114 PART II • Designing and Developing WordPress Themes
◾ Have you set the content width variable in functions.php?
◾ Are you supporting custom backgrounds and custom headers? Should you?
◾ Have you enabled support for the post format? Do you need it?
◾ What about all the other nice things you can add support for: feeds and a custom style
sheet for the visual editor in the WordPress admin?
◾ If you have built-in support for plugins, have you made sure that the theme works even
when the plugins aren’t installed?
◾ Are your readme.txt and theme information in style.css up to date? Do you fulfill
whatever demands your license of choice puts on the theme?
◾ Have you done the basic tests to make sure that the correct posts are displayed in listings,
posting comments works, and things like that? Don’t forget the most basic stuff: You can
break a lot of WordPress functionality with your theme, so test it from the ground up!Things the user will notice
◾ Is there proper 404 error handling?
◾ Is there a search form, and is the search results page actually usable?
◾ Are all the archive templates in your theme, or have you considered them in any other
way? Make sure that archives for categories, tags, author, dates, and so on work in the way
you want them to.
◾ Do nested categories and Pages display correctly when used? If there are widget areas
where they should not be used at all, have you made sure that the user is aware of this?
◾ Have you styled the single post view properly?
◾ Have you styled the Page view properly?
◾ Did you make sure that you’re not using the_excerpt() anywhere you should be
using the_content()?
◾ Is pagination working: previous/later posts on post listing pages, and possibly previous/
next post links on single posts?
◾ Does the author name display the way you want?
◾ Have you checked that all attachments (images, videos, and so on) are displayed prop-
erly? You may need to make a template file for this if your design is limited in any way.
◾ Do image galleries look good?
◾ Have you enabled featured images?
◾ When comments are turned off, what happens? Make sure that the response looks good
and displays a message the way you’d like it to.Formatting
◾ Have you styled every element from the visual editor in the WordPress admin to be
displayed properly? This includes block quotes, tables, and both ordered and unordered
lists.
◾ Do block quotes, lists, and so on work within the comments?
◾ Are you styling comments and trackbacks differently? And do you highlight author
comments?