Hi,
I'm creating a theme, and I intend to share it, so I'm looking for some advice.
For the website I am designing, I am not interested in displaying much of the metadata on the individual item pages. I've figured out how to alter this to display only what I want, but since I'm looking to share the theme, should I leave "<?php echo show_item_metadata(); ?>" in to just display everything and then let individual users change it as they please?
Not sure the etiquette on this, since most people probably won't feel comfortable making any changes to a theme.
We haven't really established a best-practice or etiquette for this. I'm personally torn on the issue. On the one hand, having all the downloadable themes use the same functions helps give users a base with which to work on any theme. On the other, its limiting if you want to design and offer themes for very specific audiences or types of sites, and I can see a lot of potential for more targeted themes.
In the end, its totally up to you as a designer. We'd be happy to add the theme to the theme's repository for other users to download, but it would be good for users downloading the theme, and for you/us in supporting the theme, to be clear about what the theme does (or does not) include. You could just display whatever metadata fields you'd like, and provide a README.txt file with some documentation on which fields are displayed, and how a user could change that.
I'm more than happy to work with you more on this. If you want to add your theme to the addons developer repository and develop there until you're ready for a public release, let me know.