Installing a new WordPress theme should be one click, well in a fantisy world maybe. I’m going to take you through the steps to getting your newly found theme ready for use.

Check your theme for the not so nice

After downloading your newly found WordPress theme unzip the files look for a file called functions.php with a text editor. Look for anything that looks like this:

What we have here is a cheap and easy encryption method. The bad news is we don’t know what the heck is in there. It could be anything from simple link back code to a algorithm allowing backend access to your WordPress dashboard.

If you find code even remotely like this don’t use the theme. Maybe another day I’ll show how to decode this.

Next look in the image directory; There should not be any text or php files in this directory. If you find one take a look for the same type code as above.

When I tear into a theme I open every file looking for any encription. I have seen themes with link backs in the 404 files too.

Title and Keywords

Many theme designers are very lazy when it comes to the title and keywords.  Most will use a very simple title such as this:

<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></title>

So lets get started, open the header.php file.
I would suggest changing it to something like this:

<title>
<?php
if (is_home()) {
echo bloginfo(’name’); echo “: “; echo bloginfo(’description’);
} elseif (is_404()) {
echo ‘404 Not Found’;
} elseif (is_category()) {
echo ‘Topics:’; wp_title(”);
} elseif (is_search()) {
echo ‘Search Results’;
} elseif (is_day() || is_month() || is_year() ) {
echo ‘Archives:’; wp_title(”);
} else {
echo wp_title(”);
$subtitle = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘Subtitle’, $single = true);
if($subtitle !== ”) { echo ‘: ‘ . $subtitle; }
} ?>
</title>

Keywords

Most theme designers will not offer any keywords or will often use their own in the keywords meta tags.

so find this:

and change theme to your keywords.

WordPress Version

This is meta tag that is really not needed. You really don’t want hackers to know what version of WordPress your using. So just remove this entire meta tag.

Footer

Now open the footer.php file and look for the that encrypted code as we talked about before. Most themers who make themes for sponsors will add encryption so that you don’t remove the sponsor’s link.

But then again, there could be more in the code than just some simple link code.

Tracking code

Now don’t forget to add your tracking code for google analytic, mybloglog….

Did I miss anything?