Updated development guidelines for WordPress themes: Envato calls, Evolve answer

It’s no news that WordPress is the best CMS out there for web development. This record is due to the possibility of working with an open source system, always up-to-date, versatile and performant under various aspects, security and privacy included.

We’re developers, and from our point of view, we can tell you that in order to guarantee such a high-quality level, standards must be in place so that we developers can adhere as closely as possible to them in order to publish our own products, and let them be available for the whole world.

These standards are constantly revisioned and modified, in order to provide better and better feedback to the developers.

Today, we’d like to take a moment and talk about the general requirements for WordPress themes that Envato has published in the last couple of months, which are set to become their standard in the near future.

WordPress themes: the importance of high-quality standards

They who have been there already will surely know about this: in order to publish a WordPress theme on the official themes repository on WordPress.org, authors must pass a review process from the #themereview team.

For those who are new to the subject, the Theme Review team is made of volunteers that collaborate to the WordPress project examining every submitted theme before it is officially accepted, ensuring that every requirement is being followed by the developers of the theme.

WordPress.org requirements are fairly strict and they cover code quality, accessibility, functionality, documentation, internationalization and more.

Every theme is manually reviewed in order to guarantee the best experience possible in terms of efficiency and security.

Envato new guidelines

In the past couple of months, Envato has introduced new requirements that must be met by all authors on their platform.

The guidelines are based on the ones published by WordPress.org and, in some cases, are even stricter.

To validate the compliance with the requirements, a proprietary Theme Check plugin has been re-published, which is a fork of the original plugin and is now updated with the new guidelines.

Our themes: even more updated and compliant thanks to our development framework

Here at Evolve, we instantly started working on our themes to make them even better.

Our strategy to make our products be compliant with the new Envato policies is already operative. For the themes that are already published in the marketplace, our intention is to update them gradually in order for them to comply with the new requirements. Concerning the themes that we’ll publish in the coming months, they’ll be developed with a drop-in framework that we designed, and that will be the basis of our development routine.

The framework will allow us to firmly keep our codebase under control, whether our products will be published on ThemeForest, or WordPress.org or elsewhere.

In the next coming weeks, we’ll release updates for the themes that are already parts of the marketplace, such as Zena, Fenix, and Agncy.

If you’re working with a theme of ours and need information regarding the future updates to the theme, don’t hesitate to contact us directly, and, to always be up-to-date with all the news from our studio, follow us through Facebook and Instagram.