[theme-reviewers] gabri v1.0

[Joey Baker]

gabri v1.0
Here goes…

Initial Reactions
• post needs more padding. Especially for h2-h6
• the font size is very small.
• left and right aligned images needs a margin
• the blue metadata bar is very confusing on the blue background.
• The spacing between the post tags, and comment explainer text is too close
• The gravatars in the comments need a left margin

CSS
• add quotes around non-standard font names (should be 'Tahoma' )
• I really appreciate that you've given each css element one line instead of breaking each style into one line!
• you should really be specifying font-sizes as ems, not px
• comments still appear as a bulleted list. You probably don't want that.

Bugs
• the nav doesn't know how to deal with sub pages. The easy fix is to specify the depth of pages you want to list. See: http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_pages
• The theme doesn't handle threaded comments. Even though the theme template tags indicate it does

Minor Changes
• I'd probably add a rel="bookmark" and a tile="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>" to .home in the nav
• FWIW, you seem to have a lot of container/wrap divs. It's not a big deal, but you can probably get away without some of them and make your code a little cleaner.
• you wrap the the_title() in a lot of divs in order to accomplish your sliding rounded corners. Take a look at a CSS3 way of doing things http://www.css3.info/preview/rounded-border/ or consider using real slide-doors code http://kailoon.com/css-sliding-door-using-only-1-image/ (this is a problem that can be fixed in several places)
• FWIW .clear is usually titled .clearfix and if you'd like it to be IE6 compatible it needs a bit more styling than just clear:both http://snipt.net/joeybaker/clearfix-9/
• for SEO and semantic reasons, the titles of your widgets shouldn't be h1 try h3
• the comment on your sidebar specifies "Widgetized sidebar, if you have the plugin installed." It's no longer a widget :)
• I'd add the following tags to your theme (in style.css): blue, widgets, yellow

Security
I'm not an expert, but I couldn't find any issues, and functions.php is essentially empty.

Overall
The biggest problems with this theme are:
• nav inability to handle subpages in the nav.
• threaded comments do not work despite the indication that they should.
• The design has many spacing issues that just need some css love.
Aside from that there's just some sloppy coding that can be touched up. I'd give this theme a ⅖ rating. I'm not a fan of the color scheme and the functionality is very basic.

Test Notes: Safari 5 and Firefox 3.6 on Mac with WordPress 2.9.2 and no plugins activated.


—Joey

On Jun 10, 2010, at 3:34 PM, Joseph Scott wrote:

> Welcome!
> 
> Another dive right in moment, please check out
> http://themes.svn.wordpress.org/gabri/1.0 (via Subversion) and post a
> review to the list (new subject line, theme name and version).
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 3:32 PM, Joey Baker <joey at byjoeybaker.com> wrote:
>> My name is Joey Baker. I've been working with WordPress for about 3 years now, almost entirely format the design side. I worked for a small startup, CoPress, that used WordPress as a CMS for college media outlets where I some of the design and support work.
>> 
>> I've since moved toward doing a lot more theme development and recently have been really interested in HTML5 + WordPress for theme work (totally doable, but there are some kinks). I'm not a professional developer (my strengths are more on the UI side of things), but I'm comfortable enough now to know what bad markup looks like :)
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Joseph Scott
> joseph at josephscott.org
> http://josephscott.org/

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