No doubt by now you know I am a huge WordPress fan – sure there are things that irritate me but so far they have been livable. I also love, love, love developing and modifying themes particularly to use a CMS. Over time, the WordPress community has been inundated by well… less ethical designers.

  First it was requiring link backs, then it was ads, then it was hidden ads and there are also reports of adding stuff that ‘call home’ or inject malicious code that harm your visitors or even steal your traffic. A shame.

Problem is, most theme users don’t have the ability or resources at hand to check these themes thoroughly. I recently bumped into this really cool plugin – Theme Authenticity Checker and quickly took it for a quick run.

First impressions – neato! I think this is much needed to help anyone novice or expert take a quick look. The plugin itself is pretty straightforward and looking inside the code, there doesn’t seem to be anything malicious inside this plugin itself – that’s important too!

What you should know: The plugin did warn me of two themes which came packaged with a contact.php Page template. Concerned, I naturally investigated the code. I’ve come to the conclusion that the base64 encoding is not used to call home, it was not used to inject viruses. It was used to encrypt or mask submitted email addresses and subject lines in the form. In short – it was not malicious.

The bottom line for me: The plugin is a great way to quickly scan any theme you use, but if you find something and don’t know what to do about it. Get help from someone who can give you more concrete answers.