[theme-reviewers] How much should I weigh looks, scalability, and functionality?

[Philip Walton]

On 4/15/11 7:55 AM, Otto wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 9:37 AM, Philip Walton<philip at philipwalton.com>  wrote:
>> Also, if I have a lot of categories, only the first 4
>> show up in the primary navigation menu.
> There's a difference between "broken site" and "design choice". If the
> theme is designed to intentionally only allow 4 entries there, then
> that's okay. If it displays something visibly broken when you exceed 4
> entries (like cut off text, etc), then that's not okay.
The theme developer has a callback to this function, which explicitly 
limits the number of categories to 4.

function display_pages() {
     echo '<ul>';
     wp_list_categories('title_li=&depth=1&number=4');
     echo '</ul>';
}

Ignoring the poor choice of function title, nothing is technically wrong 
with this function, and no errors are caused when the site contains more 
than four categories. However, intentionally limiting a menu to four 
categories with no option to display all seems like a poor decision to 
me. Furthermore, since the categories are ordered alphabetically, the 
probability that these four categories are going to be the ones the user 
wants seems quite low.

In my opinion, if a theme is limiting the number of items that appear in 
a menu, then it should show some sort of "more" link or at least give 
the user a setting where (s)he can choose exactly which items appear in 
that menu.

> Whether a "little" problem is cause for failing the theme or not is
> more of a subjective call. For example, if an absurdly long post title
> causes a weird result, then that should be noted, but if it's the
> *only* problem then it may just be something to tell the theme
> developer to fix in the next version. On the other hand, if there are
> several different "little" problems like this, then you may decide
> that yes, this is too many, so they need to be fixed in order to be
> approved. At what point those "little" problems accumulate into a
> "fail" is up to you.
>
> -Otto
> _______________________________________________
> theme-reviewers mailing list
> theme-reviewers at lists.wordpress.org
> http://lists.wordpress.org/mailman/listinfo/theme-reviewers