Not to be outdone by their recent 1 million active install celebration, Astra finds itself in some hot murky water.

The theme was recently suspended when the theme review team found affiliate links “cloaked” in buttons recommending other plugins. Friend of the show Ron Huereca shows us a code snippet of how they achieved this, and LayerWP hosted a short written interview with a member of the theme review team.

In today’s episode, I’ll share my take on the matter and where I’d love to see the theme repo move to for small product creators. You can read the theme guidelines cited in the episode, here.

Also mentioned in the episode:

Every word of this Tweet (down to the ALT text on the image) remains true more than a year later. It's a shame that this is still allowed in WordPress. https://t.co/0iTAXx94uP

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SearchWP & Gravity View for supporting the show! Please say thank you on Twitter!

Read the full transcript

Matt: (00:04)
This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by search wp.com and gravity view.co more on them. Later in today’s episode, we’re talking about the recent Astro debacle of just some thoughts around WordPress monetization. What it’s like to be a product creator, a product maker in the WordPress space, especially in the year 2020, let’s dive right on in.

Matt: (00:29)
All right, everybody. Welcome back to the mat reports. It’s maryport.com [inaudible] dot com slash subscribe to join that mailing list. For those of you that know they started a new job a couple of weeks ago over at Casto the makers of a seriously simple podcasting plugin. I’ll be the head or actually no, my official title is director of podcaster success. So I’m gonna help folks get their podcasts up and running over at Casos. If you’re thinking about starting a podcast yourself, send me an email, Matt at [inaudible] dot com and, uh, I guess some more videos up on the plugin Tut channel youtube.com/plugin Tut, check out all of my WordPress plugin theme tutorials. I’m going to get into some no-code stuff that just, uh, those are the things that, that really excite me. So some know code stuff that’s in and around the WordPress space. So do check out that channel recently, a theme with over a million active installs, one of the most popular, the most installed and activated WordPress theme in the WordPress repo.

Matt: (01:34)
That is not a default WordPress theme. In other words, a theme that doesn’t ship with WordPress by default Astra was, uh, was removed from the repo briefly for something of, uh, going against the theme developer guidelines of wordpress.org by injecting affiliate code links or affiliate links within the code of, of the theme. They sort of cloaked it in a way where you didn’t really know when you hit upgrade. Um, on these recommended plugins that they mentioned six of them, that they were getting an affiliate commission. If, if you did decide to upgrade, I’ve got a lot of thoughts about this stuff. I’m sure you do as well. But first search WP search wp.com is today’s first sponsor of the show and they were a repeat sponsor. I really appreciate the support from the folks [email protected]. Looking if you’re building out a website, you’re building out, you know, what’s really popular now, of course, in this pandemic world that we live in, I’ve even thought about it.

Matt: (02:49)
Myself is to start up a new directory site for a particular niche in, in my local area. Right? If I built out a directory site, I wanted to search that content. Cause that’s generally what you do. Search WP is fantastic for that. It searches your eCommerce products, custom field content, custom database tables, PDFs, and documents. I mean, even though it’s the year 2020, and restaurants still use PDFs for menus, you know, you could start a directory service of all these restaurants. And if they’re still using PDs for menu, you could search those PDFs. You do short codes, you can do Gutenberg blocks. You can do taxonomy terms, post titles and contents. But the real shining feature in my opinion is if you’re running one of these content heavy sites and you do need great search, not only consortia BP, do that for you, but they give you stats.

Matt: (03:38)
They give you analytics around what people are searching for. And this is analytics. You’re not going to get from Google analytics. This is going to be analytics on your site. What people are searching for is going to help you make better decisions with the content that you’re producing. Again, if you’re a webmaster for a university and now people are searching for classes and they’re looking for certain, uh, things to download, you can get all of these insights from that. If you’re a publisher high content traffic site, uh, this is going to help you make better decisions. Search wp.com. You can get [email protected]. It starts at $99 for one website for the year, 149 for the most popular plan. Check it out. Search wp.com. Search wp.com say, thanks for supporting the show. Okay, so I’m going to take you over to a former, a former sponsor of the show.

Matt: (04:32)
Uh, in the past, Ron, Ron Eureka media, ron.com wrote up a piece. If you’re looking for exactly what Astra did from a technical, uh, view media, Iran highlights this in the code snippet, and he shows you exactly what they were doing in the functions file of Astra. And they’re filtering the upgrade buttons to these, to these plugins. And here are the plugins that they were recommending. They were recommending Ninja forms, uh, WP forms, this social snap.com uh, plugin, which I have not heard...