What WordPress Needs: Private Theme Updates

One of the things that has been keeping me from releasing my own WordPress themes is the fact that there’s no way to automatically notify their users of updates. The advantage of such a system is already evident in the official WordPress plugin and theme repositories, which make the task of keeping things up to date a one-click process.

Without such a system in place, I’m anxious about releasing a theme: if I’m asking people for money in return, they’re going to expect a great finished product. Which is perfectly reasonable, it just makes the whole thing a bit daunting for relatively inexperienced developers like me. I much prefer the “software as a service” model exemplified in the various mobile app marketplaces, where the user understands they’re paying for a potentially unfinished or buggy product, but also that the developer has committed to adding features and fixing problems for as long as they sell the app.

Under the current system, to update a WordPress theme not in the official repository, you need to distribute the files and ask the user to upload them to their site manually. There is a plugin to help with this, but it’s not an ideal situation. What I’d like to see is the theme developer being able to specify a location for each theme which WordPress checks for updates every so often – perhaps using another line in the style.css theme information section – giving seamless updates for both the developer and user, and a better experience all round. What’s the downside?