This work is a try to understand a bit more WordPress and to make me happier when I work with it.
I hesitated during a long time before starting my personal WordPress theme because I knew it would be a huge job and a long time investment. But I was tired to undo half of theme features that I would use and lose hours of development.
Thistle is a WordPress Parent Theme which cannot live alone. It needs a bit of love through a Child Theme to construct beautiful experiences.
Here are many reasons why Thistle can/should not be used as it is:
- It doesn't provide any default design;
- It doesn't offer critical features (e.g.: portfolio, project, etc);
- Its template hierarchy is incomplete;
- Its
function.phpis already wellfilled; - I myself decided on this first requirement.
With the help of Thistle, I tried to collect interesting things that I judge vital to work with WordPress and that I need the most :
Basic things:
- Cleans
<head>HTML element; - Translates the base for the author and the search permalink structure depending on the locale used;
- Discourages search engines from indexing some pages (e.g.: paged/search results);
- Adds custom post type counts in "Right now" Dashboard widget; 8bc363
- Transforms the default version of dependencies to hide the WP version in URLs; 601cb1
- Use the site information on login page; c66554
- Disables the REST API except for the oEmebed endpoint; 8c04ed
- …
Helpful things:
- Adds a "Thumbnail" column for post types that support the thumbnail feature;
- Moves the excerpt meta box above the editor permanently;
- Renders the specific WordPress.com shortcodes for SoundCloud and SlideShare;
- Allows users to see a live preview of embedded content within the visual editor;
- Redirects the user to the current page or the home page on logout; c579eb
- Offers the right behaviour to
exclude_from_search; 18acb9 - Adds a new role to WordPress for customers (Editor++); 67767b
- …
Tricky things:
- Retrieves permalink for attachment following an unique permalink structure
media/%postame%; - Handles the output of embedded content to be responsive;
- Constructs
<meta>tags needed by Open Graph and Twitter Card; - Builds a new Gallery shortcode output to interact easily with PhotoSwipe;
- Enqueues assets automaticaly following the template hierarchy behaviour; 05caf1
- Autoloads TinyMCE templates for post types; d1bd7c
- Allows to use only the post type archive page; 712b0a
- …
Almost all the lines of code are commented so I let you look through Thistle to find other tips and features for your joy.
Please, note that Thistle is still under development.