[theme-reviewers] Reviewing Based on TDC: Initial Thoughts

Fri Jun 11 19:15:26 UTC 2010

Some initial thoughts on my first attempt at reviewing a theme based on
the Theme Development Checklist:

1) Quite a bit of the information is repetitive. Several questions are
asked in two different places (or more) - and that is before even getting
into the Theme Unit Tests.

Suggestion:

Incorporate the Theme Unit Tests into the rest of the checklist. Instruct
at the very beginning of the checklist, to install the unit test data and
to use it for completing the checklist.

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2) Quite a bit of back-and-forth through the test data, trying to complete
the checklist.

Suggestion:

Re-order the posts and pages in the Unit Test Data, so that posts can be
followed in order while stepping through the checklist.

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3) Some important aspects missing/incomplete from the TDC. Correct
licensing is clearly a GO/NO-GO criterion, so it needs to be included in
the checklist. Security information needs to be a LOT more
inclusive/descriptive.

Suggestions:

Add a section for licensing, to include explicit declaration of license in
the theme's style.css header information, guidelines for inclusion and/or
linking of text of GPL (some say that full-text license is required to be
included; I argue that it's overkill, and that a link to license text on
gnu.org is sufficient), and guidelines for licensing of bundled files
(images, CSS, fonts, icons, etc.)

Security ninjas (I do like using that term!) should re-write the security
section, to cover topics like raw DB queries, and other things that have
been brought up during theme review feedback. A security checklist, rather
than just a brief paragraph, would be most helpful.

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4) HTML/CSS validation

Validation of HTML/CSS is listed first in the TDC, but is it actually the
most important? Also, I think the Unit Test Data cause HTML validation
errors.

Suggestions:

We need to determine the degree of criticality of CSS validation,
especially given the near-universal use of browser-specific CSS
declarations. Mal-formed CSS is one thing, but using -moz-border-radius is
another. The former needs to be fixed, obviously; but the latter, I really
don't care about. So, we need to determine how to handle.

If the Unit Test Data are causing HTML validation errors (putting <style
type="text/css"> within the <body> tags rather than within the <head>
tags), we need to find some way to fix that. Note: the CSS declarations
appear to be for the [gallery] shortcode-generated content, IIRC.

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5) Ordering of checklist items

How do we ensure that we are thorough in each of the various types of
checks? How do we know we've found all the hooks, or all the appropriate
template tags or functions?

Suggestion:

Group certain types of checks together. Add a section for Standard Theme
Hooks (wp_head, wp_footer, body_class, post_class, comment_class, etc.),
WP 3.0 Functions, WP 2.9 Functions, etc.

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I think that's all for now.

Anyone else who's done a theme review by stepping through the TDC: have
any other comments/criticisms/suggestions to add?

Chip