We have written from our previous article about Developing Our Free Minimalist WordPress Theme. In this article, we listed 5 Things you need to know before developing WordPress theme.

We’ve listed out the 5 most important things that you should know before developing your WordPress theme for WordPress theme directory submission.

Theme Review Requirements

before you get yourself do the actual coding of your theme. We suggest that you should take some time reading the theme review handbook and its sub-topics. It is very important to read all the documents specified on the theme review handbook. The them review requirements (theme review handbook) contains a handful of information which may help you during your theme development. See also Submitting Your Theme to WordPress.org

Theme Unit Test Data

The theme unit test data or sample posts data is an xml file which you can easily import in your WordPress dashboard that contains dummy contents which applies all contexts styling that is available in your WordPress post editor. A more detailed instructions can be found on the theme unit test data page.

CONTEXTS STYLING

This means that if you are doing a theme from scratch without using CSS framework such as bootstrap and foundation or any of your preferred framework, otherwise you may have to style each elements accordingly.

Using a CSS Framework will gradually help you speed up the process most specially dealing with a responsive design. Basically, there are html elements that needs manual CSS coding such as image alignments, quotes and other stuffs which you want to override from the default CSS styles in your framework. Otherwise CSS coding really depends on your theme design.

Theme Check Plugin

When you are creating a WordPress theme for submission you should grab a copy of theme check plugin. It is a must plugin for theme authors.  It may help you during the development stage of your theme before uploading it for manual review. Hence, that when you submit your theme for review, your theme will go through an automated theme check during the upload process.

If you failed on the automated check then your theme will not be in queued for manual review. be aware that the theme review team will automatically mark your theme not-approved if you have more than 3 errors or warnings. So, you better check and correct all errors that is being generated by the plugin before you upload.

Manual Review Process

As mentioned on the review process on the theme review handbook and as what we have mentioned above. After you pass on the automated theme check during upload. It will generate a ticket number that is sent in your email. The ticket will serves as a thread for your theme review. The reviewer may leave out there comments and issues found in your theme via your thread.

Note that the manual review process may take some time it can be a week or even a month of waiting to be manually reviewed depending on the queue. So you better have more patience on waiting for your turn.

When a reviewer found any errors in your theme. Fix or modify it once and for all and reply on the thread, that way you can establish a good rapport with your reviewer. Don’t be shy to ask questions if are you not familiar with the comments made by them.

On the process of manual review the theme reviewer will give you 7 days to make the fix but if you think it can’t be done with that period of time you need to inform your reviewer or else your ticket will marked as close due to its inactivity.

Join The Slack Theme Review Channel

The WordPress slack #themereview channel are dedicated for theme authors and theme reviewers only. If you are interested in  any other team such such plugin, design and etc… mentioned on get involved page. Join their assigned slack channels.

Theme authors in the #themereview channels are there to help you to answer all your questions related to theme development. But remember, before you raise question on the channel. Try to solve it on your own or find answers in Google.

All these mentioned in this article will not be possible if you have not created an account with WordPress.org If don’t have one yet, then go ahead create an account now.