Selling WordPress Themes The Right Way

Today I received the following question through the contact form on my site:

Given that some sites sell WordPress Themes without checking for quality standards, what would be the right way to sell WordPress Themes?

To me it doesn’t really matter whether the Theme Marketplace you sell your Theme in requires a certain level of quality in the Themes it sells or not. As long as your Theme is coded in a way it would pass a Review from the WordPress.org Theme Review Team, your customers will notice and you will be all good.

So tip would be: Choose the marketplace(s) that pass(es) the T-shirt test!

P.S.: I know the title of this post maybe misleading a little strong, but hey, it was the subject line of that email! 🙂

The leanest comments.php file ever

More to be seen as a proof of concept than the next step in Theme Development evolution, in version 1.7.0 The Bootstrap’s comments.php file will contain not more than a single call to comments_form().

<?php
/** comments.php
 *
 * The template for displaying Comments.
 *
 * The area of the page that contains both current comments
 * and the comment form. The actual display of comments is
 * handled by callbacks which are located in the functions.php file.
 *
 * @author		Konstantin Obenland
 * @package		The Bootstrap
 * @since		1.0.0 - 05.02.2012
 */

comment_form();

/* End of file comments.php */
/* Location: ./wp-content/themes/the-bootstrap/comments.php */

Many Theme authors will argue that it doesn’t make much sense to move the entire comment business out of comments.php and they are probably right. But when I realized that it was possible to have the entire file consist of only one function call, I wanted to implement it and try it out.

Titles As Attributes: The Right Way

I’ve reviewed quite a few Themes, since joining the WordPress Theme Review Team a month ago. There are a few issues that keep popping up, like the wrong use of the the_title() template tag in link attributes. But I’m here to help, so let me show you how you can boost your code quality and make Theme Reviewer happy.

Suppose you’re coding your index.php file and you’re about to link the post title to the post’s single view. You want to add a title attribute to the anchor tag, so visitors have an added value. l If you do it like this, you’re _doing_it_wrong():

<a href="" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<a href="" title="<?php echo esc_attr( the_title() ); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<a href="" title="<?php echo esc_attr( get_the_title() ); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>