WordPress 3.5 Guidelines Revisions

It is that time of year again: with the upcoming release of WordPress 3.5, the Theme Review Team conducts its periodic review of the Theme Review Guidelines, and proposes any changes, either as necessitated by the new WordPress version, or otherwise as-needed.

The 3.5 release has little impact on Themes, and as such will be mostly invisible to Theme developers. One minor change will be support for HiDPI (i.e. “Retina”) screenshots. If there are any other 3.5-related changes that we need to account for, please post in the comments.

Here is the starting point for the discussion regarding changes to the Guidelines:

  • Change Theme Screenshot (screenshot.png) maximum dimensions from 300x225px to 600x450px. (Fixed per comment below)
  • New guideline under presentation-vs-functionality: Themes must not bundle custom post-content shortcodes
  • Change guideline: reduce criticality for Content SidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme. feature from required to recommended. (Themes would still be required to implement coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Settings APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. if Theme incorporates content sidebar feature.)
  • Change criticality of add_theme_support( ‘automatic-feed-links’ ) from required to recommended. (Modified per comments below)

Please discuss in the comments, and recommend any additions or changes to these proposed Guidelines revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision..

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