Going into this theme build, I figured that the hardest part of building a theme would be theme options. What I didn’t realize was how hard and how pesky that darn thing is.
This week I was going through and “enqueueing” all of the scripts that I run with the theme because that’s what WordPress wants you to do. That was all fine and good until I got to trying to do that with the scripts for the theme options page. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to load the scripts properly.
So then I scrapped the theme options page I had in favor of following a tutorial on another theme options page that had tabs as well.
So now it all works for the most part with some testing of the new options left to go and it should be up to WordPress’ standards. The only issue is that it set me back a week. I still have to enqueue the style sheets, which could be tough with the option to switch the color theme. Then it’s on to making it more and more responsive.
Once that’s finished, I’ll be looking to possibly edit the tag cloud styles and I’ve decided to wait on the favicon uploader until the next version whenever that may be. It doesn’t make or break the theme in my opinion. After that, there’ll still be some clean up stuff, but I should then be able to send it off for the WordPress theme directory.
In the meantime, I’m beginning to think of theme ideas/options/features for the next theme I’m working on which will be a newspaper-like theme similar to what The New York Times had a few years back. Hopefully by this time next week, I’ll have a mock up on paper.
