Once you have finished developing your theme, you need to prepare it for submission to the WordPress.org theme repository.
In this lesson, you’ll learn how to prepare your theme for submission, including how to test your theme, check and follow the theme review guidelines, and prepare documentation for your theme.
Testing your theme
Before submitting your theme to the WordPress.org theme directory, you should test it thoroughly to ensure that it works as expected.
This includes testing things like whether it has any errors or warnings, how it handles different types of content, and how it performs in terms of accessibility and performance.
The “Testing your theme lesson” in the Advanced Theme Development module covers all of these aspects in detail, so make sure to review that lesson.
It can also be beneficial to test your theme against the next version of WordPress to ensure that it remains compatible.
To do this, you can install the WordPress Beta Tester plugin, which allows you to switch your site to the latest beta or release candidate version of WordPress.
Once you’re sure you’ve tested your theme thoroughly, you can move on to the next step.
Theme review guidelines
The WordPress theme review guidelines are a set of requirements that you need to follow when submitting your theme to the WordPress.org theme directory.
These guidelines cover a wide range of topics, including:
- Licensing & copyright
- Privacy
- Accessibility
- Code requirements
- Functionality and Features
- Plugins
- Naming, spelling, and trademarks
- Language and internationalization
- File requirements
- Classic theme requirements
- Block theme requirements
- Theme settings pages and onboarding
- Upsells, credits, links, and spam
- Theme author and theme upload restrictions
Your next step is to review every single item in the theme review guidelines, and make sure your theme meets all these requirements.
If you’ve thoroughly tested your theme using the tools mentioned in the Testing your theme lesson, you should have already addressed many of the issues that the theme review guidelines cover.
It’s still a good idea, however, to work through them all and check each one off before you submit.
During the submission process, a theme that contains 3 or more distinct issues according to these guidelines, may be closed as not-approved.
It is possible to resubmit your theme after fixing the issues, but it’s going to delay the process.
Preparing documentation
The final step in preparing your theme for submission is to create documentation that details the theme’s features, customization options, and any unique aspects of the theme.
Themes are required to provide end-user documentation of any design limitations or extraordinary installation/setup instructions.
Depending on how detailed your documentation needs to be, will determine where you add this information.
While you could add this to your theme’s readme.txt file, it’s often easier to provide this information on a dedicated theme homepage.
Many theme developers create a page on their website that provides detailed information about the theme, including installation instructions, customization options, and any other relevant information.
They will then link to this page using the theme’s Theme URI field in the style.css file.
This link will display on the theme’s page in the WordPress.org theme directory and in the WordPress admin, and users can click on it to access the theme documentation.
Conclusion
Once you’ve tested your theme, checked it against the theme review guidelines, and prepared your documentation, you’re ready to submit your theme to the WordPress.org theme directory.