I stumbled upon a post on Yoast.com outlining the 10 criteria of a perfect Wordpress theme. Without hesitation, I went ahead and check my themes against those criteria eager to see how I score for my themes.
The 10 checks are as follows:
- Hooks
- Template files
- Is your theme widgetized?
- Does your theme have a search option?
- Does your theme work in all major browsers?
- Is the theme’s code valid?
- Check the outgoing links!
- Can the theme handle pages?
- Make sure your theme supports trackbacks
- How is your theme handling titles?
The following is the report:
Requirements:
- In header.php, it should have a small piece of PHP code that looks exactly like this wp_head(); or this do_action(‘wp_head’);, usually just before a piece of HTML that looks like this: .
- In footer.php, it should have another small piece of PHP like this wp_footer();, or this do_action(‘wp_footer’);
- In comments.php and/or comments-popup.php, it should have a piece of code like this: ID); ?>, just before the HTML tag.
Yoast said it is a standard to include all the 9 BASIC files below in a theme to avoid installation problem. Each file represents a standard Wordpress feature/structure.
home.php, single.php, page.php, category.php, author.php, date.php, archive.php, search.php, 404.php
Out of the above mentioned files, I only have home.php, single.php, page.php
Does that mean I am missing most of the Wordpress features? Not at all. I actually simplified the file structure even more by merging category.php, author.php, date.php, archive.php, search.php, 404.php into one single file, index.php
I am wondering since bbPress is a forum software developed by the Automattic team, why doesn’t Jeff use it instead of the vBulletin. bbPress may be less functional than the well-developed vBullentin, but wouldn’t it be exciting to install it in the first place and witness the improvement of this software made along the way? 
