Understanding the Theme Code

We’ve worked very hard to make our themes highly customizable and extensible without having to mess with child theming and theme code.

The methodology for our theme code is based on this. Semi-minified, unformatted, and free of programmer comments. There is no codestyling. This is all for a number of reasons, primarily to make our theme’s code as simple, lightweight and consistent as we can make it for speed and to not impose anything cookie-cutter on you (because codestyling is subjective and people have different preferences, there is no right or wrong).

http://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/coding-standards/ – No doubt, WordPress has their own recommendations (not requirements) for codestyling which anyone is welcome to use. We’re not saying that the methods laid out here are wrong (again there is no right or wrong when it comes to opinion), but we prefer to handle our code differently.

While making the theme as extensible as possible without having to hack the code is priority #1, we don’t mean to dismiss those who will inevitably want to make even more advanced customizations that will require child theming.

Admittedly, working with the theme code may be difficult if you’re using a plain text editor like Notepad or TextEdit, which is why that’s not recommended.

Tool Recommendations for Working with Code

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ – If you’re on Windows we highly recommend Notepad++.

http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/ – If you’re on Mac we highly recommend TextWrangler.

With the proper tools you’ll be able to use code highlighting, format the code however you like and accomplish many other automated coding tasks with ease. While we don’t recommend too simple of editors (like Notepad and TextEdit), we also don’t recommend editors like Dreamweaver that are too automated. The tools we recommend are a perfect hybrid in-between.

Final Note

While, of course, you can use whatever tools work for you the best and you’re certainly entitled to disagree even after understanding our methods better, please understand we won’t ever be changing our coding methodology and discussions to that effect will be considered non-constructive and closed.