[theme-reviewers] Note to theme reviewers about settings in themes

[Chip Bennett]

The better solution would be activate/deactivate/delete hooks for Themes; I
tried to take that on for 3.2, but failed miserably. :/

Chip

On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 9:22 PM, Darren Slatten <darrenslatten at gmail.com>wrote:

> I'm just throwing this out there as an idea...
>
> The best practice could simply be: Themes should not leave a footprint in
> the DB after they've been deactivated.
>
> In order to provide a mechanism for persisting data between
> activations/upgrades, theme developers could incorporate an import/export
> function that serializes/saves the data to a flat file. This would also
> provide developers with a convenient way to duplicate their theme's
> preferred settings across multiple sites, because the settings would be
> (e.g.) saved in the theme folder.
>
> Are there any inherent problems with such a solution? The only thing that
> comes to mind is that it would introduce a point of failure in terms of
> security.
>
> We might even be able to use the WP import/export functionality--I haven't
> looked at the code, so I don't know how difficult that would be.
>
> --Darren
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 8:34 PM, Chip Bennett <chip at chipbennett.net>wrote:
>
>> I must say: I don't really understand this rule suggestion. I don't see
>> the problem with setting default options, as opposed to adding in a bunch of
>> conditional code in the Theme template files, in order to account for unset
>> options.
>>
>> I'm not even sure I would suggest this approach as a "best practice",
>> given the amount of additional code/processing that implementation would
>> require; setting default options is just more efficient.
>>
>> We already require that Themes use an options array as the single entry in
>> wp_options; so we're minimizing Theme DB clutter. It's true that Theme
>> reviewers will have a lot of such DB entries; but I don't think we should be
>> making universal rules based on an incredibly niche sub-set of Theme users.
>>
>> Chip
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 3:26 PM, Otto <otto at ottodestruct.com> wrote:
>>
>>> This is just a note about a rule that I think should be added to the
>>> theme review process:
>>>
>>> - Themes should not do anything to the database merely by virtue of
>>> being activated.
>>>
>>> By that, I mean that having a theme check for a setting, like
>>> get_option or get_theme_mod and then calling set_option or
>>> set_theme_mod to set it to some default is wrong.
>>>
>>> Both get_option and get_theme_mod accept a second parameter of a
>>> default setting. If I call get_option('whatever',123) and there is no
>>> whatever option, then that will return 123.
>>>
>>> Use the defaults properly. Don't set them just because they're not there.
>>>
>>> -Otto
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> theme-reviewers mailing list
>>> theme-reviewers at lists.wordpress.org
>>> http://lists.wordpress.org/mailman/listinfo/theme-reviewers
>>>
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>
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