Title: Message to theme developers
Last modified: August 18, 2016

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# Message to theme developers

 *  [orangeguru](https://wordpress.org/support/users/orangeguru/)
 * (@orangeguru)
 * [21 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/message-to-theme-developers/)
 * Do yourself and your users a favour and comment your code and your CSS.
 * I have looked at many themes (because I am currently preping my own stuff for
   release now that 1.5 is final) and I am suprised at the lack of any commenting
   or even hints what certain lines of code do or don’t.
 * Since so many people love to play with YOUR themes, why not give them a chance
   to explore your work and adopt it more easily to their liking?
 * Is this something like that too complicated?
 * `
    <!-- headline of your post -->  <div class="category"><?php the_category(",")?
   >:</div> <div class="title" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>"> <a href="<?php the_permalink()?
   >" rel="bookmark"  title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"> <?php the_title();?
   ></a> </div> <!-- end headline of your post -->
 * Especially with ‘long running’ styles and boxes it helps to tell people where
   one DIV starts and where it ends. I have seen themes with extremly nested DIV
   or four ‘ending’ DIVs which made it hard to understand what was going on …
 * Why not simply write something like this?
 * `</div>
    <!-- end section post -->
 * `</div>
    <!-- end section content -->
 * Also the CSS are often hardly structured of spread the style definitions over
   serveral entries. The new default style has several entries for the simple h2
   tag:
 * `
    h1, h2, h3 { font-family: "Trebuchet MS", "Lucida Grande", Verdana, Arial,
   Sans-Serif; font-weight: bold; }
 * `h2 {
    font-size: 1.6em; }
 * `h2, h2 a, h2 a:visited, h3, h3 a, h3 a:visited {
    color: #333; }
 * `a, h2 a:hover, h3 a:hover {
    color: #06c; text-decoration: none; }
 * `h2 {
    margin: 30px 0 0; }
 * I can perfectly see and understand the designers idea behind HIS way of organising
   the CSS – it is nevertheless confusing for mere mortals. And mere mortals will
   try to adopt your work … and pester you with support requests if they run into
   problems …
 * 😉

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 18 total)

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 *  [help-me-please](https://wordpress.org/support/users/help-me-please/)
 * (@help-me-please)
 * [21 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/message-to-theme-developers/#post-147666)
 * I would second that, especially the importance of marking divs, because it’s 
   very hard to keep track of divs that open and close in different files. The only
   thing I would add, is that female designers should comment their code too, not
   just the men 😉
 *  [davidchait](https://wordpress.org/support/users/davidchait/)
 * (@davidchait)
 * [21 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/message-to-theme-developers/#post-147677)
 * a few things:
 * 1. use indentation when within a given file. makes it easy to see start and end
   points. I use tabs for major indents, as spaces take too many characters.
    2.
   where possible, use PHP comments, as they don’t output into the HTML. 3. where
   possible, don’t add unnecessary comments that output into the html, or in the
   css, as that increase page-load times down to a client machine…
 * Everyone pays for bandwidth… 😉
 * -d
 *  [jonimueller](https://wordpress.org/support/users/jonimueller/)
 * (@jonimueller)
 * [21 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/message-to-theme-developers/#post-147726)
 * Using a program like Bradsofts Topstyle Pro (or even the crippleware version 
   of it) helps keep stylesheets lean and mean because it has a tool called Tidy
   that can clean up your style sheets, combine elements, etc.
 * [http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle](http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle)
 * And just go to my blog and hit View Source. I comment the heck out of everything
   because I can never remember if I’ve closed a division or not so you see in my
   templates where I indicate that I’ve done so. It’s saved many a strand of hair
   from being pulled out!
 *  Thread Starter [orangeguru](https://wordpress.org/support/users/orangeguru/)
 * (@orangeguru)
 * [21 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/message-to-theme-developers/#post-147742)
 * Thanks for the feedback – it’s good to see that others share my concerns/suggestions.
   😉
 *  Thread Starter [orangeguru](https://wordpress.org/support/users/orangeguru/)
 * (@orangeguru)
 * [21 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/message-to-theme-developers/#post-147743)
 * [@jonimueller](https://wordpress.org/support/users/jonimueller/): Excellent work–
   comments like yours make it much easier to ‘decode’ and learn from other people’s
   work – and that’s how much web designers collect knowhow …
 *  [smarties](https://wordpress.org/support/users/smarties/)
 * (@smarties)
 * [21 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/message-to-theme-developers/#post-147762)
 * great idea!!! that would surely help a lot of newbies.
 *  [jewelwg](https://wordpress.org/support/users/jewelwg/)
 * (@jewelwg)
 * [21 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/message-to-theme-developers/#post-147788)
 * I am glad others feel the same way. I thought it was just me struggling to find
   which piece of code/css to change!
 *  [jberglund](https://wordpress.org/support/users/jberglund/)
 * (@jberglund)
 * [21 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/message-to-theme-developers/#post-147789)
 * Orangeguru… thanks for the organization comments, especially for the CSS. I spent
   a few hours just looking through a stylesheet from one of the templates this 
   weekend. And, though I understand ‘why’ the author organized it like that – in
   some ways, it made sense – it was nevertheless extremely difficult to manuever
   through. I had to look at 4 different sections in order to figure out the final
   structure of the page and how I could change it for what I needed.
 * I’m glad I’m not the only one who had difficulties. I felt a lot like jewelwg
   did… I thought it was just me! 🙂
 *  [jewelwg](https://wordpress.org/support/users/jewelwg/)
 * (@jewelwg)
 * [21 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/message-to-theme-developers/#post-147812)
 * well at least we now know there are two of us!
 *  [jberglund](https://wordpress.org/support/users/jberglund/)
 * (@jberglund)
 * [21 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/message-to-theme-developers/#post-147819)
 * Yeah! We can start a club! ;o)
 *  [davincim](https://wordpress.org/support/users/davincim/)
 * (@davincim)
 * [21 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/message-to-theme-developers/#post-147820)
 * Oh man, it would indeed be so helpful if code and css were commented more often.
   I spend so much time trying to figure out if this _thing_ changes _that_ thing.
 *  [NuclearMoose](https://wordpress.org/support/users/nuclearmoose/)
 * (@nuclearmoose)
 * [21 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/message-to-theme-developers/#post-147821)
 * I have a suggestion regarding stylesheets and lots of comments – and that is 
   to keep TWO stylesheets. One stylesheet is a copy of your production CSS, and
   has all of your comments. The other copy, which is what is served to your site
   visitors, has NO or VERY FEW comments. Why? Because the size of your CSS matters.
   You should be serving up the leanest CSS file possible to visitors. I know that
   it’s extra work, but a large CSS file does slow down rendering.
 * Just a suggestion – take it or leave it! :p
 *  [jberglund](https://wordpress.org/support/users/jberglund/)
 * (@jberglund)
 * [21 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/message-to-theme-developers/#post-147823)
 * I think it’s a good suggestion.
 * I don’t mind the work in experimenting/changing/dissecting… it helps me learn
   what things do – (just like taking apart my radio when I was little :). But, 
   it would be helpful just having side-by-side stylesheets to compare and dissect
   and pull apart.
 *  [mkgago](https://wordpress.org/support/users/mkgago/)
 * (@mkgago)
 * [21 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/message-to-theme-developers/#post-147828)
 * _I can perfectly see and understand the designers idea behind HIS way of organising
   the CSS – it is nevertheless confusing for mere mortals._
 * Can anyone explain the structure of those h2’s to this mere mortal? why is it
   set it up in that way?
 *  [NuclearMoose](https://wordpress.org/support/users/nuclearmoose/)
 * (@nuclearmoose)
 * [21 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/message-to-theme-developers/#post-147829)
 * mkgago,
    The only person that knows that is the creator of the Kubrick template.
   [http://binarybonsai.com](http://binarybonsai.com)

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 18 total)

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The topic ‘Message to theme developers’ is closed to new replies.

 * 18 replies
 * 11 participants
 * Last reply from: [TechGnome](https://wordpress.org/support/users/techgnome/)
 * Last activity: [21 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/message-to-theme-developers/page/2/#post-147834)
 * Status: not resolved

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