WordPress contributor teams have made several new tools for theme developers in the last month. The new tools should raise the quality of the theme developed for WordPress and improve overall theme development process.
The Theme Review team has bought us a Theme Sniffer plugin that uses custom sniffs for PHP_CodeSniffer to test a theme against WordPress coding standards and check for PHP version compatibility.
The plugin is useful for both theme reviewers and developers who want to get their themes approved for the WordPress.org directory. It includes several optional standards to test against beyond the ruleset for theme review requirements.
The Accessibility Team also published a new tool called WP Theme Auditor that runs Axe tests against a theme for automated accessibility feedback.
Axe is an open source library and testing engine created by the accessibility experts at Deque.
The WP Theme Auditor package can be installed into a theme’s root directory. Developers can then add test cases. Examples are available in the project’s README file. The tests are run against http://one.wordpress.test by default but developers can specify a different test environment URL.
