Comments on: 15 Do’s and Don’ts of Effective WordPress Theming

By: paul

paul — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 12:57:21 +0000

If you’re working off a solid framework, most of these will be built in.

By: Jay Philips

Jay Philips — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 19:18:06 +0000

Awesome tips of what to do and what not to do.

By: WordPress Hardcore

WordPress Hardcore — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 06:44:54 +0000

Options panel is recommended even for one time client though, in case the client wants to change some text which would be hardcoded in the theme otherwise (such as legal notices etc.) .

My clients usually use WordPress as a CMS, so sometimes they want to include pages in the navigation menu. Hardcoding the post IDs for those pages in the navigation menu would be inflexible for the clients in the long run, so again, some sort of configuration panel would be a nice touch.

By: Russell Smith

Russell Smith — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:22:49 +0000

#9 Do not forget the RSS integration, is a really bad idea if as it seems you are going to do it on every page load. It;

a) will do a request per page load for something that doesn’t need to be done each time

b) will wait for the default curl timeout if there is some network issue or problem with the api, this will result in annoyed users & more load as people jab refresh.

c) you may get blocked if your busy and are hammering their API.

Much better would be to take your script and make it output to a static file using cron periodically and load that in to the template. This way end users won’t get hung pages, you can set a longer time out & add error checking and your server won’t get overloaded either.

By: Hayden Hancock

Hayden Hancock — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:07:27 +0000

I enjoyed reading this post. I thought for the most part each idea was pretty spot on.

By: Marc Deschamps

Marc Deschamps — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 22:00:56 +0000

Great article, learned a couple of things here I’ll have to remember this post next times i do a custom theme. BTW for all, great comments that added value to the article itself.

Thing i’ve run across is javascript library which use images (facebox for ex.) : it’s not that easy to make the script behave. I’ve renamed the javascript to .js.php and modified link to referenced images to start with :
/images/myimage.gif

Work great

By: Eugen

Eugen — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:28:56 +0000

The API is outdated.

By: Andreas Nurbo

Andreas Nurbo — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:18:29 +0000

Most of these calls are cached so its only the first call that actually query the database.

By: Havi

Havi — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:22:54 +0000

Great summary!

By: The Frosty

The Frosty — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:22:42 +0000

I started to read this earlier tonight. Then I went out and had some cocktails..

Good read.. Some truths and some not so important..

I’m aware of all these when building a theme,