ThemeReview.co theme review

I already wrote about how to review your themes by yourself. But there is so much that you can miss. There aren’t that many people who can do a self surgery, is there? That’s why the next step is contact ThemeReview.co and let them handle high level theme review.

ThemeReview.co theme review was first started by Emil Uzelac and is now maintained by Justin Tadlock and Sakin Shrestha. They are both seasoned WordPress developers and have been reviewing themes for ages in WordPress.org. I recommend their service for everybody who is building WordPress themes:

• You build custom themes for clients. Even if you think you know it all it never hurts to learn something new or let others to review your code.
• You build themes for WordPress.org. There are lot’s of guidelines that you need to follow and they can be overwhelming. Justin and Sakin are the right persons to help you out.
• You build commercial themes for other market places. Ask any theme shops out there and you’ll probably get the same answer. It’s all worth it. Theme Foundry gives five examples what they learned.

ThemeReview.co theme review process

Theme review process is straightforward.

• Arrange a review.
• You’ll be asked to give access to your themes Github or Bitbucket repo. If you haven’t used those before, now it’s perfect time for that. You’ll thank later.
• Justin review your theme first and open issues if he spot something to be fixed. Issues can also be questions, advices or design tips. When Justin has finished his review, Sakin will do the same. Or Sakin can do the review first. Point is that they don’t try to do it in the same time.
• Try to fix the issues and conversation goes on in their own issues. Note that you don’t have to fix the issue but that’s kind of the point.

I really like the fact that there are four eyes checking your theme. They will see your code in different angle and possible spot different issues.

My experience about theme review

I have reviewed couple of my themes in ThemeReview.co. Latest was Munsa theme. I sent the theme on Saturday and Sakin was already on it on Sunday! Justin reviewed it on Monday so I would say that’s the fastest theme review service you can get. Speed naturally depends how many themes they have on the table.

Then I started to fix the issues and we were done in couple of days. Here is the list of issues I had.

• Wrong tags in style.css: I removed the WordPress.com related tags since Munsa wasn’t accepted in there.
• Variables found in translation functions: These come from the theme updater and already have noticed this before.
• Contact Page Template design issue: There was issue about alignment when there was no content on Contact Page Template. There was an easy fix for it.
• License Issue: Added licenses for images shown in screenshot.png.
• Use get_template_part() when loading comment.php file: We decided to stick the original solution because otherwise comment arguments would not work.
• Styling for header hierarchy: H4 to H6 looked all the same. Fixed the styling for better visual hierarchy.
• Styling for “dark” playlist and video: I totally forgot to style these.

There were also couple of more issues or recommendations. As you can see from the issue list they will turn your theme upside down and go trough you theme code line by line and test it on different content. After that they’ll give you suggestions how to deal with the issues.

Note that issue list would have probably be a lot longer if I haven’t reviewed theme first.

The most important thing for me is that I can trust Justin and Sakin. I can trust that they will check your themes security, design, code, best practices and everything there needs to reviewed. And not only review but help you solve the issues. Now go ahead and arrange your theme review.