I’d heard that things had moved along to the stage where WordPress themes had become very complicated and more about programming than design, but I’m glad to say, that while some things have changed, they haven’t changed that much.

Once of the most obvious changes is the use of phpDocumentor tags in the default and classic themes. I’m not sure why WordPress have started to use these tags in the themes. I haven’t been able to find any official explanation about why they are being used. Maybe it’s just good practice and part of a wider WordPress code documentation project?

These tags aren’t that significant as far a creating themes are concerned. It has to be borne in mind that these are just comments at the beginning of the file which can be used by phpDocumentor for creating documentation for php projects.

I found these quite useful and have adopted them myself and used more tags to record more details about the theme such as author, version and what needs doing etc. Most WordPress files already have comments at the beginning and indeed throughout the file anyway.

Otherwise things don’t seem to have changed that much and it’s business as usual.