Agenda for 2017 January 24

The Theme Review Team holds a meeting weekly and we encourage all members to attend.

Channel: #themereview | Time: Tuesday at 18:00 UTC 18:00 UTC

Topics:

Demo & starter content

In December we discussed what restrictions we wanted to apply to demo and starter content.

  • We define placeholder content as “Anything that is shown that you cannot pull from the user’s install” (10 thumbsup)
  • There must be a capability check so that placeholder content is only shown to logged in users.
  • For starter content the content provided by WordPress coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. must be used with an exception of images. (9 thumbsup)

Improving theme author experience

In the last meeting we discussed improving the theme author experience. @ilovewpcom has come up with a few suggestions how we can do this.

  • The theme upload process can be improved to reduce the rate of abandonment. Additionally encouraging theme authors to continue to improve on their themes which would decrease the amount of issues spotted on the first review. Themes with less issues would lead to less subsequent reviews and quicker approval times.
  • On the/themes/ page there is no login link. On the Upload Theme page it doesn’t show  your current account. Related Meta Ticket #meta-1050
  • The third UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. issue is that even after getting to your account, there is no easy way to see all your current tickets (with themes in the queue). You have to remember or dig through emails in order to get to TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/., and even then you can’t easily see your current tickets which is difficult and confusing. (@grapplerulrich has create a new report [26]  that will show all of the tickets for themes that the user has uploaded.)

@ilovewpcom has come up with simple suggestions that would have a positive effect on the whole authorship/reviewing process. There are 5 simple mock-ups.

  • The red boxes in the first 3 screenshots show what has been added to the currently existing design.
  • The last 2 screenshots are new pages (including a new “Tickets” tab).

PHP7 Support

I propose to help users switch easily to PHP7 for their websites, themes on the w.org repo should be PHP7 compatible. This would mean themes should not have any PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. notices when running in PHP7. This is not be something reviewers will actively needs to test. There will be an automated check with the new Theme Check pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party that can check for PHP7 support. In the meantime you can the PHP Compatibility Checker plugin. The Theme Preview Site is now running PHP7 also.

Theme Review Shindig

The next shindig is the weekend of February 4. The livecast will focus on hooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same. and filters.

If you have any topics, then please reply to this post and include the topic, along with a brief description of what you would like to discuss.