Now that we've got our theme designed, styled, and looking great, we just have one last thing to do. It's time to share your theme with your client, friends, and/or the rest of the WordPress community. This is the whole point of creating a theme in WordPress; your designs are separate from the WordPress CMS content and therefore easily shareable. This means that anyone can create a WordPress theme, and anybody else can install that theme in their WordPress installation.
In this chapter, you'll learn how to check your theme against the WordPress Theme Review guidelines, set it up so its stylesheet and license are correct, compress your theme as a ZIP file, and run some test installations before uploading it.
Before any theme can be published to the WordPress theme repository at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/, it has to conform to the WordPress Theme Review guidelines. These include the following:
- Code quality: Make sure your code is up to date.
- Presentation versus functionality: Themes are for presentation, not functionality.
- Theme features: Your theme should support implementation of core WordPress features.
- Template tags and hooks: Make sure your theme implements template tags and hooks properly.
- WordPress-generated CSS classes: Make sure you use WordPress-generated CSS classes.
- Theme template files: Theme template files should be used properly.
- Security and privacy: The theme shouldn't present any issues with security and privacy.
- Licensing: A GPL-compatible license is required.
- Theme name: The theme name must be appropriate.
- Credit links: Credit links should be used and should be appropriate.
- Theme unit tests: Your theme must pass these tests.
- Theme obsolescence: Your theme should be kept current on an ongoing basis, keeping up-to-date with WordPress updates.
There are a lot of hoops you have to jump through, as you can see, but none of them are too tough. For more details, see the codex page on Theme Review at http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Review, and the Theme Review team site at http://make.wordpress.org/themes/.
In this chapter, you'll learn about the specifics of some of these criteria so you can share your theme.
You can find a copy of these at http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Review.
In this chapter, we'll take a look at WordPress' licensing requirements. We'll also spend some time properly naming our theme and crediting it, as well as creating a screenshot for our theme, and giving it a run through WordPress' Theme Unit Test criteria using the following:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Unit_Test
Let's get started packaging our theme up.