New theme tags have arrived

It’s been nearly a year since we got all the results from the theme directory survey. One of the things that the team believed to be low-hanging fruit was an overhaul of the theme tags system to something a bit more modern and useful for today’s WordPress users.

After several rounds of discussion here on the blog and 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/., we came up with a proposal to overhaul the tags used.

Today, I’m happy to announce that we’re rolling out new and updated tags, which should make filtering themes just a little bit better.

On the theme tags page, we have a working draft of all the new tags.

What does this mean for theme authors?

Theme authors should start updating their themes with the new tags. In particular, we have some awesome new subject tags to better categorize what types of themes y’all are building.

Take a look at the tags that have been removed and the tags that have been added in the lists below. You’ll want to remove the “removed” tags from your theme’s style.css and add any new tags that are relevant to your theme.

This is the 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. in your theme’s style.css that looks like this:

Tags: one-column, featured-images, microformats, post-formats, sticky-post, threaded-comments, translation-ready

What tags were removed?

The following tags have been removed. At the moment, Theme Check will only give a warning for these until everything is fully integrated into coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. WP.

Colors:

All color tags have been removed.

  • black
  • blue
  • brown
  • gray
  • green
  • orange
  • pink
  • purple
  • red
  • silver
  • tan
  • white
  • yellow
  • dark
  • light

Layouts:

  • responsive-layout
  • fixed-layout
  • fluid-layout

Features:

  • blavatar

Subjects:

  • photoblogging
  • seasonal

What are the new tags?

The following tags have been added to the existing tags.

Layouts:

  • grid-layout

Features:

  • footer-widgets

Subjects:

  • blog
  • e-commerce
  • education
  • entertainment
  • food-and-drink
  • holiday
  • news
  • photography
  • portfolio

History of the changes

I’m sure there are questions about why certain tags were removed or certain tags were not added. The changes were the result of user and theme author surveys with exhaustive discussions. Many of your questions have been answered in these discussions about decisions that were made. I’m sure anyone on the team will be happy to discuss further though.

Here’s the list of discussions and other info about how the tags got overhauled:

Changing/Adding/Removing tags in the future

This change set is not the final changes to tags. Tags should always be fluid and representative of what users are searching for and what types of themes are being created.

In the April 26th meeting we agreed to have a “tags review” once a year. Therefore, in January, we will reevaluate the current list of tags and decide if changes need to be made again. This will give a chance for more people to be involved in case they missed it this year. It will also give us some sort of semi-formal process of evaluating the tags on an ongoing basis.

If there’s a particular tag that you really want to see in the list, be prepared to make your case in the next round. I’m sure there are other like-minded team members who want to see the same tag.