I am looking for a Wordpress theme for this blog. The problem with 90% of all themes available is that they focus only on design, not so much on all the other aspects you have to take care of when running a blog/website. Instead of just complaining, I decided to try to define what I believe is needed in order for a Wordpress theme to be professional and worth installing and maybe even buying (Who the hell pays for themes with just a slick design and no functionality added to it?). Now you may ask me why I write this article instead of creating a theme that fits my purpose? Maybe I will, if I find the time, for now you have to stick with me ranting on about why we need better themes for Wordpress.
Admin section
One of the most important things in order to offer a professional wordpress theme, is to create an admin interface, enabling the publisher to manage functionality, look and feel and performance settings. Ideally in this section you could drag-and-drop containers for different types of templates and setup thing such as areas for widgets. Build page templates, edit headers, footers, navigations etc etc. The theme should also implement some kind of frontend cache on top of WP Cache in order to keep database connectivity to a minimum for widgets and template data.
Integrated functionality out-of-the-box
No one thinks it is great fun to enable 25 different plugins and set them up, whenever they are installing a new Wordpress instance. Why not integrate functionality for the most popular plugins into the theme, and make that functionality managable from the admin interface.
Designed with ad standards in mind
Whether you like it or not, a lot of people will show ads in some sort on their blogs/websites whenever they start to get visitors to their site. The theme should make this easier by adapting to standard for ads. Ad Unit Guidelines at IAB.
Allow functionality for integrating with 3rd party data providers
A lot of people will use their WordPress installation as a Web Content Management System and there are few sites out there that do not provide dynamic product data or other data provided by a 3rd party data source.
Navigation solution that can handle both wide and deep structures
In order to be able to manage larger websites, the theme should offer either very flexible templates for pages or several templates to choose from in order to achieve different types of navigation depending on depth in site.
i18n and l10n enabled
Not all websites are written in english for an american market. Some sites even target multiple markets. A professional theme should take care of this with translations enabled and the possibility to show specific content for specific locations/markets.
No need for editing files
There should be no hardcoded values in a professional and useful theme. There should be no need at all to change anything in any file distributed, this should be taken care of by adding admin user interfaces for things that can be changed/modified/edited.
Object Oriented MVC approach to coding
In order to make it possible to extend the functionality of the theme it is good programming practice to strive for object oriented code even when programming themes for WordPress.
Make use of only standard libraries for CSS and JavaScript
A big problem when it comes to frontends is the compability problem with the browser clients that will request your sites. By using standard libraries such as BluePrint CSS and jQuery you will make sure that you are building your frontend code on foundation that will work on a large number of clients. And I guarantee, no matter how good you are at JavaScript or CSS, you will not create as good code and you will not test it as thouroughly as those libraries have been tested.
Delivered with variations available
What it all boils down to is the look and feel and people have different opinions about this and in order to increase the spreading of your new professional theme, you should add variations in look and feel for your theme, or themes within the theme if you like.
Conclusion
Today 99% of all themes are just designed simple xhtml/css/javascript themes with no extra attached for those who see and use WordPress as Web Content Management System. There are even people charging for this kind of themes (AND PEOPLE BUYING). What will happen now is that publishers will have higher expectations and requirements for the themes they are using on their websites. A lot of the things I have discussed in this article is somewhat difficult to add to a theme without rewriting already exisiting functionality. I see two ways this will go, first you will see 10+ A-grade open source themes that will take a big part of the market as they start to implement a lot of the features I discussed (and features I have not even thought about of course). The next step after that is of course new software bundles where WordPress is just the base and we have a lot of CMS-functionality on top of WordPress. There are a lot of different bundles now that are sold as “Universal Solutions” for Made for Adsense-sites and Spam-blogs, but I am sure that within a couple of months a large free software bundling WordPress will show its face to the public and become very popular quick. Whatever political or religious opinion you might have on WordPress, it is here to stay and will be the base in a lot of publishing systems not yet developed.
Wordpress is not just Blog Software, it is Web Content Management Software and should behave and used in such a way.
Front-End Book is run and primarily written by Mattias Hising, an experienced Lead Developer from Uppsala, Sweden. I try to focus my efforts on Front-End related issues, as I find the problems to solve are more complex and interesting than the ones in traditional back-end development.