`tags` and `features` fields are inconsistently used, reducing searchability

[mather]

Problem

The tags and features fields in theme metadata appear to serve different purposes conceptually, but in practice they are often used interchangeably or without clear distinction. This reduces the effectiveness of filtering and searching for themes.

tags field — ideally reflects the theme's style and design direction (e.g. simple, creative, elegant), but functional keywords like syntax highlighting are also present.

features field — ideally lists concrete capabilities a theme provides (e.g. seo, responsive, customizable), but style-oriented words like simple or minimal appear here as well.

Additionally, near-duplicate values appear across themes without normalization — for example:

• minimal, minimalistic, and minimalist are all used to describe the same concept.

Suggestion

I'm not suggesting that adding new keywords should be prohibited. However, it would help if there were:

1. A documented guideline clarifying the intended distinction between tags and features.
2. A review process (e.g. during PR review) that encourages authors to use existing tags/features before introducing new ones, and flags cases where style words appear in features or functional words appear in tags.

This would make theme discovery more reliable for users who filter by these fields.

Context

I noticed this while building a theme search interface on top of the Hugo themes data. Inconsistent metadata made it difficult to provide meaningful filtering.

https://mather.github.io/hugo-theme-search/