Interesting bit of survey results published by Kieran Masterton on Smashing WordPress today. According to her survey results, a lot more focus and education needs to be done surrounding the professional deployment of websites as well as the use of version control. If you’ve ever found yourself having to use a Find And Replace plugin or MySQL snippet because you switched environments with a WordPress site, I highly recommend reading the comments to see how so many others have faced the same situation and their solutions. ∞
WordPress Not Likely To Participate In Google Code-In
While a decision has not yet been finalized, judging by the responses so far on this blog post discussing the pros and cons of participating, it looks like WordPress may not be part of the event this year. Google Code In is an annual event sponsored by Google that is aimed at students between the ages of 13 and 17. The goal of the program is to encourage youths to participate in open source which is in contrast to Google Summer of Code which is aimed at university students. We’ll know whether or not WordPress is part of the program either through the WordPress.org website or when Google announces the participating mentoring organizations on November 9th.
Widgetizing That Theme Of Yours
If you’re using a theme that doesn’t have a widgetized sidebar or if you’re thinking of adding more widget spots to your theme, I recommend reading this two part series by Sarah on BloggingTips.com which walks you through how to create a dynamic sidebar. This is great stuff as it enables you to take your theme to the next level. Add a few more widget spots or sidebars so you don’t have to be confined to one long sidebar. I’m a big fan of widget areas, the more the merrier.
If you perform this tutorial, make sure when you get to the part describing multiple sidebars, you give them common sense names.
What Kind Of Theme Is This?
Making the distinction between premium themes and the degrees of theme beneath them really only lets the less than premium themes get a free ride.
So now we have premium, freemium, non-gpl, gpl, child, parent, free, commercial, *proprietary themes. Hey, at least we don’t have to worry about grand child themes!
My head hurts already from trying to think of the various classifications for a WordPress theme. By the way, proprietary is starred because that’s what Matt calls non-gpl pay for themes. At this point, I would say that themes you pay for is what I think of when I hear the word premium but after seeing Andrew give the lowdown on the top five themes on the repository, I’m beginning to think premium is just a means of describing a theme that is above par and something you don’t ALWAYS have to pay for. As if parent/child themes were not complicated enough, now we have about 50 different classifications for themes. Who’s responsible for this?!
So what do you think about a grading or classification system on the theme repository? What do you think about all of the various terms used to describe a theme?