I'm just throwing this out there as an idea...<br><br>The best practice could simply be: Themes should not leave a footprint in the DB after they've been deactivated.<br><br>In order to provide a mechanism for persisting data between activations/upgrades, theme developers could incorporate an import/export function that serializes/saves the data to a flat file. This would also provide developers with a convenient way to duplicate their theme's preferred settings across multiple sites, because the settings would be (e.g.) saved in the theme folder.<br>
<br>Are there any inherent problems with such a solution? The only thing that comes to mind is that it would introduce a point of failure in terms of security.<br><br>We might even be able to use the WP import/export functionality--I haven't looked at the code, so I don't know how difficult that would be.<br>
<br>--Darren<br><br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 8:34 PM, Chip Bennett <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:chip@chipbennett.net">chip@chipbennett.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
I must say: I don't really understand this rule suggestion. I don't see the problem with setting default options, as opposed to adding in a bunch of conditional code in the Theme template files, in order to account for unset options.<div>
<br></div><div>I'm not even sure I would suggest this approach as a "best practice", given the amount of additional code/processing that implementation would require; setting default options is just more efficient.<br>
<div><br></div><div>We already require that Themes use an options array as the single entry in wp_options; so we're minimizing Theme DB clutter. It's true that Theme reviewers will have a lot of such DB entries; but I don't think we should be making universal rules based on an incredibly niche sub-set of Theme users.</div>
<div><br></div><div><font color="#888888">Chip</font><div><div></div><div class="h5"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 3:26 PM, Otto <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:otto@ottodestruct.com" target="_blank">otto@ottodestruct.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
This is just a note about a rule that I think should be added to the<br>
theme review process:<br>
<br>
- Themes should not do anything to the database merely by virtue of<br>
being activated.<br>
<br>
By that, I mean that having a theme check for a setting, like<br>
get_option or get_theme_mod and then calling set_option or<br>
set_theme_mod to set it to some default is wrong.<br>
<br>
Both get_option and get_theme_mod accept a second parameter of a<br>
default setting. If I call get_option('whatever',123) and there is no<br>
whatever option, then that will return 123.<br>
<br>
Use the defaults properly. Don't set them just because they're not there.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
-Otto<br>
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