For as much as I’m a fan of approaching WordPress theme and plugin development as one would any other type of software project, there’s one thing about releasing major updates to themes that I don’t think should be treated as some people treat software projects.

That is, when it comes time to do a major release of a theme – regardless of what the version number is (because that’s a discussion for an entirely different post) – I think that the presentation layer or the way the theme looks or its general styles shouldn’t deviate very much from the initial design.

Think about a number of the major applications that you use on a day-to-day basis. This can be desktop software, this can be mobile applications, this can be an operating system, this can be web applications, and this can even be other WordPress themes.

A tubular update to the UI of a dog collar.

Then, think about how often their interface changes. When it comes to major updates, there’s often times a major change in the interface or the introduction of a different way of doing something within the application. The change can be significant.

Although this introduces a learning curve which often leads to frustration on the user’s behalf, and although this is something that’s normal because of the advances in technology, I don’t think it necessarily applies to the look and feel of WordPress themes.

Continue reading

One of the features of WordPress that used to be significantly more popular is that of trackbacks and pings (or more commonly referred to as pingbacks). In short, it’s a way for those who run a blog to know when someone else has linked to one of their articles.

It’s kind of a flattering thing, isn’t it? I mean, someone is writing a post and then linking their content to yours? Then again, sometimes they could just be responding to something you’ve said in a negative way. That’s not always the most flattering thing, I guess, but it fosters conversation nonetheless.

Pingbacks are the ping pong of blogging. Or something like thing.

Regardless, I’ve seen some people question the purpose of pingbacks, question whether or not they should be enabled or disabled, and question whether or not they actually help readers when skimming through the content.

Though I personally don’t have any kind of evidence from any kind of study to back up any of those points above, I have decided to turn pingbacks off on the public-facing aspect of my site in the coming days.

Continue reading

It’s no secret that one of the things that I love most about the most recent versions of WordPress is the Theme Customizer (which is soon to be called the Customizer). I’ve talked about it in a number of different articles, some of which include:

• A Guide To The WordPress Theme Customizer
• Modular Procedural Programming The WordPress Theme Customizer
• Writing JavaScript Helpers for the WordPress Theme Customizer

Further, I’ve been clear in stating that I think that as much as I like the Customizer, we’re beginning to see the same problems, but in a different place.

Simply put, I think that we’re disrespecting our customers and damaging the WordPress customizer.

And over the past few weeks, I’ve seen this manifesting itself more and more through various themes I’ve seen, various screenshots I’ve seen, and various other discussions I’ve seen.

Granted, I’m not really one in a position to say what a person opts to do with their own projects, and I’m not particularly interested in getting up on a soapbox (but this is probably going to read like that, so there’s that, I guess) and telling everyone how or why to do something, but I do have strong opinions on the WordPress philosophy and how it directly contributes to developing themes.

As it stands now right now, I think that we’re doing a terrible job of respecting the WordPress philosophy, putting it to work for us, creating happy customers, and leveraging the WordPress customizer for the betterment of the WordPress economy.

Continue reading