The maintenance life cycle: start here
This section is for designers who have released a theme and now carry it. A theme lives as long as Exponential, PHP and browsers keep moving; each of them changes something every year. Maintenance is what keeps your users' sites working.
The cycle in one picture
- Watch what changes: Exponential releases, PHP versions, libraries, browsers.
- Test your theme against each change in an upgrade test environment.
- Audit the release: accessibility, Content Security Policy, look in light and dark and at zoom, performance.
- Fix and release a new version, security fixes first.
- Communicate: changelog, release notes, deprecations, and one day the end of life or a handover.
A reading order
- The life cycle of a theme, A support policy for your theme.
- Compatibility: Following Exponential releases, Reading a changelog as a designer, A compatibility matrix, PHP version compatibility.
- Testing: An upgrade test environment, Upgrade testing, step by step.
- Audits: Accessibility, CSP, Visual regression, Performance.
- Security: Security fixes in themes, Handling security reports, Publishing a security release.
- Change and endings: A deprecation policy, Breaking changes, End of life, Handing a theme over.
- Forks and community: Forking a theme, Rebranding a fork, fairly, Contributing back upstream.
Every page of this section
Related pages
- Release and upgrade planning
- Distributing a theme: start here
- Free documentation: this page is free to copy, translate and improve under the GNU FDL 1.3.
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