Time for WordPress theme standards?

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By Scott DeToffol ⋅ September 20, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

The success of WordPress as the de facto self-hosted blog platform is partially due to the great abundance of free and paid-for themes and plug-ins that are available. As evidence that our cups runneth over, see this insane list of more than 300 resources for WordPress users.

Great huh? Well, there are some downside to using a themes. Many of them, as described by Brian Williams in his post 10 Hidden Problems with Most WordPress Themes, your site may suffer after installing an under-developed or poorly written theme. A decent WordPress developer can overcome most of these themes with customization. But the vast majority of WordPress theme users are non-developers, so what should they do?

Maybe the WordPress community can help. It would be extremely helpful is there was a list of standard features that theme developers would self identify that they include. For example, if a theme includes the basic features of widget enabled, certain page types included, and W3C validation, it could claim a bronze standard stamp, or some sort of certification. A theme that included bronze standards plus complete header/footer templates earns silver. And so on. (These are just examples, please leave a comment on how it should be setup!)

Theme standards would obviously benefit the theme user and buyer. But would theme developers go along? If a few of the big theme developers and framework makers adopted this idea I think it could take off. The serious developers would use theme standards as a differentiator. Users would eventually rely upon the standards to ensure they are getting a certain level of features and quality. WordPress would certainly benefit with a more mature marketplace for themes.

Discuss!

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Discussion

9 comments for “Time for WordPress theme standards?”

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http://themeshaper.com/ Ian Stewart

Good post. I think the official WordPress Themes Directory is the answer to this. It's tough to standardize what (in a lot of cases) boils down to style issues. But if you want your Theme included in the official directory you have to commit to what are the really important standards with WordPress Themes. Things like important function calls for plugins and widgetized sidebars. Basically the catastrophic stuff. Anything else is, again, a style issue. Luckily there are a lot of themes to choose from!
scribu

I don't think you can actually set any meaningfull standards, besides the ones already imposed by the official theme directory. It would only hinder creativity, in my opinion.
http://www.benhuson.co.uk/ Ben Huson

There is already a lot of guidance for WordPress theme authors. There is a fairly comprehensive checklist at:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development_Ch…

“…list of standard features that theme developers would self identify that they include…”

The WordPress Themes Directory already provides a solution for this. When creating a theme, it is already possible to add tags to identity key features of the theme such as “one-column” and “fixed-width”. See:

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/about/
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/tag-filter/

Is it just a case of encouraging theme authors to use of other tags such as:

“xhtml” if your theme is valid XHTML
“threaded-comments” if you have a designed threaded comments template
“theme-options” if you can customise the theme with settings in the admin
“seo” if your site adheres to good SEO principles
“widget-enabled” if widgets are supported
etc…

These tags also get displayed in the WordPress Theme directory on each themes's page which should mean that users can make an informed decision. For example:
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/thematic

So if a set of useful tags as outlined above could be decided upon and adopted by some of the major theme frameworks and more popular themes, it may hopefully encourage other theme authors to do the same.
http://www.wordpresstheming.com/ Devin Price

If anyone would like to see what WordPress.org actually requires to be in the repository see this link:

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/about/

I like the idea of requiring your html/css to validate- though that does bring up some issues if your are using -moz-border-radius or other unique cases. Hopefully there is enough community involvement with the repository that authors of bad code can be notified quickly and helped in the process of creating clean valid themes.

Thanks Ian for twittering this.
http://www.lynx-marketing.com Scott DeToffol

I agree that the Theme Directory is a good place to start for free themes. But what about the thousands of free and premium themes that don't take the time to submit to the official directory?

Also, the guidance is for authors not users. The Theme Directory presentation does not define the tags as elements of a self-reporting standard. And the tags seem under-reported. To be useful in this suggested context, they should list what features are supported and which are not.

In short, I agree that the Theme Directory is a decent start. Now these self reported “standards” should be made useful to theme users (especially novice users) and extended out into all the legitimate Theme sites and companies around the Internet.
http://webmarketcentral.blogspot.com/ Tom Pick

Scott – great post, couldn't agree more. WordPress newbies in particular would really benefit from this, and gravitate toward free or paid themes that they could be confident met stringent WordPress standards.
http://webmarketcentral.blogspot.com/ Tom Pick

Scott – great post, couldn't agree more. WordPress newbies in particular would really benefit from this, and gravitate toward free or paid themes that they could be confident met stringent WordPress standards.
http://webmarketcentral.blogspot.com/ Tom Pick

Scott – great post, couldn't agree more. WordPress newbies in particular would really benefit from this, and gravitate toward free or paid themes that they could be confident met stringent WordPress standards.

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