Editorial Policy

This page describes how the guides on this site are produced. It exists so you can judge whether to trust a fix before you run it on your own site.

How a guide is written

Every guide is written against a current WordPress install, not from memory and not from other people's articles. Steps that involve the admin are followed in the admin. Code is run before it is published. Where a fix depends on the server, the hosting stack or the PHP version, the guide says so rather than presenting one environment as universal.

Guides state what we could not verify. If a step behaves differently across hosts, or a setting has moved between WordPress releases, that is written into the guide instead of being smoothed over.

What we will not publish

• Paid placement in tutorials. No vendor pays to appear in a guide, and no guide is written to order.
• Brand roundups. We write selection criteria, trade-offs and failure modes instead of ranked lists, because a ranked list ages badly and rarely matches the reader's situation.
• Steps we have not run. If we cannot test something, we do not describe it as tested.
• Advice that risks your data without saying so. Anything destructive is preceded by the backup step, every time.

Accuracy and corrections

WordPress changes. A guide that was correct at publication can drift, and the most common way that happens is a settings screen moving or a plugin changing its defaults.

Each guide shows its publication date and, where it has been revised, the date of the last substantive change. A revision means the text changed, not that a script touched the file.

If you find something wrong, tell us on the contact page. We would rather correct a guide than leave a broken fix live, and corrections are made to the guide itself rather than buried in a comment.

Independence

The site carries no sponsored guides. Where a well-known product is named, it is because the product is unavoidable in the topic, not because of any commercial relationship. Our position on specific plugins and themes is the same whether or not they have an affiliate programme.

Who writes this

Guides are produced by the ThemesIonic editorial team. Where a guide has a named author, that name appears under the title along with the dates.