williampatton 12:23 pm on December 4, 2019  

Questions about the Future of Themes

This week we held a meeting at the last minute in the #themereview slackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel (you’ll need an account to see it). The goal of the meeting was to discuss where themes are going in the future.

We (the TRT reps) do not have all the answers but we do think this discussion is important to have and to keep open going forward.

We had a handful of questions that we wanted to get an answer on:

  • Is it time to allow theme authors to use what is available from the editor?
  • How can theme authors be more involved with the editor building experience and influence where it is going so that it is going where they need it?
  • In what ways does future editor plans affect themes?

How can we, as the people that build themes, influence the direction the editor is going in if the destination has already been decided?

William Patton

Matías Ventura offered up specifically these 2 things which we can help with that are not yet decided.

We made a proposal to the Theme Review Team and are seeking opinions from the team and from theme authors:

My proposal is firstly about allowing blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. templates into themes. Secondly it is about the pros/cons of including custom blocks directly.

William Patton

Ultimately we want to allow theme authors the ability to make use of all the features the editor can offer. Even the experimental ones, we think it’s important that experiments are done by real people to solve real-world problems.

The issue highlighted with allowing all themes to do this is that it results in a type of lock-in which we generally want to avoid at all costs. We also don’t want to have things exposed to end-users that may break in the future.

For experimental themes what was suggested is that instead of standard theme submissions and the queue authors could test these things and place them on GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ for us to check out. I think this is a good idea and something we will try to make happen.

We had 2 final points we wanted to get across to act as open-ended questions we can work on in the coming weeks and months. Please feel free to ponder these and share in the comments any insights you may have.

  • Theme authors: We propose we allow themes to experiment with current and future features. We will tag them as experimental . What are the thoughts on this?
    • Sidenote: this is likely best done not in the standard review system but instead on GitHub or similar.
  • Editor builders: How best can we help if we do not yet know ReactReact React is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to reason about, construct, and maintain stateless and stateful user interfaces. https://reactjs.org/. or have the time to look through the thousands of issues on GitHub.

As for ways to help out there is work ongoing to create a demo space here: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/blob/master/lib/demo-block-templates/index.html

As for a few action points here is what we need to do before we have another discussion about this.

  1. Get a list of things that are in discussion and relates to themes (Josepha has kindly offered to get us the inside scoop on this.)
  2. Get a list of blocks that are missing for themes right now (TRT and theme authors are in a good position to tell people what they are missing and any sticking points they have.)

Thanks to everyone who attended the meeting for this. It was very short notice so if anyone wants to bring anything up that was not discussed or considered in advance feel free to pop by #themereview channel and let us know.

kafleg 9:07 am on November 25, 2019
Tags: ,   

Theme Review Team Meeting Agenda for November 26, 2019

November 26th is the 4th Tuesday of the month. The Theme Review Team (TRT) has a meeting at 17:00 UTC. We encourage all members and anyone interested to attend.

We usually have a fixed agenda to discuss. However, this week we don’t have anything special to discuss with the team. So we would like to request all members to comment below if you want to discuss any theme-related topics.

We will start our meeting with the updates that happened since the last meeting and what TRT leads are doing and working on. After that, we will go through the proposed topics and the meeting will end with the open floor where we can discuss various theme-related topics.

Meetings usually last around 60 minutes. Attend and share your valuable feedback and suggestions.

Channel: #themereview  Time: Tuesday, 26th November 2019, 17:00 UTC

#meeting

#announcements, #meeting

dingo-d 6:13 pm on November 12, 2019
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Meeting Notes for Tuesday 12th November 2019

A meeting was held with the proposed agenda.

The following is the recap of the meeting, you can read the meeting transcript in the slack archives (a Slack account is required).

Updates

In the past seven days:

  • 352 tickets were opened
  • 354 tickets were closed:
    • 333 tickets were made live
      • 5 new Themes were made live
      • 328 Theme updates were made live
      • 3 more were approved but are waiting to be made live
    • 21 tickets were not-approved
    • 0 tickets were closed-newer-version-uploaded

Suspended themes submission

It was agreed that if the authors’ theme was suspended you cannot submit it again with a different name and account.

Theme Review Team Badge Assignment

We got the access to the badges so we are calling people to comment if they did the review so that we may give them the badges 🙂

They need to reply to the pinned slack message, and we’ll look at the reviews and decide: if someone did a poor, incomplete review, that we had to reopen for very basic issues, then no badges will be rewarded.

We need to check the review quality and dedication. A complete review is necessary in order to get the badge.

Get Ready for WordPress 5.3

Theme authors should get ready for the upcoming WP 5.3. You can read more in the make post.

If there will be any problems we encourage theme authors to contact us on slackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..

Open floor

The ticket for the core to read the PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. version for themes was opened (and closed shortly after). The coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. themes were updated to move required fields to style.css instead of readme.txt.

The fields the theme authors should have in the style.css are

Requires PHP and Requires at least.

Core won’t be affected if those fields are in the style.css but your theme will benefit from having them, so we recommend authors adding them.

@aristath recommended using the code from Justin Tadlock’s theme for handling graceful failures: https://github.com/justintadlock/mythic/blob/master/functions.php

The Theme SnifferTheme Sniffer Theme Sniffer is a plugin utilizing custom sniffs for PHP_CodeSniffer that statically analyzes your theme and ensures that it adheres to WordPress coding conventions, as well as checking your code against PHP version compatibility. The plugin is available from the plugin directory and Github. Themes are not required to pass the Theme Sniffer scan without warnings or errors to be included in the theme directory. is undergoing some updates and the releaseRelease A release is the distribution of the final version of an application. A software release may be either public or private and generally constitutes the initial or new generation of a new or upgraded application. A release is preceded by the distribution of alpha and then beta versions of the software. will be out soon. One of the changes will be the above validation – readme.txt will no longer be checked, only style.css will be checked.

#meeting, #meeting-notes, #trt

kafleg 7:44 am on November 11, 2019  

Theme Review Team Meeting Agenda for November 12, 2019

Theme review team (TRT) conducts a meeting on the second and fourth Tuesday of the month. Along with the fixed agendas, we have open floor meeting at the end where you can ask or share anything related to themes.

We encourage all members and anyone interested to attend.

Channel: #themereview | Time: Tuesday, 12th November 2019, 17:00 UTC

Meeting Agenda

  1. Weekly Updates
  2. If your theme is already suspended, you can’t just submit it again with a different name and account
  3. Theme Review Team Badge Assign – Call for username whose badge is missing.
  4. Get Ready for WordPress 5.3
  5. Open floor

Meetings usually last around 60 minutes.

The discussion about the meeting agenda can be held in the comments below. You are encouraged to propose the topic for the agenda.

#meeting

dingo-d 6:23 pm on October 22, 2019
Tags: , ,   

Meeting Notes for Tuesday 22nd October 2019

A meeting was held with the proposed agenda.

The following is the recap of the meeting, you can read the meeting transcript in the slack archives (a Slack account is required).

Updates

In the past seven days:

  • 300 tickets were opened
  • 305 tickets were closed:
    • 276 tickets were made live
      • 12 new Themes were made live
      • 264 Theme updates were made live
      • 3 more were approved but are waiting to be made live
    • 28 tickets were not-approved
    • 1 ticket was closed-newer-version-uploaded

We removed some inactive reviewers from trusted lists and added one new reviewer who has the ability to self-assign the tickets.
The trusted reviewers who were inactive for more than 6 month period were removed.

How to make an interest in Review Shindig?

The idea of a Shindig was to inspire people to do more reviews, but also to give new contributors a chance to ask questions and introduce themselves.

One idea was to maybe rename them to ‘workshops’ and make it more about teaching. Also, we could do shindigs where we make introductions about how sniffer works, and how sniffs work.

There was no concrete solution, but for now, we won’t do them until we sort out other priorities (automation tools, etc.).

Follow Up – Featured page issue

The suggestion that was made at the last meeting was that a curated list of themes would be made and that a group of people would decide on which theme gets featured.

This issue was polarizing because of the possible corruption it would bring. How to check the people who are deciding on which theme would be featured?

In the end, the following was decided:

We’ll try with the curated list. Once every 2 or 3 weeks, we’ll hold a meeting where people can recommend themes based on their unique looks, code quality and other merits (to be fully agreed upon by the team reps in the following days). The reps will then decide which to put on the featured list. We’ll see how this works for a few months, gauge what the community thinks about this and see how it goes.

The team reps will hold a meeting where we’ll agree on the fine details about this decision and publish this on the make post.

Other news

@aristath made progress on the color-alpha package. The color-alpha control ended up a bit more complicated than initially planned and it will have 2 modes of operation:

  • Simple (default)
  • Advanced (opt-in)

Both modes look, feel & work exactly the same, the difference is in the way the data is saved.

There are some details in the README.md file and more details/instructions/examples will be documented in the releaseRelease A release is the distribution of the final version of an application. A software release may be either public or private and generally constitutes the initial or new generation of a new or upgraded application. A release is preceded by the distribution of alpha and then beta versions of the software. post on make blog.

The triage meeting will be postponed (I cannot attend it due to personal reasons).

The look of the themes front page was changed to look a bit more like the plugins page.
In addition to styling changes, the upload button was removed from the top bar to prevent uploading themes by mistake – people used to use it thinking that would upload themes to their own websites.

We still haven’t seen a decrease in the erroneous theme uploads so we need to see how to further prevent this.

#meeting, #meeting-notes, #trt