Justin Tadlock

Themes really have no business altering feeds. That’s plugin territory. So, I’ll leave that out of the discussion about how themes should handle the link post format.

Let’s look at WPTavern.com as an example. For your “aside” posts, you’re breaking user expectations with the post title. On your home/archive pages, there’s no title for these posts. Of course, it’s relatively easy to figure out how to get to the post permalink page. However, you’re still changing the typical user experience.

I won’t argue that this change in user experience is wrong. Post formats are meant to change the user experience. That’s kind of the point.

Now, let’s look at the “link” post format. People have been using the post title for external links like this for years, long before WordPress ever had a feature called “post formats”. Where do you think the design idea for this came from? It’s from seeing how blogs were already utilizing this feature around the Web. If anything, my expectation is to click on the title and be carried to the actual content, not to a single page that has the same thing I was just looking at.

I’m excepting to click the link to read comments or such on the post but because the title acts as a link, I pretty much have no way of getting there.

You have a valid point here. However, I would argue that the design is wrong if there’s no way to get to the permalink page or see the post comments. There should be a clearly clickable “Permalink” or “Comments” link to get to this page.

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