New WP.org Theme Update

It’s been two weeks since we started switching Rosetta sites to using the new theme. Since then a good amount of bugs were fixed and missing features added. If sites have showcase items for example, they now get displayed properly and replace the global showcase links.

Custom slug for download page
Sites can now declare any page their downloads page, simply by assigning the Download page template, and are no longer limited to the default txt-download. When adding a page to the navigation menuNavigation Menu A theme feature introduced with Version 3.0. WordPress includes an easy to use mechanism for giving various control options to get users to click from one place to another on a site. that has either the txt-download slug or the Download page template assigned, it will automatically converted to the download button you’ve seen on the global wp.org site. So far I’ve always added that page to the menu when switching to the new theme.

No Built-in Contact Form
With the switch we decided not to continue maintaining the contact form page template, but rather have sites use Jetpack’s contact form builder. The experience there is superior to what we had so far, and more importantly it makes it theme-independent, meaning it’s not something that would need to be carried over from theme to theme.

Switching Remaining Sites
So far we’ve switched sites when their translations reached 100%—19 so far. As discussed in this morning’s polyglots chat, we’ll start switching over the remaining sites a week from now, with the goal of having that completed by the time WCUS happens.

Please let me know in the comments about questions or concerns, or—if you find a bug—please head over to #2861-meta and make a note there. The transition has been as smooth as it could be so far, it would be great if we could continue that 🙂

Thanks!