As I said in part one, this wrap up is going to be a two part series. This one is about evaluating my personal experience of creating a WordPress Theme from scratch. This is all about the Collaborate Theme so if you don’t want to hang around, feel free to go elsewhere.
I am very happy with the final result for many reasons. First of all I think it comes very close to what I originally proposed. I had some doubts when mocking up the wireframes as to whether the horizontal division of the layout would in any way work. I know some themes already use this kind of division, but from what I have seen the content would still be in columns.
Secondly the learning curve for this project has been very steep. Although I don’t intend to release any more WordPress theme in the near future, I will certainly enjoy my experience when it comes to designing custom template files for client’s WordPress sites.
The whole theme is designed according to W3C standards and validate against both CSS 2.1 and XHTML 1.0 Strict. One exception to this is one the single post pages where the comment form is displayed. There is one element in the form attribute that won’t validate: The “aria-required” attribute is not yet supported. Because of accessibility issues (especially in AJAX) I have chosen to leave it in there. In time when HTML 5 gets released properly it will validate, but until then, it won’t.
Bugs
Though I felt the theme was pretty solid when I first released the beta version on the WordPress community site, the testing still revealed a lot of bugs. My CSS though valid, included some CSS 3.0 selectors and values that are not yet supported and these had to be discarded. As they only applied to browsers that supported them I didn’t lose much in removing them.
Another bug was the trackbacks, they would break the layout if the title of the trackback was too long. Solution: use of CSS and a simple PHP if statement to separate the trackbacks from the comments and style them accordingly.
After testing the theme with the widgets and a few plugins, I found that the WP-Gravatar plugin actually caused the layout to break. As this plugin is a third party addon, there wasn’t much I could do about it other than inform my users.
If you are still interested in the theme, go to the official release post!
/Kasper – on Twitter and Delicious
