Howdy talented authors! In this ongoing quest for more transparency, here I am, again, with more juicy tidbits about the reviewing process. Let’s look at some issues that we’ll most probably enforce down the road in the interest of keeping overall quality high in the marketplace. These aren’t stringently enforced, yet, but will be soon.

This time we look at a stricter policy on deprecated tags and functions.

As I mentioned earlier, our policy towards deprecated functions is a little bit lenient at the moment. We only dock an author if the tag being used is too old and has a completely better alternative. Moving forward, we’ll require authors to use only current functions and tags. Replacing bloginfo(parameter) with their more specialized alternatives should be a great first step towards this direction.

Chime in at the comments if you have any questions and thanks for reading!

Howdy talented authors! In this ongoing quest for more transparency, here I am, again, with more juicy tidbits about the reviewing process. Let’s look at some issues that we’ll most probably enforce down the road in the interest of keeping overall quality high in the marketplace. These aren’t stringently enforced, yet, but will be soon.

This time we look at demo data.

Theme authors whip up impressive looking demos to woo authors. In real life though, it’s hard for a novice user to replicate the demo, bit for bit. To alleviate issues like these, authors may be required to include some simple setup data to replicate the demo. A lot of authors seem to be doing this already.

Chime in at the comments if you have any questions and thanks for reading!

Howdy talented authors! In this ongoing quest for more transparency, here I am, again, with more juicy tidbits about the reviewing process. Let’s look at some issues that we’ll most probably enforce down the road in the interest of keeping overall quality high in the marketplace. These aren’t stringently enforced, yet, but will be soon.

This time we look at the position of the theme’s menu.

Most themes add a top level menu under WordPress. While this is great for visibility, a more intuitive place for it will be under the Appearance menu. This is inline with the official WordPress review process and will soon be enforced. Don’t worry, it’s often a matter using add_theme_page() instead of add_menu_page()

Chime in at the comments if you have any questions and thanks for reading!

Howdy talented authors! In this ongoing quest for more transparency, here I am, again, with more juicy tidbits about the reviewing process. More specifically, I’d like to address some issues that seem to be tripping up a lot of authors. In the interest of brevity, I won’t go too much into the issues themselves since they’re a single search away.

This time we look at licenses, credits and copyrights.

I don’t think I need to explain what I’m talking about here. One of those small issues that authors seem to forget on a regular basis. Make sure that the license files are in place, give credit where credit is due [or required!] and double check the assets that you’re including with your template. The last thing you or I want is a DMCA takedown notice.

Chime in at the comments if you have any questions and thanks for reading!

Howdy talented authors! In this ongoing quest for more transparency, here I am, again, with more juicy tidbits about the reviewing process. More specifically, I’d like to address some issues that seem to be tripping up a lot of authors. In the interest of brevity, I won’t go too much into the issues themselves since they’re a single search away.

This time we look at default CSS styles.

We require authors to implement styles in their template’s stylesheet that account for some of the classes that WordPress generates. These classes include aligncenter, alignright, alignleft, wp-caption, wp-caption-text, gallery-caption, sticky and bypost author.

Chime in at the comments if you have any questions and thanks for reading!

Howdy talented authors! In this ongoing quest for more transparency, here I am, again, with more juicy tidbits about the reviewing process. More specifically, I’d like to address some issues that seem to be tripping up a lot of authors. In the interest of brevity, I won’t go too much into the issues themselves since they’re a single search away.

This time we look at adding and loading JavaScript.

In this day and age of JavaScript dominance, you should really be careful about how you include and use it. Please don’t include JavaScript code willy nilly straight into the document. Chances are, another plugin or the user himself has added another version of the library or another library itself, leading to conflicts down the road. Do it the safe way by using the wp enqueue script.

Chime in at the comments if you have any questions and thanks for reading!

Howdy talented authors! In this ongoing quest for more transparency, here I am, again, with more juicy tidbits about the reviewing process. More specifically, I’d like to address some issues that seem to be tripping up a lot of authors. In the interest of brevity, I won’t go too much into the issues themselves since they’re a single search away.

This time we look at WP hooks.

This is pretty self-descriptive—WordPress requires a few ‘hooks’ to be in place to do its thing, and we require them to be included, as needed. wp_head and wp_footer are absolutely necessary. Pagination links aren’t necessary if you’re using your own custom solution.

Keep in mind that just because your template works without a hook doesn’t mean it’s working well. Lots of WordPress plugins rely on wp_footer to include code and without this hook’s inclusion, your users are in for a world of hurt.

Chime in at the comments if you have any questions and thanks for reading!

Howdy talented authors! In this ongoing quest for more transparency, here I am, again, with more juicy tidbits about the reviewing process. More specifically, I’d like to address some issues that seem to be tripping up a lot of authors. In the interest of brevity, I won’t go too much into the issues themselves since they’re a single search away.

This time we look at stripping native functionality.

Some enterprising authors, recently, have started stripping out some native functionality from WordPress’ core. One fine example would be removing the wpautop filter to deal with formatting issues. While this may simplify the workflow for your template, newbie users can get confused with the change in the native UX.

With that in mind, we actively discourage users from making changes to core functionality like this. You’re still free to go mad with modifying the editor—just don’t modify core functions.

Chime in at the comments if you have any questions and thanks for reading!

Howdy talented authors! In this ongoing quest for more transparency, here I am, again, with more juicy tidbits about the reviewing process. More specifically, I’d like to address some issues that seem to be tripping up a lot of authors. In the interest of brevity, I won’t go too much into the issues themselves since they’re a single search away.

This time we look at short PHP tags.

This is more a language issue than a WordPress issue. Refrain from using PHP short tags in your code. Support for these isn’t universal, and it’s better to take the safe way and start using the longer, universally compatible long form.

Chime in at the comments if you have any questions and thanks for reading!

Howdy talented authors! In this ongoing quest for more transparency, here I am, again, with more juicy tidbits about the reviewing process. More specifically, I’d like to address some issues that seem to be tripping up a lot of authors. In the interest of brevity, I won’t go too much into the issues themselves since they’re a single search away.

This time we look at deprecated WordPress functions and tags.

The WordPress team occasionally deprecates certain functions and replaces them with better, more efficient and descriptive ones. It’s considered a best practice to use only current functions in your template’s code and we enforce this policy not too stringently at the moment. We’ll return to this topic in a future submission tip.

Enabling the WP_DEBUG constant in your config file will help you fix this.

Chime in at the comments if you have any questions and thanks for reading!