WordPress Editorials

Read the thoughts of the WPCandy community and share your own on our opinion pages.

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Make theme standards your New Year’s Resolution

By 37 days agoDecember 30, 2011

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Most theme authors have their own habits. Most habits will have a positive effect on themes, or least on the time it takes to develop themes. Developers sometimes forget, though, that there are Theme Development Standards everyone should use while coding themes. Some are more obvious than others, but none of them are that hard to stick to.

In the last few months I’ve heard of theme developers making silly mistakes. To name a few:

  • adding stylesheets and Javascript files via header.php instead of using proper functions,
  • including a sidebar directly into header.php instead of using sidebar.php (via Ryan Duff),
  • and hard coding menus in header.php instead of using WordPress menus.

For these mistakes and others popping up, consider this a reminder: there is a Theme Testing Process you can use to test your theme. Yet many themes out there aren’t even close to checking all the boxes on that list. Even on massively popular marketplaces like ThemeForest, there are themes that fail in the first few steps.

The WordPress.org and ThemeForest theme review team are already using the Unit Test to limit the number of poor quality themes out there. The next step is for theme developers follow these coding standards by default. With WordPress improving every single day, it’s time to improve the quality of all the great looking (but poorly coded) themes out there.

So with the new year closing in pretty quick, what are other New Year’s resolutions for theme developers? Just how high are we going to set the bar for WordPress themes in 2012?

Poll: What’s your favorite feature in WordPress 3.3?

By 54 days agoDecember 13, 2011

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WordPress 3.3 “Sonny” is out now and (hopefully you’ve noticed) we’ve gone through all the noteworthy features in a big blog post. But noteworthy is a relative term. The real question is: which feature is the noteoworthiest to you? Or, a better question using real words would be: which feature in WordPress 3.3 is your favorite?

Vote in the poll below, and stop by in the comments to let everyone know why you voted the way you did. You can pick up to two features when you vote.

For extra bonus points this post, check back on the results of our similar poll when 3.2 was released. Do the most popular features in that poll still effect your use of WordPress?

Community Poll: How many custom post types do you use?

By 123 days agoOctober 5, 2011

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Without a doubt one of the most interesting additions to WordPress in recent memory is the custom post type. Developers have built out all sorts of plugins and features using custom post types since they were made available to the community. In fact, I’m willing to bet a number of you folks are using them, and likely in large number.

When you vote in the poll, it would be great if you also jumped into the comments and told us about the post types you’re using (or not using) on your websites.

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Stop telling users they shouldn’t be running very many plugins

By 137 days agoSeptember 21, 2011

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If you are having trouble with your WordPress website, or if you ever have a problem with it in the future, you should first check the number of plugins you are running. If it’s a big number then you’ve likely found your problem. You should trim down your number of active plugins immediately.

The best thing you can do in the future is keep that active plugin count as small as possible.

Except it’s not.

None of what I just said is true, and I wouldn’t recommend anyone follow that advice. This sort of advice is both misleading to users and contrary to the spirit of WordPress, yet a growing number of voices within the community are encouraging users to limit the number of plugins they run. It’s a bit sad, because plugins are arguably the best part of WordPress. To convey that they are dangerous in large numbers is to do a disservice to the community itself.

In reality the number of active WordPress plugins you run isn’t important, and the only thing that number can tell anyone is just how much you love plugins.

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Dear theme designers: Consider yourselves on notice

By 164 days agoAugust 25, 2011

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EDIT: The premise of this post is to specifically call attention to the nefarious practice of using base64_ and other php methods to hide links to 3rd party sites in a theme file. The average user has no idea what is going on: a base64_ function in a footer.php or sidebar.php file is a very very strong indicator that their theme designer is up to no good. It is only an indicator though. When in doubt contact your host or the theme designer and ask them to explain what’s going on. – strebel

We see a lot of themes at Page.ly. We see good themes and we see bad themes.

From our vantage point, hosting thousands of WordPress sites, we literally see everything.

MoPappy will host anything under the sun and could care less what app is running or what it is doing. At Page.ly we only manage WordPress, and we have a keen interest in the performance aspect of WordPress at scale.

Stop the base64_ shit. You are a douchebag if you don’t.

A two hundred character string of HTML in order to encode and hide two backlinks is 75k. That is a relatively big file, and also adds overhead to the PHP process when it is decoded every time the page loads.

I would like to take a moment to tell all theme designers, everywhere: stop the base64_encode shit. You are a douchebag if you do this.

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Custom designed WordPress options screens need to go

By 226 days agoJune 24, 2011

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There are more WordPress themes now than ever before, including commercial themes. More and more developers are spending their time and their talents to develop WordPress themes to sell to customers. These are great things.

But a trend that picked up steam, and doesn’t seem to be letting up, is the custom theme options screen. Instead of using the standard WordPress user interface for a given options screen, a number of developers have gone their own direction, creating custom screens with their own design and their own techniques.

This stuff needs to stop.

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Post to post relationships and the limitations of WordPress

By 263 days agoMay 18, 2011

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WordPress Post to Post relationships

After recording the WPCandy Podcast last night with Ryan, we had a bit of an after the show show open discussion. I brought up something I remembered hearing a while back on a 5by5 podcast where I believe a guest of Jeffrey Zeldman’s said that WordPress couldn’t handle a website like IMDB, the popular Internet Movie Database.

I wrote down the comment to remember for later, because I had a feeling it was a bit presumptuous. Justin Tadlock, a very well respected WordPress developer, happened to be around the after the show show and was the perfect person to ask about my IMDB WordPress challenge.

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Running an Open Theme Marketplace

By 264 days agoMay 17, 2011

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One of the best things about working on the internet is being able to engage in open dialog about your business. Recently one of our ThemeForest authors, the very talented Mike McAlister, weighed in with a thought provoking post here on WPCandy. From the rate at which comments flew in, it was obvious this is an important discussion to be having.

WPCandy have very kindly allowed me to write an editorial in response to the post and the comments. I hope I can add a little more to this important conversation!

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A Hypercritical Analysis of $35 WordPress Themes

By 278 days agoMay 3, 2011

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This editorial was contributed by WordPress theme developer Mike McAlister, whose themes are available on ThemeForest. You can read more about him in his author profile below the editorial.

Your site has those fancy drop-down menus you always see around the web. Not just the one that drops down, but the one that drops down and then out, and down and out with the really slick fading transitions. It took you zero hours to code.

Your homepage features a really unique display of your portfolio items, sliding and zooming them in and out with a custom effect (designated in a custom theme options panel, of course). Adding your portfolio items was as easy as sending an email.

Your site also has 20+ custom page templates, 50+ layout and styling shortcodes, color options, video support, custom twitter widgets and working contact forms. Not to mention it is professionally designed, coded, validated and supported by some of the best talent on the web.

Your site is absolutely amazing and it cost you a total of $35. Less than an oil change, especially if you have a coupon.

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Is Tumblr the new WordPress?

By 303 days agoApril 8, 2011

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Today’s editorial has been contributed by Joshua Strebel, co-founder of Page.ly, the Managed WordPress Hosting company.

Yes, this post title is filled will juicy controversy. Intentionally so. However consider it from the following point of view.

In the rare cases someones cancels their service at Page.ly we ask them to share with us a reason why. The following is real feedback from a recent corporate customer that is part of the Viacom media conglomerate.

…[We] just want a blog we can easily theme and post to, not [run] a site primary off it. WordPress is over-complicated over-kill for this, Tumblr works fine and is much easier to deal with…

Wow.

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