So I’ve decided to write my own WordPress themes

WHY? Because the truth is that most existing WordPress themes suck. And believe me, I’ve tried dozens. I manage the themes at Livelyblog, a free blogging service which now has over 150 themes available to it’s users. And that is a very low number compared to the number of theme’s I’ve tried out in my quest for a huge variety of themes random strangers may like. There are about 2000+ themes in the official WordPress Theme directory, and I’d say that about 10%, or perhaps 200, are remotely close to alright. Most are just slightly modified rippoff-themes designed for linkspam, broken or plain ugly. So I decided to write my own theme.

Why, what’s wrong with 90% of the WordPress themes out there?

A whole lot. Including..

Spamthemes.

The most annoying thing is that most themes are made by people doing “Search Engine Optimization” in the forbidden way: They make a theme, place links to their own site and “sponsors” on it, and hope that these links - when placed on various websites - generate enough backlinks to give themselves and their sponsors high rankings in search-engines.

This, like all other black hat SEO, doesn’t work in the long run. Google and Technorati, for example, will just nuke you for not following their webmaster guidelines (and general politeness) if you do “template-linkspamming”, but nobody seems to care.

There are (at least) two things wrong with every spamtheme:

• They are just some other theme which is slightly modified (duplicate)
• They claim to be “widget”-ready while they in reality are not, the typical problem being that the “Meta” section in the sidebar is excluded from the if dynamic_sidebar.. endif; (in order to get the linkspam shown to widget-users)
• The header, and sometimes other theme files are full og spam links (hey, what’s up with placing SEO-type links in comments.php? Hope people don’t notice, eh?

It’s also interesting to note that most spamthemes are released under the “Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial ShareAlike” license, and the extra term is mostly “You can’t remove the links”, which pretty much rules out using most of these themes - unless you choose to (safely) ignore the “terms”. The reason you can ignore these terms is that many themes are GNU GPL licensed. Yes, there are spamtheme authors who release under GNU GPL and claim you can’t remove their spam-links, too, and these “designers” really should read it - because you can remove any spam-links under the GNU GPL (yeah, you have to point out who originally made the theme, but it is enough to inform that in a file called “readme.txt” in a re-released .zip file). The reason this mostly applies to the “Attribution Non Commercial ShareAlike”-licensed themes too is that most of these themes are actually based on Kubrick or some other GPL-licensed theme. This means that “Attribution Non Commercial ShareAlike” re-releases are void by default…

But it is equally annoying that..

Most WordPress themes require you to edit them

WordPress and WPMU have a nice editor, a feature rich interface and is generally user-friendly. So why do most theme designers expect the users to hand-edit the theme-files? Close to none of the WP themes available today work out of the box. The themes designed purely for linkspamming, as mentioned above, obviously require editing away the links “when allowed”, but that’s just the start.

Some themes, like Tukulr by Nurudin Jauhari, have this cute little “About me” box all worked up with some default text in functions.php and some nice graphics. This obviously requires the user to edit the text in the themes php files before using it. And the text being in functions.php and not sidebar.php makes it kind of hard to find. It must be noted that the profile page, which can be edited from within WP, has such a field - which can be called with the_author_description() (or get_the_author_description(), if you want to use it in a variable) and thus; there is absolutely no need to require the user to edit the theme file for showing “about me”..

Editing theme files is just fine if you’re not afraid to open a PHP file, but if you barely know how to install it.. this is very bad and really should be avoided. And most people are not theme designers,or PHP programmers, and don’t know how to edit php files.

I really do think that more WP theme designers should make sure the theme works right out of the box without editing any of the themes files.

And then there is the big problem of..

Many WordPress themes are actually broken in WP 2.1/WPMU 1.2.x.

This may not be entirely all theme designers fault, but fact of the matter is that many themes, like Spiffy, use things like:

$link_cats = $wpdb->get_results(”SELECT cat_id, cat_name FROM $wpdb->linkcategories”);

to print out the categories - this may have worked, but it doesn’t work with the latest version of WP/WPMU. It’s interesting that the comments field in that theme suggusts using:

$link_cats = $wpdb->get_results(”SELECT cat_id, cat_name FROM $wpdb->categories WHERE link_count > ‘0′”);

instead, however: What’s so wrong with wp_list_categories()? It’s got plenty of advanced options and there really isn’t any good reason to call the database to list the categories - or do anything else for that matter.. WP can take care of it!

..and the annyoing lack of advanced WP features

WP now allows the user to change theme top picture from within WP - if the theme supports it. I’ve slightly modified dozens of themes to support this - it’s a shame that close to zero support it by default. It’s easy to fix this in 5 minutes, but 5 minutes times 50 times become.. a lot of time. It really isn’t that much trouble for someone who maintains a theme to change it so the header-picture can be changed, and fixing this is speically easy if you already know how the CSS and PHP files of a theme work - or you have to look at them to see where/how the header pic is loaded, which steals yet a few more minutes…

And then there is the brutal fact: Most themes are ugly.

Which is the primary reason I am going to write my own theme, finally. I really want something very simple yet very pretty. This may, obviously, turn out to be something completely different from what other people find pretty, but still: As said, I have installed over 160+ themes at the free blogging service Livelyblog.com, I’ve looked at propbably more than 500+ WP themes, and none of them are really smashing.

My plan.

Just to share some basic ideas: I am going to try to make one basic theme to build on using the Template: themefolder tag which is available for WP themes. This means that I can write the php files once and then make other themes which only include style.css, images and changed core files - if any. I find it strange that nobody is using this when they release like 5 themes who look almost the same and there is no difference between their PHP files… I’d also like the theme to support all the latest WP features like widgets (not really a buildt-in feature, but it’s as good as one..) and header image changing from within WP.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 8th, 2007 at 2:18 am and is filed under WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.