[theme-reviewers] Theme Concept and Code Formatting Methodology

[Otto]

On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 9:44 PM, Bryan Hadaway <bhadaway at gmail.com> wrote:
> In any case, you misunderstood anyways.

Possibly. Your post was a tad on the vague side. If you were more
specific in what you were asking about, I could provide more specific
answers. I'll try to be highly specific in this reply.

> WordPress as a whole is a business
> and I understand that. As far as I understood it, prefixing everything was a
> precaution/not a branding technique anyways unless you're saying, no it
> really is?

Well, it's not intended as a branding technique, but it certainly is
much *safer* to prefix things than to not prefix them. It would be
foolish, in the extreme, to name a file "login.php". You never know if
there is going to be some other software installed that may have done
the same thing.


> White-labeling is about user-friendliness, not losing your name recognition.
> I don't see WordPress losing its name or power by allowing login.php instead
> of wp-login.php. Anyways, again... this is a very much side topic.

You don't need to name your files stupidly to have URLs work. Have you
visited your WordPress 3.5 site with /admin/ added to the end of it
lately? Filenames matter very little except insofar as they work in a
technical fashion. What displays to the viewer is up to you.


> The discussion I primarily want to open up is "Theme Concept and Code
> Formatting Methodology" and how other theme designers/developers hope users
> will utilize your themes or perhaps you don't care at all? That's what I'm
> curious about if anyone would like to share.

Generally speaking, I don't write themes except for special cases, so
I'm not the most qualified to answer this. However, as a developer, I
don't write for other developers, for the most part, except to try to
make my own code a) cause the least amount of conflict (prefixing is a
good way to do that, for example), and b) leave hooks in the code for
situations that I cannot anticipate right now (usually because I think
I might use that hook myself in the future).

Other than that, I think you should mainly be creating themes for
people wanting to create a website, and those people usually don't
know HTML, much less PHP.


-Otto