Michael Wales

Simpla, the theme you see here was released just over 4 years ago. Since that time Wordpress has deprecated a number of its template tags – the functions theme developers use to bring Wordpress’ functionality into their designs.

I took it upon myself to run through this theme, looking for any of the deprecated functions and replacing them with their updated versions. Although the theme still works, today, with these deprecated functions that functionality could cease at any moment.

Surprisingly, the majority of the theme has withstood the test of time. I only notice two issues: the get_settings() tag in header.php and the wp_list_cats tag in sidebar.php.

The two snippets below reflect the altered portions of the code, bringing Simpla in-line with Wordpress 2.9.2 (although I believe the actual deprecation took place many, many versions ago).

In the header, get_settings() is used to make the title of the blog link back to the home page. This snippet makes use of the new get_option() function, which allows us to provide a default value in the second parameter (I just hard-coded in what my blog URL should be) which would be used in-case this option went mysteriously missing from our database. For an added bonus, I’ve included the rel=”home” microformat as well.

Our sidebar was using the wp_list_cats() function. We’re going to replace that with the newer wp_list_categories() function. We’ll pass this function a string of arguments, which will allow us to display the number of posts within each category and suppress the default heading and <ul></ul> wrapper that the function places around the list (since we’re using our own header).