2026-08-19 06:19 2.3K
What the review actually asks for
Getting this theme into the directory took three submissions over twenty-two days and produced eight separate findings. Almost none of them were about code quality. They were about jurisdiction.
The eight
1 State the GPL status somewhere easy to find on your own site 2 Write the theme description in English 3 Make the skip link visible when it takes keyboard focus 4 Call wp_reset_postdata() after a custom query 5 Do not let a long title force a horizontal scrollbar 6 Remove the wp_robots filter 7 Do not borrow Apache's 401 wording for the password form 8 Support custom-background and custom-logo
Items 3, 4 and 5 are ordinary bugs and I was wrong to have shipped them. Item 3 in particular I had convinced myself was a measurement artefact in my own testing; the reviewer opened the page and pressed Tab, which is a better method.
The principle
Items 6, 7 and 8 look unrelated until you line them up. The filter decided what search engines should index. The password form told the visitor a server had refused them. The missing theme supports meant a site owner could not change their own background.
In all three cases the theme was deciding something that was not its to decide. That is the whole standard, as far as I can tell. A theme presents; it does not rule on indexing policy, it does not speak for the server, and it does not withhold the switches core already provides.
Once framed that way the objections stopped feeling like a tax. Removing the robots filter costs nothing, because duplicate handling was always the search engine’s problem. Adding custom-logo costs nothing, because nothing is emitted until somebody opts in. The theme still ships no images. It simply no longer pretends that the user is not allowed to.
Mechanics worth knowing
A ticket closed as not-approved sends you to the end of the queue, and the queue is weeks long. A ticket that is already assigned and in review does not: uploading a new version updates the same ticket in place, keeping the reviewer and the position. The first submission cost eight days of waiting to be looked at. The third cost one day, because by then someone was already holding it.
So the expensive mistake is not making mistakes. It is having the ticket closed before anyone has spoken to you.