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

Fri Jun 11 18:59:36 UTC 2010

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 9:26 PM, Dave Jesch <davejesch at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd have to agree that it could use a new name -- but I guess that's up to
> the theme developer. :)

To an extent.  Theme authors should be able to creative with their
theme names, but on this one I'd request a new theme name.

>
> 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.

Agreed, I only could get the top portion of the page to load.  The web
server logs showed this error:

[error] 2586#0: *744719 FastCGI sent in stderr: "PHP Fatal error:
Call to undefined function get_the_image() in
/drive/www/test.example.com/public_html/wp-content/themes/make-money-online-theme/index.php
on line 33"

> 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.

I'm not too concerned about showing the menus twice (at the top of the
page and the bottom).  But one thing I also noticed in the header is
'Make Money Online' is hard coded in instead of showing the blog title
and tag line.

>
> 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.

Yeah, that was odd.

> 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.

I think given the broken nature of the theme it's hard to do a full
review.  I did scan through the code and pick up a few other items:

- there are ad/promo/sponsored links in the footer.  this by itself is
enough to pass on this theme for the directory.
- hard coded references to localhost in the theme

This theme isn't a good fit for the directory.

-- 
Joseph Scott
joseph at josephscott.org
http://josephscott.org/