Requirements for Wordpress Themes

Hi Everyone-

My latest Wordpress theme was soft rejected because it didn’t support child themes. I thought, what a great idea! I had never thought about using child themes as a way for people to modify themes. That would make it very easy to keep changes even when I update theme versions. I know there could possibly be some other things that I could include to really give more value to customers. Is there a list of criteria for for authors to refer to for theme review? I’m assuming there has to be a standard list somewhere but I cannot find one anywhere. Anyone know of any?

Thanks ahead of time! Andre

2winFactor said
My latest Wordpress theme was soft rejected because it didn’t support child themes.

What? Since when is it a requirement for themes to have child-theme support?

Not sure, but my theme crashes when a child theme is activated (my options panel urls need to change). Is that not a requirement? I’d love to release the theme and have child theme support be a version 1.1 update since I don’t think many customers will use it. I don’t suppose I could ask TF review team to kindly let this one wait until 1.1?

What could make a theme not support a child theme? Every time I’ve used a child theme it’s been pretty straight forward: Create the child theme folder, create the child theme style sheet, and activate.

For my own knowledge, can you share what’s not working with your theme and a child theme?

Surely. Upon activation my options panel is looking for options panel files in the child theme (which don’t exist, hence the error). I need to create a function that tests for child themes and changes to url look for the files in the parent theme’s directory. Does that make sense?

Make sure you don’t hardcode any paths in your theme. Instead, use paths relative to your theme root directory and let WordPress dynamically determine that directory using functions like:

get_template_directory() will always return the path to the parent theme for example

Hope that helps!

Chris

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the resources. I do have a function in place to test for these and output the correct one. I must just be missing something small. :/ I should have a solution for this soon.

Going back to the previous question – is there a requirements list or some things to check before launching a theme? It would be a great resource for all authors – I’m sure there may be something else I might not know about.

Thanks again, Andre

Also, be sure users can override any custom functions in a child as well with the use of PHP ’s function_exists or making them filterable in the parent.

if ( ! function_exists( 'my_custom_function' ) ) {
   function my_custom_function() {
      // code
   }
}

The rejection is not for the child theme per say. It’s for improper codding. Use enqueue scripts and style to add your css and js. Belive me i know, i got rejected for that too

Thanks Cudazi and Duotive. I’ve been doing both – great practices. Looks like I fixed the bug. Perhaps I should put together a comprehensive checklist of things/test I check for when submitting Themes and add ideas from other authors? Would anyone be interested in something like that?

Andre