We use to feature BuddyPress usage case studies. These are great ways to share with you how BuddyPress can help you achieve your community site projects reading how other buddies did it. The case study you are about to read now is a bit different. It’s about the steps the lovely BuddyX BuddyPress theme had to take to be widely and freely available from the official WordPress.org theme directory. I’m very happy Varun Dubey took the time to write this guest post to share his experience with all of us. My secret hope is that it will inspire as many BuddyPress Theme authors as possible to do the same 😇.
Varun Dubey is a full-stack WordPress & BuddyPress developer. He’s the co-founder of Wbcom Designs, a WordPress themes and plugins development agency in India. He’s also a regular BuddyPress contributor, we often talk with him about the BuddyPress project during our development meetings (every other Wednesday at 19:00 UTC on Slack), he contributes to our development tasks (testing, reporting issues, patching, documenting, etc..) and he still manage to find time to help you regularly replying to your support topics (661 replies so far!). So, once again, many thanks to him for getting involved with BuddyPress 😍.
So let’s learn more from his experience, here’s what he wanted to share with you about it!
I submitted my first theme at WordPress.org, and now it’s live.
@vapvarun
We, at Wbcom Designs, are excited about our achievement to present a full-fledged community theme powered by BuddyPress and WordPress. It took almost a year to work on BuddyX and make it stable enough to submit at WordPress.org.
The approval process was surprisingly short, approx 6-7 weeks to get it approved after initial submission. We usually had heard that it might take 6-9 months to get the theme live.
Submitting the theme at WordPress.org will increase your reach to all sites which are using WordPress. The WordPress theme directory is used by millions of WordPress users all over the world. The directory themes are available for download from WordPress.org, and WordPress users can also install them directly from their administration screens.
By hosting your theme on WordPress.org, you’ll get:
- Stats on how many times your theme has been downloaded
- User feedback in the forums
- Ratings, to see what users think of your theme.
We have learned a lot about code reviews, code quality, and theme lifecycle during the approval process. I will give a quick glimpse of how it was for BuddyX; it might help others get the theme approved quickly.
How to start with a theme skeleton?
Lots of developers begin the development of a theme from scratch. There are articles and tutorials available on how to start theme development from scratch, and the WordPress Themes development handbook also has a detailed step guide on this topic.
After comparing _s, roots, and other starter themes, we decided to start with the WP rig. WP rig helped get a basic skeleton of the BuddyX using the latest tools, best practices, and coding standards. It helped integrate lazy-loading, async/defer JavaScript enqueueing, component-level pre-loaded CSS, optimized Web Font loading, modular extensions, and a full-featured list of optional template hierarchy files at day one.
Along with WordPress Code Quality Testing, WordPress Coding Standards integration was also part of it. After getting initial help for the WP rig, we only have to focus on design improvement for BuddyPress Community features.
Early prep of the Theme submission
After the design part gets ready, we have released our theme on our website and make it available for free download to get initial feedback as a soft launch. It received a good response from the community, and we have got some feature requests and feedback on initial versions. It helped us to gain the confidence to submit BuddyX at WordPress.org.
You can follow these steps to check your theme against WordPress requirements before submitting it for review.
1- Code Quality Check- To make sure your theme code is secure ( using proper escaping functions ), it meets WordPress Coding Standards.
2- Theme Check by plugin- The WordPress Theme review team checks your theme using the Theme Check plugin. It will be useful to double-check your theme against it first before uploading it.
