WordPress themes: keep it simple

Keep it simple - KIS - is fairly obviously good advice for any WordPress theme builder.

Keep it universal - there are a lot of people out there, running all kinds of different system, doing different and strange things with the files, any complexity is increasing the risk of breaking the theme for them…

Keep it to a level - the natural impulse is to show off all the fancy programming you’ve learned - there’s a limit to the stuff that should be put into the theme and what should be left for people to individually customize (or even pay someone to do). Not everybody needs/wants everything in the shop.

Today, I had to mend someone’s site - it had a WordPress theme loaded, which had better remain nameless and authorless.

Trouble was, hard-coded into the theme, not even as pluggable function, was code to send a warning email of any HTTP error - to every admin on the system, on every page load.

And the theme had been delivered to the theme showcase site with a broken image path.

The guy was wondering why his admin email box had filled up with 5,000 warning emails overnight.

We did sort the problem - we got rid of that theme.

Any more “Keep it”s for designing WordPress themes…?