[wp-forums] Disastrous Coding Practices in Premium Themes

[Joni Mueller]

I wholeheartedly agree and that is one big reason I prefer to "roll my own" and won't work on a site if a client insists on using some bloated premium theme. Most of the time, they lack flexibility anyway.  Granted, there are some great premium theme developers out there; Brian Gardner and StudioPress come immediately to mind; there are others.  But by and large, I see a lot of sloppy coding, sloppy CSS, bloated and superfluous CSS. Don't get me started.

And the sad thing about it, the irony, is one point you made.  These premium themes cater to people who can't or won't hire a web designer/developer and/or who don't know and/or don't want to know HTML, CSS and other code necessary to tweak their own WordPress theme.  And it is precisely this group of people who are not going to be savvy enough to figure out that the code is bloated and possibly even in some cases malicious. Or certainly harmful, perhaps not intentionally.  

Someone hold my drink while I climb down off my soapbox. :)

Joni Mueller
Pixelita Designs
http://www.pixelita.com
________________________________________
From: wp-forums-bounces at lists.automattic.com [wp-forums-bounces at lists.automattic.com] On Behalf Of Francisco de Azevedo [frandeazevedo at gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2012 2:36 PM
To: wp-forums at lists.automattic.com
Subject: [wp-forums]  Disastrous Coding Practices in Premium Themes

Hi everyone!
So, I've been stuck for a few days on some custom jQuery functions for some
friends' site using the Retreat theme (premium) by WooThemes. Since I care
a great deal about optimization and HTTP requests, I started working on the
theme's *general.js* file rather than creating a separate one from scratch.
After doing some debugging, I was able to narrow the issue down to the *
(window).load* event, and finally able to determine the cause of the
problem: It seems the original theme developers had stuck the following
piece of cr... **cough** code inside the JS file:

> var window = jQuery(document).height();

[snipped]
*2.* Some premium developers don't seem to know what the hell they are
doing, and thus could cause a lot of harm to WP users who are just
beginning to understand how the platform works or who do not have the time
and/or the desire to learn that much programming.