The WordPress Theme Archive
- Posted by mariteaux on July 13th, 2020 filed in Technologizing
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Longtime Scratchpad readers (all five of you, but I love you anyway) will remember a few months back when I switched from a homebrew theme to one found on the old WordPress.net. In that post, I bemoaned the lack of good, live web places to find these retro themes. In a way, they almost seemed intentionally buried. I thought about rehosting them myself, saving as many as I could from being lost in the Wayback Machine.
I’ve finally gotten around to making that a reality: The WordPress Theme Archive is live.
This all started when, not long after that post, dcb scraped the Wayback Machine (somehow) for all the themes it managed to grab. The total was close to 1,800. Surprisingly, that’s not as big as you might think: a lot of the themes don’t even crack 100kb. In total, the entire scrape was around 250mb. I’ve had that scrape sitting in my downloads for months now, so it’s about time to start doing things with it.
It’s a manual process to start with, installing the themes on a junker blog, testing for duplicates and outright broken themes, screenshotting each one, and noting down such things as modified dates, authors, and homepages. (Yes, even though most of them are probably defunct.) AutoSite makes putting the page together a bit easier, thankfully, just dir screenshots/ > list.txt to get a list of filenames and then slot them into AutoSite attributes. In total, I can get a page done in probably three hours. A tedious three hours, but a worthwhile three hours.
48 to a page, 48 up currently of course. More to come as I feel like it. For now, I’m just happy these are back online in some capacity, and in a more comfortable format to browse.
