I’ve been thinking a lot about themes recently, more specifically about the sort of functionality that comes with themes and an idea occured to me: Theme components.
The idea is a fairly simple one really. If you are designing a theme and you want to add some additional functionality you can download a component class that handles the logix for you.
I imagine an example is needed.
Let’s say you wanted to add a comment sorter as part of the theme. You download the comment sorter class and dump it in a lib directory. You then instantiate it within the functions.php file and that adds four or five functions for sorting or filtering the comments which you can use to produce the theme.
Ideally certain functions become the default and raise the bar on the base functionality a theme needs in order to be considered useful.
Do you think there is a ‘market’ in this? I say ‘market’ because my feeling is that they would be free, and require the theme they were used in to be free as well.
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Eric,
Although in some cases theme designers are producing the same tools, in most cases they just aren’t including them. Most themes are just themes without any added functionality.
A plugin can do this, but then the theme author has to second guess the blog owner over which plugins are added. Adding it as part of the theme means it is certain to be available.
(__)
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I’m new to WP and was actually kind of shocked something like this wasn’t in place and that theme designers were re-inventing the wheel every time.
Kinda thought this was what a plugin would do. Or maybe a theme component plugin that managed different components.