I’ve been working with Brad to get a free WordPress theme our for a while. We thought this would be a good way for iThemes to give something back to the WordPress community (along with our free plugins, core contributions, and codex additions). I must say, the process of adding a theme to WordPress Extend isn’t the most friendly one, but it is there none-the-less. The new theme is called Quick-Vid. It is a Tumblr inspired theme intended for quick blogging.
To be honest, I built most of this theme in one night. Brad put together a set of color schemes in about an hour. So why did it take so long to get this released? The WordPress theme review process has undergone some changes recently that make it mighty difficult to get a theme on the repo. While I agree, quality control is important, I did find the process somewhat nit-picky.
One thing I will give the reviewers credit for is their helpfulness. They were more than willing to spend some time with me in the IRC chat room (#wp-themes) and get some of (what they saw as) the kinks out of the theme. Another thing that has improved dramatically since the start of the process is the time it takes to get a theme reviewed. The first and second submission of Quick-Vid sat untouched in the review process for a month EACH. Now, they have the process down to a few days at most.
As far as improvements to the process, the main one I would like to see would be SVN access for the theme author. I think this is especially critical after it has been approved. Theme authors need to be able to push an update with fixes to bugs quickly to their users. Having to re-upload the theme and start the process all over again for a bug fix is a bit ridiculous.
Anyway, hope you enjoy the theme.
-matt