WordPress theme featured Image . How to code properly

Iam developing a theme . In my index.php I have written code as if a post has featured Image . It will display featured Image but if the post does not have a featured Image I set a default image to display . Please see the attached image . Is that allowed in themeforest . If I upload it for this reason themeforest will hard reject or soft reject

Don’t set a default featured image.

Your theme will not be hard rejected because of that, for sure.

Thanks for your valuable reply

Do you know review process of themeforest. Whether they check the design first and if the design is awesome but the code is poor or some bugs in sanitizing or minor bugs. Whether they hard reject or soft reject

From my experience, 99% of hard rejected items are because of Design. If the design is poor (or if there are to many similar items) they will not even look on the code - the item will be hard rejected and that is.

If the design is ok, they will check the code and tell you if something need to be fixed. So, at this stage you can get only Soft rejected. But, if you don’t fix and continue to upload/apply (several times), you can get Hard rejected.

Again, all this I am writing from my experience - until now all my items was approved (I don’t have any hard rejected item until now). Also, with my first theme, I had 7-8 time soft rejections (all for different things) but after that, when I upload the new item I get max 1-2 times soft rejections. I had also several items approved without any soft rejection.

So, to sum, from my experience the design must be high quality and try to make something “unique”. The code can have some smaller bugs (which of course you will need to fix) but when you finish one project it will much easier (for code part) - you will need just to keep attention on design quality.

Thanks for your brief explanation

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