Agenda for 2017 April 18

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

Channel: #themereview | Time: Tuesday at 17:00 UTC 17:00 UTC

Recap:

We have changed the team meeting to an hour earlier. New to 17:00 UTC from 18:00 UTC
Last week we changed the team structure. Now we have four team leads/reps and review moderators.

Topics:

This week we want to start defining specific items that we want to prioritise so that we can get back to Matt with an update since out last chat.

Prepare a post comparing the theme and 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 review process to see how we can work towards a goal of making both processes very similar so that any improvements made to one will also profit the other. Responsible: @grapplerulrich
Put a team together to tackle the theme previews as this is a major issue. Get Matt to put resources towards this.
Automation is still a priority to catch common issues and giving us more confidence that themes cannot be shipped that give sites a white screen of death.
Define the minimum requirements that need to be manually reviewed for the themes to be hosted on w.org. The basic items I could think of are checking for licencing, anything illegal, dishonest, or morally offensive.
Agreeing to try out a way to get more feedback from users on different aspects of themes and using the extra data on the theme to rank them appropriately in the repository.

Once we are agree on these items we can get back to Matt and discuss the next steps.

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.

Justin Tadlock 12:35 pm on April 18, 2017

Another obvious one for the minimum requirements would be fatal errors.
- mesmera 7:51 pm on April 18, 2017
  
  🙂
- mesmera 7:53 pm on April 18, 2017
  
  alert(1);
kevinhaig 2:52 pm on April 18, 2017

I would like to see this discussed in a meeting.

Proposal : Only team leads, moderators, the theme reviewer, and the theme author are allowed to comment in tickets.

I have come to the opinion that preview comments are causing more problems then they are doing good. In some recent comments I have seen:

1) Recommendations are not being properly separated from requirements. This is causing authors to recode areas they do not have to recode.

2) Design comments are being made without reference to them not being required for theme approval. Authors that do not understand the difference between requirements and recommendations are recoding.

3) Preview comments are not explicitly stating that the review is not a official review. This is confusing both the author and the Reviewer.

4) Requests for some things required things are not consistent with our current acceptance of requirements. Some requests made in these previews are related to requirements but are not being interpreted correctly. For example trivial content previously allowed is now being requested to be removed. This is also causing confusion between the Previewer, the Reviewer and Author.

Although I know in the past we have allowed, and even encouraged these comments, I think that they are not productive. One reviewer made comments for a while on every child themeChild theme A Child Theme is a customized theme based upon a Parent Theme. It’s considered best practice to create a child theme if you want to modify the CSS of your theme. https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/child-themes/. because of all the theme check errors (that did not apply).

I think comments in tickets are good, but they need to be done by a group that has been through the complete review process, and with enough reviewer-author experience to understand the importance of what the comments need to accomplish. The above proposal should do that.
- Nilambar Sharma 3:49 pm on April 18, 2017
  
  Completely agree. Unofficial reviews should be clearly mentioned that the review comments are not official. I have seen several new reviewers waiting for the theme authors to fix such unofficial review rather than actually doing review. It is eventually slowing the review process.
- jrf 6:02 pm on April 18, 2017
  
  While I agree it would be very useful if it would be clearly indicated what the role of the commenter is in the review process, I strongly disagree on the suggestion that non-reviewers should not be allowed to comment.
  
  As one of the contributors to the TGM 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 Activation library, over the past year I’ve had an alert set up for any mention of TGMPA and have verified both the TGMPA version as well as done spot checks against common issues with the use of TGMPA on dozens of themes because of it.
  
  While I am not a theme reviewer, nor have any intention of becoming one, I know my comments in theme review threads have prevented end-users getting white screens of death because of search & replace errors made by theme authors. Similarly I have prevent end-users from being exposed to an – albeit minor – security issue by urging theme authors to include an up to date version of TGMPA.
  
  Theme reviewers often forgot to mention this until I started adding these comments (a lot are getting better at it because of seeing my comments so often <3).
  - kevinhaig 7:44 pm on April 18, 2017
    
    I have no problem with your comments, there are always special cases.
    - jrf 8:10 pm on April 18, 2017
      
      Thanks Kevin. I figured as much, but wanted to make sure those cases are taken into consideration.
      - Jose Castaneda 4:32 pm on April 24, 2017
        
        Special cases are always taken into condsideration. 🙂
Cristiano Zanca 4:47 pm on April 18, 2017

a way to get more feedback from users on different aspects of themes and using the extra data on the theme to rank them appropratly in the repository.

Rating every single tag that theme author use should be useful for matching better user needs and theme functionality
Rinku Y 6:08 pm on April 18, 2017

=== Theme Previews ===
We can add new 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 style sheet like theme uri called “theme demo”. if a theme have it, previewer will display it otherwise previewer will preview as it do now. it will not affect current system and will add a new feature.
Ionut Neagu 6:13 pm on April 18, 2017

I would be happy to get involved with the theme previews, as I see it is not that that simple as allowing everybody to mention a demo url, a huge step forward would be just to have the current previewer aware for the starter content introduced in coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress..
- childthemestyles 9:24 pm on April 18, 2017
  
  I’ve been arguing the preview issue that fell on deaf ears for so many years, but finally hopefully something can get done now….better late than never.
  
  I believe the Preview should somehow be a direct link to the theme’s actual demo site (via new browser tab). People want to see how the site looks with all of its features and functions and author determined demo content. Using a “demo url” tag in the stylesheet should be possible; if not found, then the default method takes over. But it should be encouraged for theme authors to create live demo sites. You see them for the default WP themes. Even my own themes that I built before, I always made sure I showcased the theme because the preview in a customizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings. window or WP default coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. demo is just not enough for the user.

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