Justin Tadlock’s running a series where he asks theme users what they would do if they were a theme developer. His latest posts asks which plugins should be supported out of the box? It is a great series and a good question but I’d like to turn it round the other way and say what plugins should be developed to support the theme?
Premium themes have kicked off an increase in complexity with many of them adding one or more admin pages to help control the theme. With all this functionality though there must be some users that don’t want to use any of it, some that want some of it, some that want to pass some on to clients, but not all, and some that want to go about things in the old fashioned way. You know, custom fields and such like.
What I wonder is, if these were produced in a more modular way, so you could do things manually, with custom fields or by setting values in an xml file perhaps, but you also had the option to download four or five extra plugins to control those aspects of the themes through the UI, would that change the things that themes can do?
Would that do nothing but make life harder or would it free up themers and plugin authors to work side by side, offer replacement UIs and generally be more innovative?
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I think I see what you are saying: that adding more options doesn't really provide more choice, just more ways of doing things within a more rigid structure?
I am slightly concerned with the way they have handled the comment changes in 2.7 because they are removing the choice for themers, but having decided to go with Disqus now it makes little difference to me.
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Monika, I have completely changed the comment system so this should not happen any more. This was almost certainly down to my anti-spam system which was cookie based and might not have played well with your browser.
Apologies.
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short:no
this time wp 2.7 to design comments theme authors have less freedom than WP > 2.7
more options is less freedom for the theme author and less freedom for the user, because every option offers a way – most of the time 3,5,6,7,8 ways but not all ways to use this or that plugin this or that feature.
for customers I do like premium theme authors but not for *all * WP user.
I realise that german wp user prefer other things and features as blogger from usa – I don’t know why but I see it.
I ‘m afraid that the way your question is going we try to *paternalism* blogger -
simple as possible – not difficult and less options
Monika
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I hate your formular – most of the time I lost my comment, because I have the false things in false order – most of the time I could use my automatic form of the browser – I hope I can remember all my words for the next try-maybe this kills spammer, maybe but sure it kills my time and my patenience ….