(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...A WordPress Theme Designer’s Wishes and Woes
Category: Themes and Tricks
- CSS We Are The Buzz
(5 out of 5) - Throw (5 out of 5)
- qmula (5 out of 5)
- Heartworker (5 out of 5)
- Decently Exposed (5 out of 5)
- DePo Masthead (3 out of 5)
- Sinklar (3 out of 5)
- Simple WordPress Theme - SimpleWP (3 out of 5)
- Arman Adhitama (3 out of 5)
- Michelle Dinan (3 out of 5)
These wishes—which are mostly laments—are the result of my recent coding spree with a WordPress-powered site. It is by no means comprehensive, and not exactly limited to WordPress theme design.
Fix the ugly code in sidebar widgets. By ugly I don’t really mean invalid HTML/CSS, but code that doesn’t make sense. Take for example the RSS widget. Why does the feed icon have to be an image instead of a background image for the feed title? So it can be linked to the RSS feed while the feed title can be linked to the main URL?
Remove the “category” prefix in the category archive permalinks. Really, this one’s a no-brainer. Every string in between forward slashes in a URL is supposed to correspond to a “directory” on your website. See, date permalinks make sense: if you have a permalink called /2008/02/14/postname/ you’ll find that every section of that permalink comes up with an archive, 2008th year, 2nd month, 14th day. You don’t see the word “date” being prepended every time, so why do it to category permalinks? Hack: use a period “.” instead of the word “category” in the permalink options page. It doesn’t play nicely with RSS feeds, though. Truth is, this is just a symptom of a bigger problem: we need more flexible permalink options, one for every type of link, from posts to archives to feeds.
Provide options for the_excerpt. At least give us the chance to specify how many words, characters, perhaps even sentences to display in an excerpt. And perhaps strings to append before or after, just as one normally would in several other template tags. I believe adding […] at the end is hideous. This function should be a little more similar to the_content, don’t you think?
Update the jQuery library in the wp-includes folder and give everyone a convenient way of including it in themes and plugins. This applies to every other JavaScript library in that folder as well. Reusing those files in themes and plugins can be done, but I’ve tried several times and ultimately can’t get it to work. Perhaps an official help file/Codex page from the WordPress developers?
Make thumbnail creation during image uploading optional. I’ve avoided using the WP upload dialog because I can find my way around my website folders through FTP. For me I see no merit in having to list those images in the database. Let me save space and server load! But everyone else who wants to do so would agree with the optional thumbnail creation feature, not to mention resizable thumbnails. Hack: use the Old Style Upload plugin.
Add drop-down menus to the admin panel. I’ve always used the Admin Drop Down Menu plugin every time I install WordPress. It’s much more efficient, especially when you’re looking for that plugin options page but don’t know whether it’s under the Options page, the Manage page, the Plugins page, or somewhere else.
Require plugin authors to link to the plugin options page(s) in the Plugins page. This is related to the previous item—do you really want to click everywhere just to find the options page of the plugin you just activated? Or memorize where everything is? I believe there’s a push for plugin coding standards and I hope this could be included. It’s pretty easy to do anyway! Perhaps the next WP version could put all those plugin options pages in one place.
I’d write more, but that’s about it for now.
