The Webgazette theme is now available. More details on the Webgazette Theme page. Get it while it’s hot

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.

I’ve decided to call it “Webgazette” as it was originally used here on ainsliejohnson.com. It’s a good looking theme and I’m sure that many people will want to download it. I’m not making any promises as to when it is likely to be released, as it needs a bit of tidying up and refinement, but hopefully it’ll not take too long to get knocked into shape. It’s also been a while since I worked with WordPress themes so the coding may have changed a bit and I’m going to need to catch up a bit. I’ll post more news at a later date when I’ve made some progress.

I got a little burnt out by the demands of a trying to support users of my WordPress themes. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has experienced this. At one stage I was getting hundreds of emails a day and as much as I loved designing templates and themes it can soon turn into a real chore when the support requests never let up.

You know, you feel guilty ignoring emails but I don’t have the time to answer them all. I guess it the global scale of the WordPress theme thing – if you get a popular theme then you catch a lot of interest and it can be relentless.

Another thing is that the emails ranged from very polite request (which were a pleasure) for help to incredibly rude and sometimes insulting demands (that got ignored) for help. There’s no accounting for the way some folks behave!

I’m not sure what the ideal solution is. You could just say up front that there is no support. I’m not sure this is the best option if you want a good reputation, though. Maybe you could charge for support from the beginning. In my experience this will see off most support requests. Like I said I’m not sure what the solution is, but it’s something you ought to think about before releasing any themes into the wild.

I suppose, you got to learn to cope with it the best way you can and not feel guilty about it.

Good luck out there.