Interface for authors to find active installs for a potential theme name

[wphoot]

From ​https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2017/07/24/july-meeting-agenda/#comment-43013

Since there is no way for authors to know whether a theme name has active installs or not (except a generic google search for existing themes with same name), a simple interface to check this would help.

If active installs cannot be made public (for theme names not on wordpress.org), then a simple 'OK' / 'Not OK' can be shown (The limit as it stands currently is 50)

[Otto42]

To be fair, "a generic google search for existing themes with same name" actually does a pretty damn good job of telling you when you need to select a different name.

[poena]

Google search does not include theme names that are already taken in ​https://themes.svn.wordpress.org/
Not all authors know about it.

[dingo_d]

Could ​https://wpdirectory.net/ be used for this purposes? You type in Theme Name: {name of the theme} and see if it pops up.

We could link it in the requirements or on the submission page maybe? It's an excellent service.

[poena]

But it won't catch the non .org themes.

[dingo_d]

Then I'd close this ticket. I don't think that we can cover all bases, seems like just too big of a task to handle. We should add this to a FAQ section, maybe like: how to check if the theme name is taken (before developing the theme). And offer links for author to search.

[dd32]

I'm going to close this as a wontfix.

I don't think we want to provide an API which can be queried to get this data.
We could add a 'Yes / No` response, but I would prefer to see authors using sufficiently unique names rather than just pulling from the popular words dictionary.

A Google search for "WordPress theme {$name}" does a pretty good job, the only reason there's a block on the uploader is because authors weren't doing that.