Guidelines For Authors

For the most part, authoring Micro Themes is all about your own creativity. But we would be remiss if we didn’t give you some guidelines for creating a Micro Theme that get accepted on to our marketplace.

Rules

1. Don’t breach copyright.
2. Don’t breach copyright. Worth repeating because we take this very seriously. Any designs that you submit to us must be entirely your own.
3. Fully complete the meta.txt file in Microthemer before exporting your theme as a zip file.
4. Include a screenshot image called screenshot.(jpeg|jpg|gif|png) in the dimensions 220px by 165px.
5. Only include files with the following extensions in your theme: jpg, jpeg, gif, png, txt, json, psd, ai.
6. Check that your theme renders properly in the following browsers  (IE7+, Firefox, Chrome, Safari).
7. Important: Micro Themes for free WordPress themes will only be accepted if the parent theme can be downloaded from the WordPress theme repository. Micro Themes for premium parent themes will only be accepted if the parent theme can be purchased from an established marketplace and the author has authorised Themeover to exhibit their theme. Please see our list of premium WordPress themes that fit the bill.

Guidelines

1. Try to keep your theme name short and descriptive. If you created a micro theme with a blue colour scheme for instance, an appropriate name might be “The Big Blue” or “Oceanic”.
2. Use a Blank Slate Theme as your starting point. This will limit the choice of parent themes you can create Micro Themes for, but there are significant advantages. Blank slate themes follow a certain structure in terms of what selectors are added and how they are organised into sections. This consistency makes it easier for end users to customise Micro Themes. Also, once you understand the structure Blank Slate Themes follow, you will be able to create Micro Themes for a variety of parent themes with ease.
3. When you override a CSS rule such as “#branding img”, just type “#branding img”. You don’t need to type “#wrapper #branding img” (to ensure it is specific enough) because the styles you define will come after the theme’s default CSS stylesheet in the HTML head section. It’s always best to keep things simple.
4. Remember to click the “close all” link when you have finished defining your styles in the Microthemer UI. Microthemer remembers the arrangement of your UI and it may be confusing for users if they load your micro theme and find that lots of CSS selectors are haphazardly open. Also, it’s messy.
5. When you give a CSS selector a label, and it is for an element that’s function is purely to wrap another element, use the terminology of “Wrapper” as opposed to “Wrap” (for consistency).
6. When labelling links, and they’re various states, use the terminology “Link Hover” or “Link Visited” as opposed to “Hover Links” or “Visited Links”. You can use this as a rule of thumb – always start with the element (e.g. Image) and then the state (e.g. left aligned). Again, this is to achieve some kind of consistency for the end user.
7. When ordering your sections and CSS selectors, try to match the ordering of the elements on the page – from top to bottom, left to right.
8. Try not to put more than 15 CSS selectors in 1 section. Consider breaking the selectors into 2 sections if this happens.