quickly grew as more and more themes hit the street and it soon escalated to over 300 within a very short period. A couple of server crashes and too much CPU load and it quickly became apparent that in order to survive, the Theme Viewer would need a new home. It also needed a new format so that themes could be seen and downloaded easily. Kafkaesqui kindly stepped in and helped with some great coding and Matt provided some new server space and a new location. It was generally agreed at the time that the Theme Viewer served it’s purpose very well and enabled the process of viewing themes to be a relatively easy one.
Progress never stops, and after being up for some 12 months or so, the time soon arrived when it became obvious that a new structure was needed. One which would facilitate easier access to the theme downloads and make the whole experience of searching for a theme a whole lot simpler again.
The philosophy behind the Theme Viewer has always been one of providing WordPress users with the opportunity to view the huge amount of themes available and allow them a quick test run or demo at the same time. It was a simple methodology and it worked. In that regard nothing has significantly changed.
However, as with most things in life, it needed a new injection of oomph!.
Step in two very talented people in the form of Joshua [Alphaoide] and Steve Cooley. Help was requested, mainly through a WordPress IRC Meeting, and these two guys put up their hand to volunteer. Since that time, they have worked extremely hard to help build a new and greatly improved site to showcase the themes.
This was back in early 2005 and even though the 3 volunteers had never met face to face - they built up an understanding of one another as they had to overcome hurdle after hurdle to get a final result. Changes of servers, work commitments, frustration at scripts not working, and the sheer volume of themes, all contributed to a lengthy and arduous task. However, good things comes to those who wait and the new Theme Viewer was finally open for use.
The new viewer
With competition from other theme sites and many requests from WordPress users, in 2006 it was decided to make a new theme viewer system. The theme viewer needed more options and a better theme handling, and in june 2006 we were able publish the new viewer. The undersigned coded a new system and with help from people like Headzoo and Mark Jaquith a great set of features became possible - this is the theme viewer you are looking at today.
In mid 2007 Thomas didn’t have the time to keep up with the support required to keep the viewer tidy so he turned it over to Matt Mullenweg and the core WordPress team to handle ongoing maintenance and rewrite the backend to scale with the high levels of traffic it was getting. (Overloading a very powerful server.)
The theme viewers functions in short:
- Test run blog
- Flawless theme handling
- Automatic theme snapshotting
- Theme creators can upload their themes
- Download counter
- Comment and rating
- Advanced sorting options
- Searching
- Tagged themes
- Theme zip structure automatically fixed
- And much more …
Please note: Many of the themes listed are now getting quite old and this means that some do not have original download files; they may not be found on the original designer’s links; or they simply are no longer supported. We are unable to provide support for the themes on display at the Theme Viewer and highly recommend that you take any issues to the WordPress support Forums or to the designer’s themselves.
That’s it. Simple really. Have fun!