[theme-reviewers] Review of "Make Money Online Theme" v1.1

Fri Jun 11 03:26:01 UTC 2010

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 3:52 PM, Joseph Scott <joseph at automattic.com> wrote:

> Welcome Dave!
>
> Please take a look at
> http://themes.svn.wordpress.org/make-money-online-theme/1.1 (you can
> check it out via Subversion) and post a review to the list (with a new
> subject line, theme name and version).
>
> I will say it needs a better name at a minimum :-)
>
> Thanks!
>

I'd have to agree that it could use a new name -- but I guess that's up to
the theme developer. :)

I'm not going to get into the appearance of the theme, since that can be
very subjective. I will only comment on functionality of the theme.

After installing, the first thing I noticed is that the theme appears to be
broken.

About half way down the page are a series of words that are displayed across
the entire content area of the page. These appear to be a list of categories
that are supposed to be in the sidebar/widget area but are not formatted
correctly. This causes the content of the page/post to be displayed at the
very bottom of the page after the widgets. I ran the HTML through the W3C
validator and it noticed a missing </div> from the Pages widget in the
sidebar, which is likely the problem.

The content area of the page should be output before the sidebar/widget area
of the page in the HTML.

There is an error during execution of the theme code when viewing a post,
since it ends abruptly without outputting the footer area or even a </body>
tag. (See comment further down for more specifics on this.)

The menu that is displayed at the top of the page is displayed again at the
bottom of the page just above the footer. There's no reason to have the menu
twice -- especially since it just ads a bunch of links to the page. Might be
better served by placing a "go to top" link that will scroll the page back
to the top so the menu is available.

The menus being displayed don't behave well when there are lots of entries,
for one thing they run into the RSS links in the upper right of the page.
The menus don't work like pull down menus, i.e. when you mouse over a page
name, the sub-pages associated with that are displayed below the menu as a
popup. Rather, every single page in the database is displayed as a link.
This makes for a lot of clutter in the menu area.

The screen shot that comes with the theme doesn't look anything like the
theme itself.

There is a <meta name="description" /> tag with the content being filled in
via bloginfo('description'); -- this means that every page on the site will
have the same meta description. The entire meta tag should be removed so the
blog owner can install their own meta tag plugin for greater flexibility.

Similarly, there is a <meta name="robots" /> tag that is hard coded to
"follow all". This should be removed.

The body_class() function is not used in the <body> tag.

The post_class() function is not used in the creation of the <div
class="post"> entity.

The comment_class() function is not used in the creation of the comments.

There are functions in the functions.php file that are not being used and
should be removed. There is also a scripts/timthumb.php file that looks like
it's does image caching but is not referenced anywhere in the code. If it's
not being used, it should be removed to reduce code clutter.

There is a call to the function wp_related_posts() in single.php that should
be removed, or at the very least put a if
(function_exists('wp_related_posts')) in front of it.

There is a call to the function get_the_image() in archive.php, index.php
and search.php that also should be removed or checked with
function_exists().

When outputting the <div class="navigation"> tags, there is a conditional to
use either wp_pagenavi() if it exists, or outputting the next_posts_link()
and previous_posts_link(), but the closing brace for the if block is after
the </div> for the navigation area -- this will cause malformed HTML if the
wp_pagenavi() function exists.

I'd recommend removing all references to functions that are defined as part
of a plugin. Not all users will have all these plugins installed. But if
these functions are going to be left in, careful checking to see that they
exist should be done in all cases.

I didn't do too much more checking since the HTML for the page is broken in
a few places. It's difficult to get an idea for how things are supposed to
look with some of these existing formatting issues getting in the way.

Dave
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