An “announcement” of a project, sounds exciting doesn’t it? Well if you develop WordPress themes you should be excited, or at least somewhat amused. I’m planning on developing a set of what I call “tools” for you WordPress themers out there. It is still in it’s planning stage at the moment but I’m going to list what it is going to have so far because I want your input on what you want, and how you think it should work.

The Basic Idea

When I develop themes I spend a lot of time doing the same things, or copy and pasting code from my other themes and tweaking. Things like theme options, basic functions, filters, widgets. I also have had some trouble keeping things like widgets up to date(thank God WordPress is so forgiving).

I want to build a library that can be dropped into any theme, and be easily customized to suit the needs of that theme. This is the basic idea behind the tools project.

Theme Options

I think theme options are an integral part of modern WordPress themes. Themes are more complex than ever and I can’t imagine developing a theme without options. Theme options can be a pain, but they don’t have to be. The tools project’s first feature (and already almost done) is a library which makes creating theme options as easy as creating a few arrays. Drop in the files, customize a file and you are good to go. No more searching through long files of code.

Basic Functions and Filters

Custom functions can greatly help a theme designer, whether it is doing complex things or just helping clean up the source code. I have a few functions and filters planned already, but this could definitely use some input as I’m sure other people could add to this part.

Widgets

Custom widgets are nice…especially when they work right. Custom widgets are also a huge selling point (or give away point??) for themes. And custom widgets are also usually a huge pain in my ass. It is a lot of code, and a lot of my code is now outdated due to WordPress 2.7. I’m not sure how easily customizable the widgets will be though, any ideas on how that could work are welcome.

Widget Areas

So far this is just a bunch of arrays premade for the theme. Not sure if there is anything else that can make this basic feature better.

Your Input

That is what I currently have in mind for the project, however I’d like to extend that further. l’ll need the input of people who build themes. What do you want? How do you think it should work? Any ideas for more features?

I’m going to upload this on github once I have a good, functioning base so people will be able to branch it and commit changes and updates.