I’ve been contributing to WordPress community as Theme developer since 2013. During the good old day, first time Theme submission only takes a month or two. The theme review teams will review the submission and decide to accept the theme or tell the developer to fix any issues found. Usually after one or two reviews and fixes, your theme should be accepted and ready to be downloaded by user at WordPress theme repository. Unfortunately, today the theme submission process is getting far more strict and took longer queue to get your theme reviewed.
After two years of hiatus on creating free WordPress theme, I decided to polish my skill and decide to release a new Free WordPress theme, Epic Base. I’ve developed it with best practices in mind using the latest BootStrap css and Hybrid Framework. At that time, I’m confident it will be accepted without too much trouble. Then, I submit it to the repository and wait patiently for the review results. It will take a long wait for the review result to be released. Below is the reply from my theme submission.
As part of the new theme directory guidelines, reviewers may now close
tickets if a theme has 5 or more issues. This is part of our long term
goals to improve the theme quality and shorten the queues. You can read
more about this change here: https://make.wordpress.org/themes.
Please do not get discouraged by the ticket being closed. We want you to
resubmit your theme, but we do ask that you spend more time making sure
that your theme meets all the
[https://make.wordpress.org/themes/handbook/review/required/
requirements]. You can upload your updated theme here:
https://wordpress.org/themes/upload/
Because of the large number of themes waiting for review, we might not be
able to follow up immediately. We will review your update when your theme
reaches the top of the review queue.
== Issues ==
Waiting four months and get rejected is really unpleasant. Apparently, if your theme have more than five issues, it will be rejected and have to wait for more extra four months to get reviewed. Honestly, I’m surprised about the new rules. Usually, you got second or third chance to fix any issues and resubmit it for review. The new rules is enforced in order to improve theme submission quality. I mostly agree with the sentiment, but having to limit the issue to five even though the issue isn’t fatal is too draconian for my tastes. Having incorrect screenshot image ratio or adding wrong theme tags shouldn’t be counted as issues.
Alas, it is the new reality here. I decided to fix all issues mentioned by reviewer and resubmit my theme, It will be a long time until it will be approved. Having to learn to be more vigilant about such issues is a good lesson, I guess.