Style Sheet Header Improvements Tidy up your WordPress Theme Details

The Theme Review Guidelines are often updated as each new version of WordPress is released, and although these guidelines are for themes submitted to the WordPress theme repository, they are a good baseline to which all themes should strive to achieve.

If your theme was written a while ago, your site might not be following all of the current best practices. Here are a few simple alterations you can make to your style.css file.

Theme URI

An easy one to start – in the header info, you’ll likely find a line starting with Theme URL (note the last character). This should now strictly be Theme URI.

License

In your theme, you might see some inconsistent or no license information at all. There are now a couple of specific slugs you can use, License and License URI, to show the same information in a way that WordPress can read from (example):

License: GPL-2.0+
License URI: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php

Tags

Tags haven’t been added to many themes at the moment, yet if you’ve got a lot of themes installed, being able to filter them to just certain features (see Appearance -> Themes -> Feature Filter, right-hand side, next to the Search button) could be useful. Many of the tags could be added by the functionality that a parent theme like Genesis provides, while some would be child theme specific. A theme that could theoretically meet every single tag would include the following:

Tags: black, blue, brown, gray, green, orange, pink, purple, red, silver, tan, white, yellow, dark, light, one-column, two-columns, three-columns, four-columns, left-sidebar, right-sidebar, fixed-width, flexible-width, blavatar, buddypress, custom-background, custom-colors, custom-header, custom-menu, editor-style, featured-image-header, featured-images, front-page-post-form, full-width-template, microformats, post-formats, rtl-language-support, sticky-post, theme-options, threaded-comments, translation-ready, holiday, photoblogging, seasonal

Trailing Slash

Another easy one – if the Theme URI or Author URI values are the home page of a website, add a trailing slash to it – this typically saves an extra lookup on a server if someone clicks on the link.

Theme Name

Some themes might be named as “… Theme” or “… Child Theme”. The Theme Review guidelines recommend that the term “Theme” is not included (as everyone knows it’s a theme). Since the guidelines also suggest that the fact a theme is a child theme be mentioned in the Description, your theme could drop both terms. Switch to another theme before changing your theme name.

Template Version

Previously there was a suggestion to include a Template Version slug to child themes to indicate what version of the parent theme the child theme was built against. However, this appears to have been removed until such time that WordPress can actually use this information to notify users.

Further Information

Beyond the changes listed above, you can find more information via the theme review guidelines, by following the Theme Review Team discussions, and also by running the Theme Check plugin (the development version has a few extra fixes) on your theme. WordPress also has a set of CSS Coding Standards for the main portion of yout style sheet.