I believe that we should build trust when people try out Pods, and one of the ways to do that is to offer up links to some themes that come Pods-enabled or Pods-friendly out of the box. Part of that process is connecting with interested Theme authors to ensure they have the information on how to do this and then setup a process for us to internally test these themes to ‘certify’ it as officially working Pods.

On our site, we could have a directory (similar to the other directories) in which Theme / Plugin authors can submit their themes / plugins (providing a private url for us to download, or they can e-mail it, but either case we won’t offer them for download on our site) for us to review. They can also manage their theme / plugin thumbnail, description, and link to the page on their site (or wp.org) to download it from.

With plugins, it’s a bit different. As people experiment with creating Pods-based plugins, it’s important to develop a standard, and once that standard is fleshed out – to offer links to plugins that use the standard. Now, we can’t just offer free security consulting in case their plugin has coding flaws, but it’s Pods use could be checked pretty easily. If we thought a plugin may be insecure, or all other code is choppy, we don’t have to approve it to be listed.

We already do this for Packages (to an extent, and that too could be enhanced in a number of ways.

The point behind all of this is that we offer new users (and existing) with options to check out themes and plugins that use Pods in one place – vs having to go around looking on the web, or even worse – searching for “Pods” and having podcast related plugins / themes show up.