Created: 2017.04.14
Theoretically a custom theme could fulfil any niche need, and therefore deviate very far from the typical idea of the WordPress 'blog'.
At least, that's what I thought when creating a custom theme to manage my internal knowledgebase.
The reality is, that all themes need to meet certain criteria, and these criteria are very much embedded in the idea of WordPress-as-blog.
This plugin runs a barrage of tests against would-be themes. Of course there's nothing that says that you have to publish your theme, but ignoring the theme check is a bad idea for several reasons:
- Publishing themes and thus freely sharing knowledge is the whole backbone of the WordPress ideology, and lack of compliance is a poor excuse for not giving back
- Standards-savvy clients will expect themes to meet basic criteria, and I know that I'd rather avoid lengthy back-and-forth conversations about why my work doesn't do this.
- It's nice to have another set of eyes over my work (even if they are blank machine eyes)
Disabling comments is a good option for corporate sites where user input isn't part of the marketing strategy.
WordPress freely allows you disable comments and prevent anyone leaving a comment directly (in the comment form) or via a 'ping back' style acknowledgement.
But the Theme Check plugin will fail you if you don't include redundant comment templating:
What the Requirements actually say about templates, is:
If you use the relevant templates, your theme should include: ...
the_comments_navigation(),the_comments_pagination().
So perhaps this requirement would not be enforced if I only used custom post types, and didn't use the default comment-able post page (single.php)? Or perhaps I need to really disable comments?
But on the other hand, the Theme Check plugin, definitely does flag the missing comment templating as a 'requirement', not an 'option' that I 'should' have.
When creating my theme boilerplate, I naively threw boilerplate in as a tag. Bad move.
Theme Tags are also in lock down and you can only choose from the 28 pre-approved tags:
REQUIRED: This theme doesn't seem to display tags
This one tripped me up, because I was already displaying a Tag Cloud using the built in widget, plugged into the sidebar.
But this requirement is actually referring to the_tags() - specific to a post:
This template tag displays a link to the tag or tags a post belongs to. If no tags are associated with the current entry, nothing is displayed. This tag should be used within The Loop.
This output can then be suppressed by not assigning any tags to a post.
The theme should include a screenshot.png, to show sighted people what they're getting. But it can't be any old size, it has to be exactly 1200x900.
But wait, what's this Apple? Your 2012 11" MacBook Air only goes up to 1366x768 ? Damn.
Well, it's only a Recommendation, but still..
Hmmm, maybe I'll just use a standard BrowserStack screenshot..
Hmmm...
