One of the posts I think maybe some of you’ve been itching for me write in the If you were a WordPress theme developer series is about really cool features.
In this sixth post, I want to ask you a very simple question: If you were developing your own WordPress theme, what essential feature would you add?
Forget about everything else for a moment. Think of this as a desert island scenario. If you had to choose one feature for the rest of your blog’s existence, what would that feature be?
Some of you may think that having no features is a feature itself, and that’s a perfectly valid answer.
What are theme features?
Well, there are no set-in-stone rules here. Anything goes.
I’ll give you a few examples:
- The Featured Content Gallery plugin that runs off SmoothGallery.
- Ability to place widgets virtually anywhere, such as in the Thematic theme.
- Tabbed content and in the sidebar.
- Built-in SEO options in the theme backend.
- Auto-generated thumbnails for your archive pages.
Those are just examples. Features don’t have to be as flashy or complex as some of those.
What feature would you add to your WordPress theme?
Take some time to think about it. Remember, you only get to choose one feature for your site. Make it a good one.
Ideally, this feature should stand the test of time because in our scenario, it’ll forever be on your site.
I’m really excited about reading some of your answers.
I’d have to go with the SEO. I see long tail benefits from good seo for posts that I’ve written years ago. search traffic isn’t great for retention, but if you’re wanting to monetize your blog, search traffic clicks ads like you wouldn’t believe!
Secondly, I’d want an effective subscription form. RSS subscribers are very valuable. They found your content interesting enough to choose to receive it every day. They’re one step away from being your fan, and fans are a very good thing in blogging.
I guess I would have to say the ability to create an archive list on the fly based on a specific tag that you can implement per post/page and be easily inserted. I have been trying to do this since forever and still can’t do it exactly how I want to – I have pretty much given up the hope of ever doing this on my blog.
I think menus are often done very poorly. I would want a full on menu editor, not just a list of pages that can be excluded.
I agree with Andrew, menus are not that flexible. I wish Wordress just made the menu form a list of links that I could enter from the admin panel. This way I could put a post, page or external site in the menu with out having to mess with my pages.
I could have lots of pages and it would not mess up the menu. Right know If I write a page it has to show up in the menu or I have to hide it by making it a child of another page. Some themes get messed up if I have lots of pages.
Having a simple way to make a menu out of a bunch of links would be very versatile.
OK, let it be my turn…
1. There are couple of plugins out there, which one of them can hide some pages in the menu and the other one hides some categories. I was using these plugins for a while, and its useful to include them in the theme core instead of letting them be standalone plugins.
2. I have never seen nicely arranged sitemap/archives page associated with a WP theme, I would build one in the theme code.
3. Paginated comments and built-in pagination instead of using WP-Pagnavi.
What else? I don’t have more things to say… Will take some time to remember
Just for fun, I skipped past everyone’s comments to record my feature.
If I had to choose just one feature, I’d choose to have a mood ring.
This would change the tone of any post, depending on what my reader wanted.
Suppose I were writing about a controversial new WordPress plugin that some people viewed as a violation of their privacy. The opening paragraph would be displayed, along with the mood ring, which has little buttons to select how that paragraph affected the reader (shock, outrage, bemusement, intrigued or ROFL). Depending on the reaction, the reader is treated to a continuation that is tailored accordingly.
This is not some parlor trick employed by Internet marketers to fetch a segment of the page from a database and render it “below the folder”.
No, the mood ring relies on the writer’s ability to see all viewpoints and merge them into a seamless post in such a way that, no matter which reaction was selected, the reader will come away with a sense of having gained a deeper appreciation for the subject matter. In fact, each post will have mood ring options that reflect the writer’s goal (in order of increasing difficulty:
1. Magnify the selected mood
2. Neutralize the selected mood
3. Reverse the mood
4. Conditional alteration depending on mood (Make outraged readers positively seething, while wiping the grins off of amused readers’ faces)
With this feature, all of my posts would be winners, getting link love and accolades in the blogosphere.
Of course, this could be abused, as I could monetize the website with the crappiest products and STILL make a ton of money. And let’s not get started on the possibility of ruining a good company’s reputation with a well-planned flame post.
Cheers,
Mitch
For this non-programming user, the most important feature to me by far is the header, and the ability to customize or change it. Sadish Bala has the best designs for this, and Cutline’s theme also has it, although it’s more labor-intensive.
Out of the thousands of WP themes (millions?), about 15% of them are ones I think are really good and functional out of the box — but about 10% of those either have no picture header, or one that requires extensive knowledge to change. I think designers forget that not all bloggers are computer geeks. Some of us are just writers or photographers who have a blog, and want the ability to make it look like our own, and unique.
SEO would be tops for me. But I am just hoping somebody out there(hint, Wordpress!)would build a free image gallery software (with full feature sets of Coppermine or Gallery) and develop an easy bridge for wordpress. These 2 solutions are good but to get them working with Wordpress is a pain in the you know where..
Nathan
I had a feeling you might say something like SEO.
Adding a visible way for users to subscribe is a must.
Kim
Could you elaborate a bit about the archive list? Are you referring to any type of archive? Maybe a simple solution with a shortcode would do the trick. I’m interested in hearing more about this.
Andrew
A menu system would be great. I too often find myself explaining how to customize menus to users.
I’m always riding the fence on whether to implement a menu system or not though. From the theme settings page I’ve seen for the Thesis theme, it looks like it has a great menu system built in.
monkeymartin
Yeah, menus are tough. Also, check out the wp_list_pages() function. With most themes, you’ll end up having to edit that until we get something better implemented.
J Mehmett
More menus. Maybe some of y’all are hinting at something.
I was actually checking out a built-in function for WordPress that handles pagination the other day. I found it because I was looking at how the new comments paging functionality in 2.7 works. I might have something like this in line in the future.
Mitchell Allen
Sounds like a cool feature. Now I want a mood ring.
Well, I’m not sure what I’d do with it myself. Do we have any plugin developers that want to take on the project?
Jane
I think most of the time, designers forget that most theme users probably don’t know how to add a header image because it’s so simple for us. I only have one theme with a feature to upload a header image. I’ll have to check out a couple of the themes you mentioned to see how they’ve implemented it.
Magneto
All right, we have another vote for SEO!
I think the image gallery features will continue to get better. We at least have the ability to upload multiple images and use the
[gallery]shortcode now. Since reading your idea, I just got a new idea for a Coppermine-esque WordPress theme.SEO and Auto Generated Thumbnail is great
Jauhari
I just think SEO might be the winner here. Luckily, in most of my themes, I include my Get the Image plugin, which can auto-pull thumbnail attachments.
Let’s say a tabbed front page.
Separated content with separated css with a tabbed navigation. I really don’t know if it’s even possible but i guess that would be awesome…
I may not be clear but it would be like a tabbed sidebar plugin but for the whole content, with the choice in the admin section. Like the options theme in fact but with several front page…
: )
I use WordPress for a log of websites (pages). Best feature for me would be navigation that could be place over the header, under the header, or either sidebar (of course, the sidebar could be on either side).
I’d save lots of time with this feature!
Thanks, Justin!
Custom Write Panels. I think that is the terminology. If you are going to require custom fields for the theme to work, create the panels needed to easily insert them into the page or post so it looks correct. Don’t make us dig through theme code to figure out what custom fields we need to create. Create them for us.
The Revolution2 theme series make this mistake. They look nice and have nice features but they don’t tell you what the custom fields that you need are nor are they included in the 6 lines of documentation included with the themes. I guess its to try and force frustrated users to purchase the support service though they’ll probably just find another theme.
Also if a theme has code to show certain categories in different columns, it needs options to fill that in.
These just make it easier for non-developers to use the theme and for developers to roll out sites quicker.
frednetick
Thanks for the feedback. I’m not a big fan of tabs myself, but people do seem to love them. I’m not sure if they’d survive our desert-island scenario. Tabs could easily be so last year next year.
Larry Levenson
Those are definitely great ideas. It’s something I’ve toyed around with in my themes. My only problem with it is that we’re assuming that we have a header, navigation, or even a sidebar. OK. So, that may be a bit of a stretch.
I actually like the idea of using page templates to control where the sidebar goes too.
Wayne Luke
I actually agree and disagree that custom write panels are needed.
First, the panels already exist — custom fields input boxes. Extremely simple to use. However, the documentation should clearly point this out.
Depending on the theme, custom write panels could be added. If there are a lot of custom fields that could be used, a custom write panel would be nice. If there are only one or two, it might be overkill.
I’ve actually built them into my next theme though, which I’ll be releasing by this weekend. Maybe you can give it a go and let me know what you think.