Title of Session: Improving maintenance of older default themes
Facilitator: @desrosj
Notetaker 1: @mikachan
Notetaker 2: @zoonini
From the session schedule:
Recently, there was a proposal to retire some old default themes. In response concerns were raised around how to do so. This discussion aims to explore how to maintain older default themes in more sustainable, streamlined methods.
Key Points
- Concerns raised around breaking the promise of supporting all default themes forever, just like we do for CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress..
- Can we write an underlying framework to help support all themes?
- They’re all so different so may be difficult to build a framework to support all of them. It could be a lot of work.
- Older themes are an educational resource for theme developers. By maintaining older themes we are educating developers on how to update their own themes.
- The burden falls on the Core team to maintain themes. Original theme authors often get re-assigned or leave the project.
- How can we help spread the workload?
- Can we onboard more people to maintain themes?
- We have already tried having a default theme maintenance team. This has previously been a burden; 20xx themes are a burden to maintain.
- Why is there only a default theme lead for the last version of the year?
- Why not each release so updates can be bundled in each release?
- Used to have a Theme Wrangler for each release but this dropped off.
- More docs needed for default themes.
- Using the default theme to showcase new features makes it difficult for backwards compatibility.
- Does it have the same impact if we make all default themes 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?
- Is there a world where we could make all default themes as light as possible?
- Default themes can be updated outside of the release cycle. Could we introduce a regular cycle of updating default themes? Theme cycle vs release cycle
- What about designing a method of testing older themes for each release?
Action Items/Next Steps:
- 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 Apache Subversion (often abbreviated SVN, after its command name svn) is a software versioning and revision control system. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS). WordPress core and the wordpress.org released code are all centrally managed through SVN. https://subversion.apache.org/.)
- Pick the most critical issues from tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. to move over
- Consider having a Theme Wrangler for every release
- Explore creating style variations and patterns based on past default themes, as a way to blockify the older themes
- Explore setting up visual regression 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
Raw Notes
Continue reading