This document contains guidelines for websites built by the Office of Website and Social Media Management at Texas Christian University. It is for all our team members and partners who contribute content to TCU websites.
By maintaining consistency in coding styles and conventions, we can ease the burden of legacy code maintenance, and reduce the risk of breakage in the future. Following these best practices will help optimize page loading, performance, and maintainable code, and ensure a solid web management structure.
WordPress Codex
Always refer to the WordPress codex website for instructions on how to build themes, widgets, and plugins.
WordPress Themes should be coded using the following standards:
- Use well-structured, error-free PHP and valid HTML. See WordPress Coding Standards
- Use clean, valid CSS. See CSS Coding Standards
- Follow design guidelines in Site Design and Layout
Plugins
WordPress Plugins allow easy modification, customization, and enhancement of a WordPress blog. A WordPress Plugin is a program, or a set of one or more functions, written in the PHP scripting language to add a specific set of features or services to the WordPress weblog, which can be seamlessly integrated using access points and methods provided by the WordPress Plugin Application Program Interface (API).
Documents