Can templates go too far?
One Fine Jay takes a peek under the hood of Twentyten, the default theme for WordPress 3.0 — which can’t be far away, since the current release is 2.9.2 — and apparently it assumes a hell of a lot:
Twentyten uses conditional logic in loop.php that references Category names such as Asides and Gallery. Not a bad idea, except the installation does not populate those Categories. I’m certain that there can be safeguards to overwriting existing categories when this happens for an upgrade, but if you’re going to take dibs on category names, at least populate those names or have a friendly (yellow) reminder up top that tells users “in order to make the most out of your theme, please create categories with the following names: Asides, Category, YourMomsKnickers.”
I suspect I’m safe, since my existing category names cover a range from inscrutable to indecipherable.
Then again, the theme I’m working with dates back to the Cretaceous period, so I may run into other problems when 3.0 insinuates its way into the Dashboard.
LeeAnn »
10 March 2010 · 7:42 am
I’m sorry, I saw the word “template” and went immediately into the fetal postition. Didn’t get much farther.
Lynn »
10 March 2010 · 8:11 am
Huh? Wha..? I have no idea what you said but now I’m even more terrified of upgrading.
CGHill »
10 March 2010 · 9:06 am
I didn’t see anything there to indicate that existing themes would be hosed, though people switching to the new default theme may have issues.