WordPress Functions and Versioning
Whether progress in WordPress development continues at the same pace or not, the issue of the capability of a theme to display all new functions, template tags etc, is a live one.
Referred to as compatibility, this perhaps isn’t quite accurate - a theme will (should) work with a range of WordPress versions, (for various reasons, good and bad, we don’t all heed the so-named ‘required’ updates) - however, the question is whether a theme will supply all the functionality of an installed version of WordPress.
1. As a tentative suggestion, should there now be a tag field in the style.css header = ‘WordPress Version Capable: 2.7′ - or would this cause more problems than it solves?
2. Should there be a codified list of template tags (and wp-defined php functions) applicable to a given WP version? - the single page of template tags doesn’t seem to go far enough now.
October 1, 2008
12:36 pm
that girl again said
1. yes, this should be a requirement when submitting themes to wordpress.org/extend (way more important than theme version numbers). Ideally, too, a theme should use ‘if (function_exists)’ to implement any post-2.0 tags, since 2.0 is still being maintained.
2. The Codex page does state when template tags were added and deprecated; that’d probably be enough for me if I were still developing themes, but then I never did anything too fancy.
(btw, I wonder why get_avatar isn’t included in the list of template tags; did the codex team object to Gravatar integration?)
October 1, 2008
1:05 pm
Lewis said
@n(t)u or @tga…
Yes, the template tag page is good enough for most purposes, but not authoritative and for some ‘deeper’ functions, eg. query_posts() and even is_home() the version documentation is a bit fragmentary - I’d accept it’s a big job to keep it all updated…
Dunno, maybe some scruples were exercised about including a template function associated with a commercial, Automattic-owned enterprise on a wordpress.org codex. Could see if the same is so with threaded commenting in 2.7 etc.