Joy
(@joyously)
They are not broken. The WordPress theme preview has typical blog data, and these themes are showing it, exactly like it would look if you installed it on your site. What you have found is that these themes show a screenshot that does not look like their default settings, sort of like false advertising.
It seems odd to me that the top three demos of sites on wordpress.org would be broken. Is there no expectation of developers to load the demo data? If I send clients to WordPress.org to look at themes they will be dreadfully disappointed.
Joy
(@joyously)
They are not broken. The data on the wordpress.org theme preview is not what they look best at. That’s on them, not the preview site. Developers do not load new data. They all use the same data, so you can compare the themes instead of the data.
Remember that user’s sites will look like that if they do nothing but install the theme.
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This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by
Joy.
That makes no sense to me. Surely you want a site to look at its best to demonstrate a theme.
Theme developers normally provide a demo set of pages and content so people can follow their lead and see how they did things. It also helps non devs make a site look great.
If WordPress forces them to only use the default pages – that is trying to force a one size fits all model on the developers. A blog is different to a discussion is different to a News site is different to a media download site to a hotel booking etc. One size doesn’t fit all for default pages, so surely theme developers should be allowed to put demo data in so the demo works.
This is possibly why so many developers point you to their personal site instead of dealing with the wordpress demo.
Joy
(@joyously)
Surely you want a site to look at its best to demonstrate a theme.
That’s the whole point. The theme author wants it to look its best, but the author knows how to do that and the user does not. The user will actually get what the .org preview shows. The data is normal, not customized to any theme. When you first switch to a theme, that’s what you will get.
WordPress is not forcing anything. If they want to provide demos on their own site, they can, and do. But the user can’t tell how much the theme is doing and how much the author did in the demo data. With the preview, it is obvious that there is nothing extra. The only thing changing as you preview themes is the theme.
The theme has to style normal pages as well as its “special” pages, so what’s the big deal? The “special” pages are so few, and the normal are the majority.
> But the user can’t tell how much the theme is doing and how much the author did in the demo data.
Fair point.
