Wordpress Detect Theme
Recognize Wordpress Detect TopicHow can I tell what is wrong with it? Developed by Luis Alejandre, ThemeDetector tries to detect whether a website uses WordPress* or not, the precise topic a website is currently using (note: it can detect both top and bottom topics) and even the plug-ins** used; moreover, according to Luis, it is able to display information about the use of CDs (such as MaxCDN) and/or WordPress specialised web hosters ( such as WPEngine)!
Let us try one of the most popular - and longest run ning - WordPress blog communities: Here is a screenshots of the first part of the results (note: you can either click on the picture itself to see the TOTAL results of our test, or just go to the WM theme detector and do exactly the same test yourself):
It not only provides the promising sub-topic and super-topic detail, but also information about where the super-topic is available. In addition - although not shown in the above screenshots (click on the picture to see the full results) - we were also informed further down on the page about ten plug-in detail that are currently used on the site.
First of all, as mentioned frankly on the Frequently Asked Questions page, the utility cannot recognize all plug-ins used by a website: it can only "recognize plug-ins that are running and for which reference can be found in the HTML that has been created and sent by the website's server". Concerning the subject matter in detail, WPThemeDetector should indeed be able to deliver the results as precisely as possible - and in this case, since WPTavern actually incorporates this information into its style sheet (which we briefly reviewed), the results are shown exactly!
However, there will be pages that have masqueraded the information WPThemeDetector is looking for, in which case there may well be misleading results: for example, saying a website does not use WordPress when it does, and/or not finding information about the specific topic being used - but to some degree, of course, this can't be any different, since no such utility can ever be flawless.
In terms of a fast and simple way to find information about the topic of a website, the WPThemeDetector is an excellent piece of software - it provides far more information than I originally expected: some of it would be hard to find. If the only true risk of reliance on such utilities is that website users have their websites somewhat outside the standard (by opting not to embed or masquerade certain information, using WordPress only on part of their website and/or making sophisticated WordPress adjustments, etc.), then all of these utilities will have difficulty recognizing things as they should - if you want to find the subject a website is using, then using such utilities is a good starting point.
Simply don't take everything they say as evangelism and don't give up when an apparent impasse appears, as it may be very worthwhile to do a few things that the utility doesn't suggest: such as manual review of the source and/or sending an email to the website owners to see if they will give you extra information, etc., but you can't do that.
Although'attempts' here are the noun to concentrate on, because it can't detect ALL the different plug-ins used on a website (far from it)! Hint: Have you found the perfect topic, but are still not sure which is the perfect one? Do you know any other good WordPress theme (and/or plugin) recognition utilities?