Hi Philip,<div><br></div><div>Thanks for details. </div><div><br></div><div>I even believe myself not everything that can be done via plugin should be done inside theme.</div><div>When wordpress-seo by yoast came, we removed our SEO options and now display "list of recommended plugins" in theme options pages.</div>
<div>We support many plugins like subscribe-to-comments, YARPP's related post, etc.</div><div><br></div><div>Main concern is - some tiny plugins. I will explain this bit with more examples.</div><div><br></div><div><b>#1 - Align RSS plugins (<a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/align-rss-images/">http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/align-rss-images/</a>)</b></div>
<div>Wordpress adds classes like .alignleft and .alignright for which we add some codes in style.css </div><div>Now when these wordpress-generated classes goes into RSS feed content, image alignment do not work as style.css cannot be loaded by feed-readers.</div>
<div>Just 2-3 lines in theme can replace 'class=alignright' with "style=float:left" in feed-output.</div><div><br></div><div><b><meta charset="utf-8"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; ">There are few more plugins which "fixes" something. Personally, I believe these fixes should be added inside wordpress-core!</span></b></div>
<div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; "><br></span></b></div><div><b>#2 - Sharing icons</b></div><div>Since facebook/twitter shares icons gets displayed on front-end, having theme control their dimension and other aspects can improve theme aesthetically.</div>
<div>Most plugin which latch on fliters ruin themes output. Then a user is forced to add function call himself in theme codes to get desired placement of these buttons.</div><div><br></div><div><b>#3 - Advertising </b></div>
<div>An average blog sells ad via 3rd party. He only want a place to put some HTML/JS codes given to him.</div><div>If theme provides textareas for common ad-slots, that will save him from using bloated plugins which counts impressions and do plenty of other things. </div>
<div>Such stats are already provided by ad-networks so why to waste CPU power & database space of server. </div><div> </div><div>I observed that, plugins which adds HTML/CSS/JS on front-end generally miss preciseness. In that case, user starts altering code and a single biggest mistake they make is adding function provided by plugin without surrounding it via if(function_exists('example')) block.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Using WordPress API is of highest priority here. In fact, rather than relying in codex documentation, we trace wordpress core cods to find functions which we can reuse always!</div><div><br></div><div>
<meta charset="utf-8"><div>On sidenote, as a theme-developer, while adding such functionality, I will keep it disabled by default and will provide an option for user to enable it if they like to.</div><div><br></div><div>
Only thing I expect from WPTRT is freedom for theme-developers to decide on functionality they want to add inside theme. </div></div><div><br></div><div>==</div><div><br></div><div>Please someone clear my doubts regarding parent-child theme deployment.</div>
<div><br clear="all">--<br>Rahul Bansal | Founder & CEO | rtCamp Solutions Pvt. Ltd.<br>Mobile: +91-9860501882 | Web: <a href="http://rtcamp.com/" target="_blank">http://rtcamp.com/</a><br><br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 2:55 PM, Philip M. Hofer (Frumph) <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:philip@frumph.net">philip@frumph.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div bgcolor="#ffffff">
<div><font size="2" face="Arial">While timthumb has been banned, that doesnt mean
other internal functionality will ever be banned as
such. You might come across recommendations that said
functionality should be a plugin, but it is only that a
recommendation.</font></div>
<div><font size="2" face="Arial"></font> </div>
<div><font size="2" face="Arial">To answer your list.</font></div>
<div><font size="2" face="Arial"></font> </div>
<div><font size="2" face="Arial">1. Fine - recommend plugin</font></div>
<div><font size="2" face="Arial">2. Fine - recommend plugin </font></div>
<div><font size="2" face="Arial">3. Fine</font></div>
<div><font size="2" face="Arial">4. Definately Ok.</font></div>
<div><font size="2" face="Arial">5. Absolutely Ok.</font></div>
<div><font size="2" face="Arial">6. Fine - recommend plugin</font></div>
<div><font size="2" face="Arial"></font> </div>
<div><font size="2" face="Arial">While the push for developers to strive to utilize
as much api and plugins that do the load of the work that you are describing,
there's nothing that you wrote there that would be not-accepted; however,
that being said it is in the developers interest to utilize as much of the
plugin to theme control as possible and more importantly the WordPress API
itself.</font></div>
<div><font size="2" face="Arial"></font> </div>
<div><font size="2" face="Arial">Frameworks at this time are finalizing the
guidelines for it. Chip is probably the best person to respond about that.
- as for integration as you speak of, that one client doesn't justify the large
number of possible users to the theme that might want a different functionality
from a plugin instead. It is in my opinion better to cater to the
wider audience then the single one, giving the audience which uses the
themes/derivatives/child themes a wider variety of possibilities goes quite a
long way.</font></div>
<div><font size="2" face="Arial"></font> </div>
<div><font size="2" face="Arial">On a side note, I used to believe integrating
everything was the right choice as well.. .until something occured with an
update of WordPress which made one single function not behave as it should which
ruined the theme for everyone who upgraded.</font></div>
<div><font size="2" face="Arial"></font> </div>
<div><font size="2" face="Arial">^ My 2cents, nothing more.</font></div>
<div> </div>
<blockquote style="border-left:#000000 2px solid;padding-left:5px;padding-right:0px;margin-left:5px;margin-right:0px"><div><div></div><div class="h5">
<div style="font:10pt arial;background:#e4e4e4"><font style="background-color:#ffffff" size="3" face="Times New Roman"></font> </div>
<div><br></div>
<div>My concern is, for our next theme, which is actually our internal
base-theme (sort of framework) and contains features like:</div>
<div>
<ol>
<li>Social bookmarking/Sharing controls (twitter/facebook/etc buttons)
</li><li>Advertising options (like Google AdSense/BuySellAds/Kontera etc)
</li><li>Typography options (font-faces/font-sizes/etc)
</li><li>Layout Options (2-column/3-column/etc)
</li><li>Content Options (Thumbnail size/summaries/read-more settings)
</li><li>Other options like feedburner integration, favicon/logo
upload</li></ol></div>
<div>There were SEO options also which we plan to retire in favor of
wordpress-seo plugin by yoast.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>To give you better ideas, just think of themes at themeforest which
provides theme-options.</div>
<div>We have many clients on themeforest for which above said internal
framework has been maintained and continuously updated from a
year.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Now question is - if we decide to release our framework in open-source,
which features we need to remove (if any) to maintain compliances here?</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Also, can we upload themes we have developed for themeforest
here? </div>
<div>Will there be any extra regulations regarding features & options
themes at themeforest provides? </div>
<div>Just a note - themeforest publishers are very aggressive. On one instant
a client sent us list of 30+ plugins which he wanted to integrate in a
wordpress-theme! </div>
<div> </div>
<div>We have many themes in our repo, originally developed for
themeforest but never launched for various reasons (most common is client
defaulting payment). </div>
<div>We are owners of all graphics/code which we want to release on wordpress
theme repo, of course under GPL :-)</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>==</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>My second question is regarding parent-child theme.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Here is what we want to achieve.</div>
<div>
<ol>
<li>Our base theme (framework) is common across all our themes [Parent]
</li><li>Each theme has its own set of local changes [Child]</li></ol>
<div>We want to leverage power of parent-child theme to push updates. If
there is any change in base-framework - all child theme users should get a
notification about new update of parent theme.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Not sure if possible here, specially as SVN access is not available on
theme-repo (like we have access to SVN on plugin-repo).</div></div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Regarding release - should we release parent
and child theme separately? Is there any extra guideline on
parent-child theme release.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Also while answering please consider 3-level relationship =>
parent-child-grandchild as well!</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>==</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>The only purpose of asking all questions in advance here is to save
our development efforts and also precious time of theme review
team.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>I hope to get some good
suggestions/guidance/inputs here. </div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Thanks All,</div>
<div>-Rahul</div>
<div><br></div><br clear="all">--<br>Rahul Bansal | Founder & CEO | rtCamp
Solutions Pvt. Ltd.<br>Mobile: +91-9860501882 | Web: <a href="http://rtcamp.com/" target="_blank">http://rtcamp.com/</a><br><br>
</div></div><p>
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