Get in the habit of commenting throughout your design

There are still a lot of blog themes out there with little or no comments in the design. If your simply uploading the theme and changing the logo then this isn’t something that you will not really have problems with. However, anything beyond that i would strongly advise adding comments throughout your design.

2 minutes adding comments to your templates and coding can save you 10-20 minutes trying to get to grips with your design again at a later date.

This applies to bloggers who are just making small edits to there and also to those who have created their theme from scratch. Try and get in the habit of adding a comment to any significant change to your templates.

When i talk about a significant change i mean something that will not take 2 seconds to find at a later date which is usually the case with the majority of plugins or modifcations you make.

In the past i have been stupidly arrogant and lazy about this kind of thing. If i’ve been working a lot on a site and know the files inside out i have got lazy and left out comments. It’s only when i come back to the design 6 months later and i have’t got a clue where everything works that i kick myself for not commentating the file better.

How do you add Comments

You add comments differently in different programming languages but since the majority of popular blogs are coded with PHP and designed using HTML and CSS, those are the ones i use here.

In HTML the basic code you use is this :

<!-- Add your Comment Here -->

The comment is not displayed publicly - its just a reminder to you about something. For example, some wordpress themes have dozens of css divisions in each template. It can get very confusing sometimes when your not sure which closing div tag belongs to which div

Therefore i always make sure i leave a comment explaining what division its closing like this :

<div id="sidebar">
sidebar code
</div> <!– End of Sidebar –>


In CSS you can start a comment using /* and end a comment using */.

For example :

/* Sidebar CSS Code */
#sidebar {
width:200px;
float:right;
}


In PHP all you need to do to comment is add // at the start of every line you want to comment.

For example the top of your index.php file could look like

<?php
//
// this is the index.php file
//


Summary

Unless you’ve got a photographic memory, i would strongly advise getting into the habit of adding comments whenever you are working on your files. It really can save you a lot of hassle in the long run.

Good luck,
Kevin