Posts in Category ‘Themes’

Article

More theme statistics from wordpress.org

[Part One: Funny observations from the themes on wordpress.org]

Last time, I was trying to find some metric to give me “good” themes, and ended up looking at downloads vs ratings. That didn’t really give me anything I wanted— with no way of knowing when a theme was uploaded, I couldn’t really average out the downloads, and the older themes outweighed the new ones. So this time, I decided to play with comparisons.

Above is a pie chart of downloads by theme author (I excluded wordpressdotorg themes, focusing just on community themes). Automattic leads, percentage-wise, as the theme author with the most downloads, followed by CyberChimps. I’m really impressed with how much the top 6ish shops command. Part of this has to do with how prolific some authors are, but I think theme age (since this is all-time downloads) inflates the number a bit.

The top 50 themes make up just over 1/3rd of all downloads. You can see how these stack up against all themes on this graph, but the names are really hard to read, so I’ve omitted “Other” from the following charts.

This one is all-time downloads. It mostly matches up with the theme authors, and again the older themes take the lead. To avoid this, I worked up a script to pull down the last 90 days of downloads, and sum those up.

I should make it clear that this chart is not the top themes in the last 90 days. With the method I’m using now, I can only get the last 90 days’ data for a given set of themes. Regardless, it is interesting to see that my guesses about theme age affecting the downloaded rank are correct.

I’m not sure I’ll find anything super-cool in the data I’ve pulled, but it’s interesting to try. Any suggestions for what I should try to figure out next?

Article

New Theme: Aventurine

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 :) ).

Check out our intro post.

Psst, Want to help translate one of our themes? Or let us know about a bug? You can contribute to Aventurine through github.

Article

What an exciting day!

  • I started my first day at Automattic! I’m on my support rotation now, but once I finish up I’ll be a Code Wrangler on VaultPress.
  • Umbra, a theme I developed that I’m really excited about, launched on WordPress.org.
  • Another theme I worked on, Museum, was launched on WordPress.com! (You can also get it on WordPress.org)
  • Flatfish, made by Michael Arestad, was launched on WordPress.org - the first published child theme of any of my themes :)
Article

Funny observations from the themes on wordpress.org

scatter

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!