Testing Your WordPress Theme to Avert a Major Screw Up

                             

Doling out sermon on why your WordPress themes are the best among the herd available in the market is an exercise that has to be backed with self-assurance. If the WP themes you invested days and hours while developing are coming up with some runtime issues, it might as well prove to be a nasty burn on your business stratagem.

WordPress themes are hotly pursued and when you are in the business of producing and selling them, it is imperative that you keep ‘testing’ an indispensable part of your development stage. Except you, there are also the webmasters who are using good enough themes but need a dummy site to evaluate how the theme would play out before he/she can go live with it.

The following sermon is part meant for the extensively theme developers and part for the coders who are still finding their way around codes and stuff. Here is what you can do to not let errors creep in to your theme:

Before the Development Phase

While developing the theme, it will serve you better if you develop keeping in mind the network installations. Than, one hassle that coders would like to steer clear of is manually coding the unwieldy database queries. This is where they can instead resort to the custom table prefix that lets them achieve the same. Besides, these prefixes add a fraction of non-memorizable code to your default wp_, which further enhances the prospect of the theme remaining shielded from security threats.

If you have planned to opt for PSD to WordPress conversion process, set WP_DEBUG to True in the config.php set up if you wish to keep a track of the salvo of variables and functions in your code. While it is recommended that you disable the script concatenation during coding, but you also would need to re-enable the same at specific stages in the project – like during the production environment. In addition to these, you will need a much more enhanced process of analyzing the queries and no matter how helpful you might the Trash feature, it would make your process much smoother if you just disable it.

Version Control in WordPress

You may or may not be very fond of Git, but it indeed is a priceless tool along with SVN or Mercurial for you to revert back to the previous versions of your code in the event things go awry.

While You are Developing

Now, the development process is extensive and it does require close attention to all the details. To begin with, be sure of every single feature you want in your theme and deliver utmost focus on fully developing the ones you choose before switching to the other ones. Don’t leave any task half-baked only to complete it later.

Follow a modular approach of developing codes. Every element you code for should have no bearing on any other element. Create a back-end representation of a certain portion of your theme’s layout, finalize it and make sure that it leaves room for adding the front-code without any hassles.

Also Read: A detailed insight into WordPress 3.9.2 Security Release

• To make sure website is responsive and fast loading

It is only when you have in your arsenal the most ideal development tools can you keep the crash and slow loading issues at bay. Sass as a tool proves to be exceptional and so does CodeKit, a tool that does the job of compilation, proves to be instrumental in concatenating the JavaScript files, examines the code for bugs and accomplishes much more.

The code snippets are used customarily by developers across all realms of web development. Now, they do save a lot of time, but at places where a lot of customization is required, it might prove to be a better option if you create the code from the ground up instead of squinting hard to evaluate where you need to make the necessary tweaks.

• Viewing it from the User’s Perspective and More

While tackling any CMS conversion, do not forget to use a tool of the likes of User Switching when you want to have a clear-eyed view of what your users will be seeing. So, instead of dabbling between different accounts, this tool provisions switching between user accounts in just one click.

And whether you are using Chrome or Firefox or any other browser, there are development tools for your consideration with every browser. Do create a theme hierarchy to ensure you don’t skimp on some critical element of the web page.

Finally, after you are done with everything elucidated above, do try out the plugins like WordPress Theme Check that will go a long way in locating the errors by examining the code in its bare bones, like the legacy functions, the missing functions and files, the bugs and more.

An undeniable but ever-so-denied fact remains that you can’t make a WordPress theme that doesn’t contain a single flaw or bug. That said, it is at the end of the day a tool that requires constant furnishing before you can get rid of all the niggles and knots.

Also Read: PSD to WordPress Theme Conversion – How it is leveraging you?