Per theme plugins?

Question

I'm building a plugin that heavily modifies the commenting section of a blog page. It think that I cannot do this in a way that works with all themes — some CSS has to be tweaked, depending on the particular theme in use.

I'd guess that in the future, the plugin will also store some data in the database. So I suppose it should be a plugin, not a theme. (?)

Hence these questions:

1. Is it possible to in some way indicate that a plugin works with only this and that theme?

2. And then release some fairly simlar versions of the plugin, each version tweaked for a specific group of themes?

3. Or are plugins supposed to work well with... all themes in existance?

4. Can you think of some solution other than per-theme-plugins and/or forking-and-modifing-existing-themes? Perhaps child themes? But, no, then it would not be possible for users-of-my-child-theme to create their own child themes?

Answer 1

There is no way to bind it to a specific theme unless you contact theme authors and they link back to you at some point (on theme activation with yellow message on the top or in their admin menu etc). As you suggested yourself, a plugin is supposed to work with any theme.

Theme and plugin markets could handle this by indicating that their plugins work with their themes only but this is a corporate restriction and cannot be applied technically.

What could be do is when you release something, you could name and describe it so it's pretty much obvious (such as here - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/headway-views/ ). Also, in your plugin you could check for the currently activated theme (see get_current_theme ) and output some error message from within your plugin that it's inappropriate choice.