Featured Page - Proposal

[acosmin]

A new theme has two weeks to gather some stats before it shows up on the Popular page. Before it shows up on that page, I propose that the Featured page should become a way to promote some great themes. Based on these two weeks we can do the following.

First week

1. Theme goes live
2. We gather active installs counts just for this week. If a theme has already active installs we subtract from them what we gather in this week.

Second week

1. The theme will show up on the Featured page and it will be ranked based on the stats gathered in the first week.
2. At the end of this week the theme is removed from the Featured page and it follows its normal path. With some luck it can be ranked better on the Popular page.

The Featured page can display all the themes for a 1 week period (that second week). Everybody gets some extra exposure.

[Otto42]

Interesting proposal. Basically you want it to be a "new themes" page.

By and large, this would help or hinder themes depending on the rate of theme approvals (go-live). If you bulk go-live on 50 themes, then having 50 themes there for a week would not really help them very much. You'd need to mete out the lives at a regular pace to keep the number there reasonable.

[lyrathemes]

Maybe off topic or may belong in another ticket: but shouldn't popular/featured themes have some kind of weight for support threads resolved / responded to + reviews?

[acosmin]

@Otto42 not all themes are that great, we could put a threshold, a number like 300-400 active installs in a week is decent and it shows interest in a theme.

30-40 themes on the page is like 3-4 mouse scrolls. If the user is interested, he'll scroll.

[joyously]

Why make this the Featured page, when it's about Latest?

[bothera]

+1
It's a lot better than what we have right now :-)

[rinkuyadav999]

+1

Because it will be better than just randoms.

[acosmin]

we could also make a Core ticket to rename the page to Trending or something like that.

[acosmin]

we could also exclude child themes :) that would make the list smaller

[bothera]

+1 for the rename
-1 for excluding child themes, a lot of people put tons of work into creating awesome child themes, they deserve attention too if they're good

[rinkuyadav999]

Yes, we should not exclude child themes. All authors should get equal opportunity. we can remove child theme queue and review child theme same as new theme. so new theme queue will contain parent and child themes tickets, and that would make the list smaller.

[DannyCooper]

+1. This is the fairest proposal I've seen so far.

[acosmin]

@Otto42 is this doable? The Featured page needs some loving :D

[AlxMedia]

(Another idea, not creating another ticket as it is close enough)

How about adding filters to the popular page to be able to browse it better?

I do not know what kind of data that can be retrieved, but if possible, something like this:

[Most Downloaded | Most Installed | Best Reviewed | Best Overall]

For themes submitted:
[Today | This Week | This Month | This Year | All Time]

Is this doable with the data you currently have?

[gouravwptech]

I'm agree with this:

I have noticed that now a days Popular tab is booked for big author, they create a theme and wait for months and do full marketing of that theme and when it have 1000 or above activate install then they upload it at WordPress.org. The result is that they comes in popular tab at higher position where normal author with good theme never expect because there theme comes with 0 active install at the time of upload and it will get 600 or maximum 800 active install in two weeks but not comes at top, because that position is already taken by themes with very higher active install gained from external platform before uploading themes, I think we need to do meeting over this system.
if we can end TA author system then why can't do something new with popular tab, like remove all old theme and assign popular as month wise or give a chance to only those themes which are submitted with zero active install. And do best performance in 2 weeks.

[dingo_d]

Since we didn't come to a good solution on this I'll close the ticket.

What we are considering is to implement a curated list of really good, no upsell themes that would be picked. Additional idea of deciding will be done in the next TRT meeting.