Automattic Releases Theme Guidelines


Automattic wants you to have the best possible experience on, and to ensure that, all of the available themes go through a rigorous series of tests.

Each theme is carefully scrutinized by at least two, if not four, of Automattic’s Theme Team focussing on code quality, usability, and potential theme-specific anomalies. The result is a theme that “just works” out of the box, with no annoying bugs or usability quirks.

Traditionally, things like this have been closely guarded secrets, but Automattic has publicly released their theme guidelines so anyone can benefit from them. These guidelines, are not a requirement if you want to just develop a theme for WordPress in general, but they are still some great coding practices worth following if you want your theme to “just work” too.




  1. Clearsite (2 comments.) says:

    And thank you very much Automattic. Indeed some great coding practices to follow when developing WordPress themes.

  2. Jake Spurlock (1 comments.) says:

    This is a good condensed version of what we have to do to develop themes for VIP program. There we have a little more leeway as far as custom plugins tho.

  3. Sizwe (7 comments.) says:

    James, thanks for the link to the guidelines – a lot of common sense stuff and some new pointers there I found helpful. Definitely useful overall from a developers point of view given that Automattic is obviously more likely to consider (and have more info on!) the future evolution of the WordPress platform in terms of theme design. Hopefully the designers of premium themes like Genesis etc take note of these too.

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