Last week I worked on an old WordPress theme that had information hard-coded into it. There were tables, images and included files all coded directly into the WordPress theme itself. While the site owner could update pages and posts he couldn’t update the site menu.
Why would anyone hard code anything into a WordPress theme? Today there’s no good reason to to do this, but years ago it was a common practice. Themes weren’t updated as frequently as they are today so there wasn’t a big risk of losing custom coding. The option for navigation menus didn’t exist in the early years of WordPress. Also themes didn’t have as many options as they do today. To compensate for the lack of choices some developers hard-coded items into WordPress themes.
The site owner I worked with last week didn’t want to change how his site looked; he just wanted to be able to update his menu. To fix the problem I recreated the look and feel of the old theme by using the professional version of the Weaver Xreme theme. The site looks the same, but it has no hard-coded items. Also the site is now mobile friendly without the use of a special plugin.
Contact me if you’d like to get rid of your WordPress theme with hard-coded items. I can help.
