Asset Marketplace: New validation requirements released to Asset Marketplace listing flow

[AJLaPorte]

What is it?

Today, HubSpot updated the Asset Marketplace listing flow to reflect the latest theme requirements. These new standards are required of all new themes going forward, and we request any existing themes to update by May 1, 2023.

Like before, anyone submitting their theme will experience several automated validation checks – now against a more expansive list of requirements. Any failed checks are accompanied by recommended solutions, so themes are easily updated and resubmitted for faster review and approval.

Why does it matter?

We are committed to offering high quality themes to our customers that deliver a delightful website building experience. We also want to ensure theme partners are set up for success in upcoming product releases.

By updating pre-submission validation to include the latest theme requirements, we hope to give you a faster time to market, more transparent listing experience, and accelerated approval times.

How does it work?

Last year, HubSpot dev docs were updated to reflect the latest theme requirements. We highly recommend you complete the following by May 1, 2023.

1. In your Asset Marketplace provider account, navigate to Asset Marketplace, then Listings.
2. Click the name of the listing you want to update, which will bring you to the listing editor.
3. Here you can make any changes to your listing, then click the Reviewtab.
4. On the Review tab, you’ll be prompted to re-run validation.
5. If it passes, resubmit your theme for approval.
6. If it fails, you can view the detailed list of errors and recommended updates. See a preview of this experience below. Please make these changes, and resubmit your theme for approval.

Who gets it?

Going forward, all new themes will be compliant with the latest requirements. All existing themes listed in the marketplace are asked to update by May 1, 2023.

For more information about the listing process, please refer to the developer docs. Questions? Email us at cmspartners@hubspot.com.

[alyssamwilie]

Going to reiterate a lot of what I said in the Slack but essentially this is a terrible update.

1. Moving fields around is going to cause breaking changes for those using themes already in the marketplace. Forcing us to update those themes is forcing us to endure backlash from our users who will now have to go back through all their pages and re-make any edits they made to fields that have now moved. I'm even more outraged by this as in a webinar that spoke of these upcoming changes I specifically asked about the updates possibly making breaking changes and was told they believed it would not. 

2. Religating those specific fields to only be allowed in the Styles tab is, honestly, ridiculous. Having them in the Styles tab doesn't always make sense especially if it's an element that will likely always need editing.

For just one example: I have a hero module that lets a user choose between an Image, Gradient, Color, or Video for a background. Video is not allowed in the Styles tab, the other three are now forced to be in the Styles tab. This would be incredibly confusing to the end user. If they choose Video the video options are right there, if they choose any of the others they are forced to go into the Styles tab to make the changes they need.

It's always been a rule of UX that "the less clicks the better" and you are forcing us to very frequently make the user jump around to make their edits.

3. This limits how unique a theme can be. The whole point of third-party created themes is that they're all different. One big factor users look at when choosing a theme is how easy they can understand and use the field orginzation. What makes a field orginization easy-to-use differs between user. Limiting how we organize our fields limits how we can set ourselves apart from other themes. And not only that it limits how imaginative we can be with our theme/module build.

I've already been frustrated with the limits on what fields can be used in theme settings and this update has me basically outraged that I'm now limited even more. I've never seen a theme marketplace that dictates this granularly how fields are to be used. I'm really disappointed, HubSpot.

[bradhave]

Color fields now can't be in the Content tab? Thats... alarming
We used colors fields a lot for things that wouldn't work putting them in the Styles tabs.

Examples: Buttons, we allow them to choose Primary, Seconday, etc Which are set at the theme level

But we also give a custom options which then shows color fields...