Proposal: Default Theme Task Force for 2024

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In May, a proposal was published with a suggestion to retire some of the older, lesser used default themes. With the release of Twenty Twenty-Four, there are now 14 default themes maintained by the project, making it difficult to effectively maintain all of them. Additionally, retroactively adding support for new 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. editor features is important to ensure that users can unlock the power of the block editor while using these themes. This is becoming increasingly harder to do in a timely manner with the high standard of quality our users deserve.

After some good discussion in the comment section, Matt (@matt) joined in and clarified that the original intention for each default theme was to maintain them forever. He issued a challenge to rethink how the team approaches the maintenance of these default themes to make them easier to maintain, and more future-compatible.

In response to that request, I submitted “Improving the maintenance of older default themes” as a topic for the Community Summit in August. This topic was accepted, and a fantastic session took place with many of the top theme-focused contributors from the community in attendance.

I highly recommend reading the raw notes in their entirety before responding to this proposal and participating in this discussion, but for the sake of including the context of the important takeaways from that discussion, here are next steps and potential action items that were identified:

Consider having a Theme Wrangler for every release.

Explore moving default themes to 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/ (with sync to SVNSVN Subversion, the popular version control system (VCS) by the Apache project, used by WordPress to manage changes to its codebase.), moving only the most critical issues from tracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. to move over.

Explore creating style variations and patterns based on past default themes, as a way to “blockify” the older themes.

Explore setting up visual regressionregression A software bug that breaks or degrades something that previously worked. Regressions are often treated as critical bugs or blockers. Recent regressions may be given higher priorities. A "3.6 regression" would be a bug in 3.6 that worked as intended in 3.5. testing for default themes

How do we improve the feedback loopLoop The Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post. https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop. from people building themes in GB?

Improve default theme docs.

All of these are reasonable next steps and worth exploring further as potential changes. However, after considering this topic some more and discussing with @chanthaboune, it’s become clear that the first step to any solution to this problem is cleaning up after ourselves. At the heart of the problem is not a tooling or philosophy problem, it’s a bottleneck of available contributor time with an interest in supporting these themes.

At the time of publishing, there are 436 open tickets in the Bundled Theme component, 53 of which have not received any response. This list of outstanding tickets needs to be properly groomed and addressed before any tooling changes can be considered.

Creating a Theme Task Force

This post proposes the creation of a contributor working group with the goal of tackling the Bundled Theme component ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. backlog, focusing on one or two themes at a time and using their best judgment to:

Triagetriage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. the list of open tickets for the Bundled Theme component.
Address bugs in a future-proof way.
Individually evaluate enhancements and feature requests, closing any that are no longer relevant or not supportive of project priorities.

One criticism of how default themes are maintained has been that updates are always released at the same time as WordPress major and minor releases. After researching and investigating why this is the case, no specific reasons were discovered that indicated this is a requirement.

Recently, there have been a few occasions where updates to default themes were released independent of WordPress ones, and these have gone quite well. It is recommended that this practice continues as a part of this proposal in an effort to more efficiently progress through this large backlog of tickets. Theme updates can be released as often as necessary. Theme updates accompanying WordPress major and minor releases are not barred, but rather welcome when deemed necessary as supplemental to any other updates published by this group.

While each theme receives increased individual attention, the state of support for the block editor and all of its features will be audited and evaluated.

Once this ticket list is under control, further discussion can be had around potential tooling changes (GitHub vs SVN), frameworks or methodologies that can be implemented to make maintenance easier, etc.

Summary & Volunteers

In total, default themes account for over 10% of all WordPress installs. While some are less used, the active sites for each of them represent site owners and end users that deserve our attention and consideration. In order to better support them in a future compatible way unlocking the block editor, this house keeping initiative is a necessity.

If this initiative speaks to you and piques your interest, please reach out directly on WordPress.org Slack instance or Matrix homeserver to @desrosj or @chanthaboune, or volunteer in the comments below.

Props @chanthaboune for pre-publish review.

Jonathan Desrosiers 4:28 pm on December 5, 2023

+make.wordpress.org/themes/
KafleG 8:00 am on December 6, 2023

Thank you @desrosj for writing this proposal.

As a themes team repTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts., I think that the themes team should handle this task force by encouraging more theme authors to help maintain coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. themes.

Making it independent from core releases and updating the theme based on necessity. That will create more trust in the core theme users.

We also started developing community themes which is an awesome work experience that I feel personally. And we can follow similar patterns for maintaining those themes.

1. Handover the responsibility to the themes team
2. The Themes team will make a team(with more experienced on building themes and this can be like leadership or advisory team and they will monitor the work)
3. The themes team will call for volunteers to maintain the themes and make a team(Based on the performance we can give them access)
4. Themes team will run weekly/biweekly triagetriage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. meeting
5. Themes will be maintained/developed in 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/
6. Coordinate with the core team before releasing the updates

In the current scenario, after the 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. themes are introduced, the themes team has less workload than before. Because reviewing themes does not take a long time.

So, the themes team can take care of the core themes and it’s also a responsibility for the themes team.

Thank you
- Jonathan Desrosiers 4:05 pm on December 8, 2023
  
  While I agree that the Themes team is the most logical place for this responsibility to reside, I’m not sure if that is the right move to make at this time.
  
  However, nothing stops any members of the Themes team from helping with this initiative. I picture it as the area in a Venn diagram where the CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and Theme teams overlap. As for the reasons why I feel this way, let me respond to some points you made below.
  We also started developing community themes which is an awesome work experience that I feel personally. And we can follow similar patterns for maintaining those themes.
  
  I think this is an important and vital initiative. The definition of what constitutes a theme is undergoing a drastic change, and where that definition ends up is not yet clear. I feel that the community themes are important to exploring this while also giving site owners more choices for themes that properly support Full Site Editing.
  
  Because default themes are a foundational part of the Core software, the process of maintaining requires a much different mindset and process. I’m not sure that the same patterns and practices will directly translate. I’m open to working on better documentation of these differences and intricacies, though. After that, perhaps we can perform a better evaluation.
  The themes team will call for volunteers to maintain the themes and make a team(Based on the performance we can give them access)
  
  I think that’s already exactly what this is doing, just the Core team asking for theme contributors to help out with this specific set of high impact themes.
  Themes will be maintained/developed in 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/
  
  This was one of the action items/take aways from the Community Summit session. However, after considering it further, I’m not sure how feasible this currently is.
  
  Because default themes are bundled in the built WordPress packages, there would need to be some exploration into how to include the themes in those packages if they’re no longer in the same repository.
  
  I’d also add that it’s potentially risky to do this. As an example, say GitHub goes down when we’re attempting to publish a release. The themes could potentially end up missing and this would cause problems.
  
  That said, contributions to the themes through GitHub are always welcome. It’s just not realistic to switch the canonical location where we maintain them to individual repositories on GitHub at this time.
- Maggie Cabrera 8:47 am on January 9, 2024
  
  @kafleg I would love to see the Themes team be more officially involved in the development/maintenance of themes in general. I would love to discuss this with you and see how we can make that a reality. I agree with Jonathan that in the case of the default themes the responsibility would be more of a joint thing with CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. too, but in my opinion the initiative and maybe the leadership should come from Theme experts.

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Welcome!

Communication

Creating a Theme Task Force

Summary & Volunteers

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