Today I finally released the first version of Theme Mentor – a theme review plugin inspired by the almighty Theme-Check. Over the last year I have spent more than 200 hours fixing themes for the WordPress.org repository gone through the Theme-Check tests. There are numerous issues not covered by Theme-Check, easy to miss during your review or development process. Truth is, most of them are absolutely valid and an algorithm couldn’t be built so smart to determine whether it is a real error or not. Few of the problems covered by the first Theme Mentor version:
- <link> or <script> tags in template files (not necessarily critical, but odds are you can resolve them properly)
- query_posts calls
- misspelled WordPress (i.e. all-caps or small P)
- deregister/dequeue of jquery
- missing wp_title function in <title> head tags
and a few more.
Theme Mentor is designed to cover every possible scenario from a subset of errors. It’s average success rate is about 70% (according to internal tests). Nevertheless, Theme Mentor is listing common errors for authors or reviewers to double check. There’s nothing bad in checking a piece of code after a notice and reassuring that everything is OK. But it’s better to have the chance to find typos or violated standards within the reported list.
Use it together with Theme-Check, as an extra subset of tests.
Note: it’s the first released version this weekend so don’t hesitate to report issues or extra validations to be covered. The project lives on GitHub under the Theme Mentor repository.
