I am currently in the process of creating my first free-to-download WordPress theme. The possibilities are endless, and not helped at all by the fact that I have never actually used a theme that someone else has built. This means I have only a limited perspective on what people want, or need, from a theme and I would like your help.
I have no problem with diving into my theme and editing the code directly, whenever I fancy a change, and that means I have tended to design my own theme with the intention of modifying it once I start using it. Not ideal for a theme release.
What I need to do is to compile a list of essential properties, or features, that a theme must have.
Over the next few days I am going to download a series of themes and give them a try. It will give me an idea of what other people do with themes but that still won’t tell me what it is like to actually run a blog based around someone else’s theme.
So what I want to know is, what really matters to you?
I take it as a given that it should be widgety, and gravitarised, but what else absolutely must be there? What would make or break a theme for you? Is there anything you have been searching for that you haven’t found?
Lastly, what feature have you seen in other themes that you thought was un-necessary, added to the complexity or was simply a wasted effort?
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Hi Andrew, thanks for opening this topic out to us wordpress vandals!! LOL
There will be as many features as people posting and just about everything has been covered at some pont in the wordrdpress arena. What I notice as a develper is the more ‘features offered, inevitably the more complex and therfore ‘bloated the theme code gets. A wonderful theme with oodles of options turns into a dinosaur on the page! Not surprising given the loops, tricks and detours the code needs to render all that stuff. Is that really useful, or is it a short lived gimmick that leads sadly to an unusable website?
What I would like to see is a way to set out options and choices, but then ’snapshot’ all that dynamic code into a html file that preserves ONLY the necessary dynamic tags to run the site. In other words remove all the looping of varaibles in the admin, remove dynamic tags to site name, tagline, rss feeds, footer details etc… None of this changes on a production site and yet we are usually calling all this stuff repeatedly on every page load. Result a slow-code heavy site. If you could set up your options, then convert most of it to a static theme file, this would reduce lots of processing. Then, if you wanted to change any options in the theme, you simply do so, then create a static theme page again, with all the changes hard coded, except for just the real content dynamic tags. Ok, it’s probably not what you are looking for but opens a new way of writing themes.
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Thanks Vivien,
I mostly have my plate full because I tend to make life difficult by trying too many different things at once. Having said that it is never too late to comment, suggestions are always welcome.
When you say optimize do you have anything particular in mind?
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huh, I’m a bit too late to comment here, looks like you’ve got your plate full with all those valid wishes above, Andrew;-) Good luck. And I do hope you’ll post some tutorials on how to optimize themes that will be released for the free public use, writing it from your perspective.
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1. Readability. This is mostly for the selection of fonts, sizes, colors, backgrounds, line and paragraphs spacing, and things like that.
2. Support for plenty of in-post formatting – images, nested quotes, bold, links, pre/code blocks and stuff like that.
3. Support for widgets and plugins out of the box. FlickrRSS, del.icio.us stuff, ShareThis, Google Adsense, Google Analytics, etc. The less I need to do and the more things work out of the box, the better. Famous “Cutline” theme has some nice implementations, including a custom.css support for easier upgrades.
4. SEO.
5. AJAX goodies – they look and feel so good, when done right… :)
That’s about it…
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I would like you to think about seo, especially the proper use of header tags. A different H1 tag for every page/post and proper use of h2, h3 tags.
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Thanks Guys, You’ve given me some solid gold ideas there. This project is getting more complex by the day!! :-)
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Nice to see your knowledge of WP influencing a theme, Andrew :)
First off, I have to say that i18n support is probably the easiest but most underestimated thing you can come up with for a theme. Make it multi language! At least I’d thank you ;)
All sidebars widget ready and gravatar-support should be standard, as you already said.
Also, make as much things that do make sense (Font color, size etc.) a theme option. See this great tutorial on how to do that: http://theundersigned.net/2006/06/wordpress-how-to-theme-options/
Maybe you can even come up with saving different colorschemes for the theme?
Add a theme option to highlight the comments of the post author. Quite easy to realize in code (see http://paste.barnal.de/show.php?pid=473 – I dont think your comments will allow me to paste PHP here :) ) but it should be optional I guess.
Separate pingbacks from comments! Nothing looks worse than 20 comments mixed up with 10 pingbacks that ar not separated by each other (may it be visual style or by ordering them).
Maybe support asides (http://codex.wordpress.org/Adding_Asides) – although I’ve never been a big fan of it.
Nice to have: support for Scrobbler (http://leflo.de/projekte/scrobbler)
I’d also like to see switching between older/newer posts (on the front page as well as inside a post) “AJAXified”. AJAX comments + followup notification + comment subscription as seen on your current theme are great additions too.
That would be all – for now ;)
btw, make sure to check out the Web2.0* (http://web2wptheme.com/) Theme by Neil Merton (http://www.neilmerton.co.uk/)
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If you are looking for a lot of downloads, I’ve found that there are very few blog themes that support 125×125 banners out of the box. I think if you were to offer a good looking theme that supported that out of the box, it would be a hit!