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missgeekbunny
37,033 PointsSuggestion For Course Improvement
I've been going through the process of trying to get themes validated for the core and I think it would be good to cover everything that would be needed to pass a basic theme check. For instance (and it's probably my biggest complaint), the class doesn't go through how to build the comment template so it validates on a basic level. I've been learning it through dissecting themes and reading the core, but it would be nice if it were covered in the building a theme class.
4 Answers
Paul Graham
1,396 PointsWhat do you mean themes validated for the core? Are you talking about WP.org?
missgeekbunny
37,033 PointsYeah validating to be able to be taken in by the WP repository.
Paul Graham
1,396 PointsAh, I see, the guidelines are here http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Review and http://make.wordpress.org/themes/guidelines/guidelines-recommended/
But if you review the guidelines, you don't actually need to include a comment template at all so I'm a little confused by that.
missgeekbunny
37,033 PointsThere is a plugin called Theme Check which is used in the approval process though and it has the certain comments tags that need to be there along with some minor things like CSS tags. It is kind of stuff that is more looking from the reviewer end but all themes added to the repo have to go through everything mentioned in http://make.wordpress.org/themes/about/how-to-join-wptrt/ Also without those comment tags people are unable to comment on posts on blogs where with the portfolio page it's not a big deal but for designing themes for the repository it kinda is.
Paul Graham
1,396 PointsI see, to call the comments template you only need to include a http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/comments_template comments_template tag, you don't actually need to build that template as it will call the default template without an argument. Sorry if I'm misunderstanding what you're talking about.
missgeekbunny
37,033 PointsOkay yeah actually that's true I've just been dissecting a lot of themes with templates for it. But you need 2 different tags for comments to be validated by theme check. The one you mentioned and http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_list_comments. I mean it's just the idea that it would be nice to see it somewhere in the course cause they aren't even touched if I remember the course correctly.
Paul Graham
1,396 PointsPart of the reason that's the case is that the default WordPress template used to be a mess before 3.6. It was XHTML code and didn't really work with HTML5 themes. In WP 3.6, you can output an HTML5 comment structure so it's a lot easier now to just use the default. However, if you still want to do your own comments, and there's many reasons you would, there's a nice article about it here: http://themeshaper.com/2012/11/04/the-wordpress-theme-comments-template/