Twenty Seventeen Kickoff Meeting Notes

Today, we had a kickoff meeting for Twenty Seventeen! See the introductory post for some details.

A few housekeeping notes:

  • Slack archive of meeting.
  • This meeting was short notice, but I plan on posting an agenda each week prior to the meeting.
  • No meeting next week, but watch out for posts here about tasks related to Twenty Seventeen.
  • Next meeting is Sept. 23rd.
  • Meetings are every Friday at 18:00 UTC in #core-themes in 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/..

Our agenda was:

Introduction to Twenty Seventeen

  • This meeting really has two main focuses: Gather help, and a design review.
  • Twenty Seventeen aims to show that the one-page look and feel is possible in a WordPress theme.
  • And the bullet points in the announcement post get directly to that:

A better flow for using a static page as your front page.
Visible edit icons in the CustomizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings., replacing the current hidden shift+click method.
Expanding custom headerHeader The header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes. images to include video (think: atmospheric video headers!).
Dummy content for live previews.

Ways to help

We discussed a few of the above bullet points in more details but tried to stay out of talk of implementation. We focused on how to best break the work up and what the first steps would be. There’s many ways to help with Twenty Seventeen this year that don’t involve the theme itself or code.

Specifically:

  • #19627 Themes should be able to opt-in to a static front pageStatic Front Page A WordPress website can have a dynamic blog-like front page, or a “static front page” which is used to show customized content. Typically this is the first page you see when you visit a site url, like wordpress.org for example.: Document what other services, platforms and themes do to help inform a bunch of things, including page-on-front changes. @melchoyce will take a look at the WordPress.comWordPress.com An online implementation of WordPress code that lets you immediately access a new WordPress environment to publish your content. WordPress.com is a private company owned by Automattic that hosts the largest multisite in the world. This is arguably the best place to start blogging if you have never touched WordPress before. https://wordpress.com/ flow for front page setup and related things to get this started.
  • Dummy content for live previews: @helen described this as: “So, dummy content would be something like a text widgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. with business hours appearing in live preview (currently known in the form of the customizer) if there are no widgets in that area yet. That shows users a) there’s a widget area there (otherwise it’s just empty right now, or maybe has like, a search box and a login link at best), and b) what content might work really well there and what it’s going to look like.”
  • #37974 Add multi-panel feature to pages through add_theme_support: @karmatosed created this ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. and has ideas on how to move forward with it.

Who wants to help?

  • Front page flow: @mor10, @aaroncampbell offered to help here.
  • Video headers: Myself, and @celloexpressions have interest here.
  • Dummy content: @helen will help get this moving.
  • Visible edit icons in the Customizer: We need help here, but should have details soon on this. See: #27403.

If you want to help on any of these, and missed the meeting, no problem! Comment here and I’ll do my best to get you pointed in the right direction.

Design review/feedback

@melchoyce lead the design review:

Here are the current mockups, for reference: https://cloudup.com/cR_df4xfeeG

Mel’s to-dos she’ll be working on in the next week: https://cloudup.com/cRPc_k7MnIb

Points discussed:

  • Extremely wide screens + what happens to images that are not wide enough to be full-bleed.
  • Make sure color contrast requirements are met.
  • Mel wants to explore pull-quote styles and color schemes.
  • Really rock-solid support for non-latin alphabets should be explored.

Questions, Next Steps, Etc.

  • The schedule is listed above.
  • What about browser support? See this issue from Twenty Sixteen, which Twenty Seventeen will follow.

The theme is now on GitHub. A few things to keep in mind:

  • The theme is a fork of Lodestar, a theme designed by Mel and built by @laurelfulford. It’s an excellent base to start with and what you’ll see on GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that 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/.
  • The design isn’t implemented.
  • A lot of other work remains too, and issues will be created in the coming week to help guide the process.

Again, if you want to help, comment here. If you have questions, just ask. It’s time to get to work! 🙂

#4-7, #bundled-theme, #twenty-seventeen