Ninjineer

a Nerd with Delusions of Wonder

Today, Marco voiced frustration about the long wait times to receive an acceptance or rejection from Apple’s App Store. I have no basis for disagreeing with any of his observations, but I find it ironic that for theme designers Tumblr’s own Theme Garden suffers from similar interminable waits. In some ways its even worse as the Theme Garden system offers NO feedback on the status of themes.

The only way to tell if your theme has been accepted is to troll the Theme Garden page periodically and note if the Population count has increased. If it has, then check out the Recent page to see if the new theme(s) is(are) yours. Fortunately, the newest themes are at the top of the page.

Determining if a theme update has been approved is even more awkward. First, you must locate your theme on the Recent Thems page and click on the Preview button. If the change is not immediately obvious, then you must scour the page source to determine if the changes are present. That’s enough of a headache that I’ve never bothered to check.

There is no mechanism for determining if and why a theme or an update has been rejected.

Now, I realize that Tumblr does not have the same resources as Apple. They are providing a free service for nearly a million accounts with just a handful of personnel. It would not suprise me if theme approvals are only handled when higher-priority, more-interesting work is not pressing. And it not like this impacts a high percentage of the Tumblr-verse. Still the lack of feedback is irritating.

What would make me happy? How about displaying the status of each theme on the Manage Your Themes page? For example:

Mange your themes

• ABC - published
• DEF - update pending
• GHI - initial submission pending
• JKL - initial submission rejected (too ugly)
• MNO - update rejected (does not render properly)

Or how about just throwing a notification to my Dashboard when the status of one of my themes changed?

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