WordPress Deprecated Tags

When building a WordPress theme, one thing that you might immediately get called out for (by other designers mostly) is the use of deprecated template tags.

Essentially, WordPress occasionally deprecates certain tags and replaces them with better, many times more descriptive, template tags. These updates usually come alongside a major upgrades in the WordPress code itself (like when WP went to version 2.0, 2.1, etc.).

When WP deprecates tags, it is considered best practice to “upgrade” your themes (custom and free) to replace the old tags with the new ones. For instance, the wp_list_cats template tag has been depreciated and replaced with the wp_list_categories tag. Notice the red text at the top of the each one of these pages that I just linked to. On the wp_list_cats page, you’ll notice that there is a clear iteration that the tag has been deprecated. The good thing is, they tell you which tag to use instead, which will save you a lot headaches when looking for the newest tag.

But when upgrading to the newer tags, you may also notice that some of them are not compatible with older versions of WordPress. This means that if you’re using the older versions of WordPress, these tags are going to spit back a nice little error message.

So when building WordPress themes, make sure you check the tags you use to see if they have been depreciated or not. If they have, go ahead and switch them over. But even if you forget to do this, most (if not all) of the deprecated tags will still work in the newer versions of WordPress, so don’t worry about it too much.

Posted May 2, 2007 by Nathan Rice | Filed Under Blog 

Comments

4 Responses to “WordPress Deprecated Tags”

  1. Sadish on May 2nd, 2007 9:32 pm

    I think the word is “deprecated” and not “depreciated”.
    You may want to look it up anyway.

    Sadish

  2. Ed Sutherland on May 3rd, 2007 9:07 am

    Deprecate means to plead against; Depreciate means to belittle, according to the New American Webster Dictionary. Designers depreciated the value of the WordPress tag that developers want to deprecate.

  3. Nathan Rice on May 3rd, 2007 9:36 am

    haha, good looking out guys :-) Funny how one letter can be so influential.

    Thanks!

  4. WordPress 2.3 Theme Backward Compatibility | Nathan Rice on September 24th, 2007 4:48 pm

    [...] been developing themes for a while now, you’ve got to be aware of tags that have been deprecated. For instance, let’s say you wanted to list your categories in the sidebar. Normally, you [...]

Leave a Reply