Ghost Theme Rejected – Quality Standard

[samesies]

The Barber Theme

So I just had this theme rejected for not meeting the required quality standard and I am really confused. The codebase uses popular JavaScript patterns broken into components (not spaghetti jQuery) and ES6, the Sass is broken in components, regions, tools, utils, etc., and the HTML is using BEM naming and commented.

I also have things that other themes Ghost themes don’t have. The first thing is I’m not using any jQuery. Everything is vanilla JavaScript. The theme has endless scrolling using fetch (instead of jQuery + AJAX), a contact form that also uses fetch, and page transitions.

It also has custom Google AMP pages (most Ghost themes have the standard Ghost AMP template…) and passes HTML validation checks (some blog posts don’t because Ghost uses same IDs multiple times which isn’t my fault).

I’m just confused how the code doesn’t meet a quality standard when it’s very well organized and using some of the newest features.

Documentation can be found here: http://samesies.io/documentation/barber

Any idea?

[Aspirity]

Hi
There are some issues but your design nice and clean.

1. There are too much white spacing. It’s not necessary.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. This block is aligned so strangely.
   
   
3. You need additional work with typography. There are low contrast and too accented paragraph text.
   
   

Best regards, Aspirity.

[samesies]

Hi @Aspirity,

Thank you for the feedback.

1. The white spacing was 100% intentional. It was inspired by minimal websites like http://www.instrument.com/ and others seen on https://www.siteinspire.com/. The whitespace drastically drops on mobile and tablet.

2. This isn’t Barber, so shouldn’t have had an impact on the Barber submission. Confused how it is aligned strangely though. It’s 50% width. I’m working on the navigation still as I just changed from a image logo to a text logo.

3. I only wanted to use one font family to keep the minimal look. I was using Roboto for that look, but decided to switch to Cabin. So themes on Theme Forest need a head and a body font?

I just see all these WordPress themes that are just copies of each other. They have animations to just have animations. I have no idea why this is rejected when looking at the quality of other themes.

Thanks again.

[samesies]

Any other feedback?

I’m switching the font back to Roboto and maybe pairing with a body font for the blog posts. I have also reduced some of the padding, but haven’t pushed it to the demo yet.

I’m going to submit it under Jekyll after I do the updates.