We have few themes in the pipeline, and we submitted one of them on Envato marketplace, and we know the theme has clean code with the fresh design.
Reviewers are sending the same issue which resolved before. Also, reviewers want the fix for the issue is not a problem.
This time is a funny experience we have with Envato in my whole career with Envato.
Why this happening? Doesn’t Envato want the new product? Or giving more opportunity to the new author who has really low-quality theme or item in Envato?
i faced this type of issue with my last theme. The things getting worse day by day.
All problems are NOT traced in 1-3 review, it takes them 10 soft-rejections and ask for the wordpress themes’ screenshot resolution. Thus, to approve a complete theme, its taking 1 month. and some of the reviewers are new, especially they are the authors who competing with us with their own item, they are not willing to approve, just finding fault of a theme that has no sense.
Yes, you are right. Envato reduces review time but extended review by creating lots of soft-rejection. That mean Envato didn’t reduce any review time. This just a simple tricks Envato is applying for new items.
Im on my 10th soft reject with my theme. Got 4 other themes waiting for submission.
What dissapoints me is taht every time my item gets soft rejected, they only send 1 reason.
For god’s sake, last soft reject was because of a NOTICE in theme check. (Theme soft rejected for ‘INFO’ notice in Theme Check)
They could also send any other issues, don’t you think ?
Sometimes I got just surprisingly unplausible rejection reasons, like “rename inc folder to includes” or "prefix METHODS INSIDE A PREFIXED CLASS (???)"
I think I’m not gonna get my item approved soon, because my first submission was in JANUARY )))
That wouldn’t be an efficient use of time though. If they find one reason not to approve the theme, then why carry on reviewing… it’s not going to be accepted at that stage anyway.
Like if you get to the nightclub and the bouncer says you can’t come in with trainers on… there’s no point in them then frisking you and checking your ID as well, in case you come back after changing your footwear.
Re-submitting theme a million times is not an efficient way too.
I have respected everything from theme quality requirements, but they awlays come with some stupid ideas like “prefix methods inside a class, or remove autoload (done in PSR-4 way)”.
Once I’ve built some OOP-decorators for posts (to be able to write like: $post->getMeta() instead of get_post_meta) and they asked me to remove this. Funny.
I agree that these days reviewers only provide few points on their soft rejections, after that they provide another 2-3 points and so on.
But in your case…Why have you built custom functions when there are already WP Built-in functions to do the work All you need to do is to use them. I think the reviewer is right here.
Imagine you’re saving gallery images for a post inside a meta key named “gallery_images” (you’re saving only attachment ids as array). You want a method that will fetch ids, get attachment files (maybe resize them) and return an array of urls. Sure you could write a simple function that will do all the stuff, now imagine you have tons of this kind of cases… your functions.php will be a huge codesmell.But if you write a PostMetaDecorator class, where you have methods for retrieving metas from a built-in cache instead of loading it EACH Time from database, methods for getting images in a given size, filters for adding lazyload attributes to those images depending on options enabled… etc etc your code will be much cleaner, well-structured and easier to maintain
The most efficient way would be to make sure the theme is perfect before uploading! I appreciate that’s difficult, as they have a lot of rules on what is and isn’t right. Maybe the head of the review team could put together a “top ten reasons why your theme got soft rejected” article. Not so much for design/quality, but more of a technical check-list that authors could go through, to address any issues there might be before uploading. Would save a lot of time for authors and for reviewers… help reduce the queues.
Exactly, the main issue is the lack of up to date submission requirements.
The Quality Team are actively working on Phase 2 WordPress requirements and plan to gather information and feedback from the community, before publishing the Phase 2 requirements later in 2015.
Except that review team doesn;t always stick to this.
Another issue is double-standards. I’ve developed a framework for company I was working on, and some parts of that framework I’m including in my themes (frontend-submission module). Company’s themes were approved without questions, but my theme got soft rejected for reasons which were ignored by review team when reviewing company’s theme. (Like Theme should not create pages on Install).
I think I will just follow anything review team says, even if it sometimes doesn’t make sense.
Low-quality backend and high-quality frontend, this is how it is expected to be.
That was the ridiculous experience I’ve ever with Envato. Exactly, I was getting the very silly issues and getting approved when we have almost lost hope on that project.
BTW, Currently, we are not thinking about ThemeForest
All you need to do is to use them. I think the reviewer is right here.
