CHAPTER 4 • WordPress Theme Essentials 115
◾ Have you put in special styling for sticky posts? Is special styling needed?
◾ Have you checked that headings 1 to 6 look good (even if you don’t expect to use them all)?
◾ Do images inserted from within WordPress display properly? This includes images
floating to the left and right as well as centered images.
◾ Do image captions work?
◾ What happens if an image that is too wide gets published? Does it break the design?Naturally, there are tons of things that are directly related to your theme that you need to test
out as well. You need to check whether menu links work and that all text is readable. The
preceding checklists will help you avoid common WordPress-related mistakes with your
theme. You should add anything that is related to your design and code to those checklists for
even more assurance that your sites will look good and work as expected.
COMMERCIAL THEMES AND THE GPL LICENSE
Commercial (or premium) GPL themes cannot be submitted to WordPress.org at this time.
However, if you’re a theme reseller, you can get featured on the commercial themes page,
which currently is just a links page containing screenshots of some popular themes, but no
hosting. In other words, this means that the commercial GPL theme you’re selling won’t work
with automatic updates from within the WordPress admin interface because WordPress.org
won’t let you host it there unless you make it free for all to download. Naturally, if you do that,
hosting may be approved, and you can make money on providing support or customizations
to the design, or whatever your theme business is all about.
There are commercial themes on WordPress.org on designated pages. You can read more at
http://wordpress.org/themes/commercial.
SUBMITTING TO WORDPRESS.ORG
If the theme checklists didn’t raise any obstacles and your theme is licensed under a GPL-
compatible license, you can submit it to the WordPress.org theme directory. Hosting your
theme there is good for several reasons, the most prominent being the ability to reach
WordPress users through the official channel, which incidentally now also resides within the
admin interface. It also lets you update to new versions and hosting and provides nice linkage
with the WordPress.org support forums.
Before you start thinking of submitting your theme, you should install and run the excellent
Theme Check plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/theme-check),
which is based on the tests that the theme review team runs on your theme. This plugin will
let you know what problems there are and also recommend fixes, so it is a great help and also
a time-saver for the review team. If you’re comfortable with messing with wp-config.php, you
should also enable WP_DEBUG, which means that you’ll set it to true:
define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );
When done, just change this to false again. This will give you more information about any