Today I want to go over the dos and don’ts of WordPress theme creation. Regardless of whether you’re building a WordPress theme for yourself or you’re building one for others to use, you should follow these steps as closely as possible.
1. Don't hardcode full URLs in your themes
When you are creating your themes there may be times canada number for whatsapp where images are used, for social media icons or RSS feed icons, and during these points in your coding you may want to encode the full URL (ie: /wp-content/themes/your-theme-name/images/image.jpg), but this will cause errors on the website every time the person using your theme changes the name of their theme folder.
The proper codes to use in order to pull the full URL dynamically are below.
<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/images/image.jpg
2. Use template tags whenever possible.
WordPress does an awesome job of presenting all the template tags you can use, so do yourself (and everyone else who might use your themes) a favor and learn WordPress template tags – and then use them as much as you can. By using template tags, you are able to ensure that your themes don’t break or cause errors when the end user sets it up and runs.
3. Don't forget the navigation dropdown codes
When you're building your WordPress theme, one element that seems to get overlooked is the dropdown codes for your navigation. Sure, some themes may have navigation set to not use multi-level uls, keeping everything on a single row, but what about those of us who have multiple child pages for every parent page?
There is a solution for that. You can check out some of the tutorials below on how to code multi-level dropdown menus.
How to implement a perfect multi-level navigation bar
Multi-Level Dropdown Navigation Menus: Examples and Tutorials
Multilevel menus with jquery and css
4. Prepare your theme for widgets
In my opinion, as an end user, there's nothing worse than deploying a theme and being ready to set everything up, only to realize that I'm now faced with the task of trying to customize sections of my themes by hard-coding information into them. Your sidebars and other places in your theme (do you have a three-column footer? make it widgetizable!) should be as easy to edit as possible. It's one of the easiest things to do to your themes, and it will benefit your theme users greatly.
Automattic has a great tutorial on how to widgetize your theme. Check it out here .
Also be sure to check out the widgetizing themes tutorial here on Theme Lab.
5. Don't make users depend on numerous plugins to make your theme work.
Whether you're releasing free themes or creating commercial themes for WordPress, you should keep your end users' interests in mind when creating your themes. Cluttering your themes with 5-10 necessary plugins will not only make people frustrated when downloading and setting up your theme on their site, but it will also cause a lot of people to not download it at all because, let's face it, people don't have attention spans longer than 2-3 seconds.
For example, if you're going to set up pagination in your theme, why not use this article to learn how to set it up in your theme automatically. Cats Who Code has a pretty good tutorial on how to add pagination to your theme without activating a plugin.
6. Display the search term on the search results page
For some reason, this is an often overlooked tip that you can (and should) implement in your themes. It's a simple one-line code that allows your theme to remind the visitor what they just searched for. It may seem trivial, but it's useful so that if the results don't show any entries, the visitor knows the exact phrase they searched for and can type in a different search term.
Below is the code used to replace your current “Search Results” title in your theme.
<h2>Resultados de la búsqueda de <em><?php the_search_query() ?></em> </h2><