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16 Vital Checks Before

Releasing a

WordPress Theme

Wordpress Made Easy

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Okay you have have your hosting account and a

WordPress site. You are about to finish your new

WordPress theme and you want to make sure that

everything is ready and prepped, but you don’t know

where to begin. Here are 16 Vital Checks Before

Releasing a WordPress Theme that I have found and

below is my summary and the link to the original post

1. Don’t Display Comments on Protected Post – I think

this one is self-explanatory. Do a check in the

comments.php if you need to make a post password

protected. Viewers may see the post but they will not be

able to see the comments if they don’t have a password

for it.

2. Display Attachments Correctly – Check the theme if

you can see a special template file which is the

attachment.php. It allows visitors to view your

attachments correctly, like images or videos. The theme

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twenty ten has an attachment.php which allows viewers to

see images in different sizes.

3. Introduce Right to Left Support – This one’s a bit

complicated. However, you can always make this easier

by checking the theme of the rtl.css that can override

those in the main style.css. This is very important for

languages that are Arabic as well as Hebrew.

4. Supply an Editor Style – Styling the TinyMCE editor

can be easy by just creating a file named as editor-

style.css. Just match the typography you see in the main

style.css.

5. Make Paginated Entries Work – You can observe

that paginated entries aren’t much popular in WordPress.

To make it work, use the <!-nextpage-> tag. This is in

order foryour visitors to see other pages beyond what they

are reading.

6. Style Default Widgets – Check the widgets because

more often than not, you can’t style them.

7. Make Threaded Comments Usable – make sure that

comment pagination works as well as have that certain

margin to know that the comment has been replied to.

8. Do Not Forget wp_footer () and wp_head () – If you

leave this two out, features, headers, as well as plugins

may not work.

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9. Support Thumbnails – other themes rely on plugins to

support thumbnails. But if you want, you can add some

lines in functions.php.

10. Support Custom Menus – After registering theme

support, you can display custom menu with

wp_nav_menu. But remember to protect your layout to

prevent weird-looking menus.

11. Enable Custom Backgrounds – WordPress 3.0 New

Feature and you just got to add one line like

add_custom_background(); That easy!

12. Enable Custom Headers – You can change the

header background as well as the title color by defining

the constants.

13. Make User-Visible String Translatable – Wrap

every string users need to read with the _() if you wish to

translate it.

14. Handle Custom Fields – this one’s optional for

many. You will know if WordPress supports adding

custom fields in each post-so check on that. You can also

do this by using the function the_meta() which displays

custom fields attached to a post.

15. Make sure everything looks consistent – this is self-

explanatory. Make sure that comment section matches the

body and the overall appearance of the site.

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16. .Use the WordPress.org Theme Unit Test –

WordPress.org offers a sample content file that you can

import into your WordPress installation. It comes in

assortment of test post, page as well as images.

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/wordpress/16-vital-

checks-before-releasing-a-wordpress-theme/

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