The goal going forward

Welcome to the Themes team!

We are a group of volunteers who review and approve themes submitted to be included in the official WordPress Theme directory.

We do license, security, and code quality reviews.

We help build and maintain default themes.

The primary focus of the team is to help theme authors transition to 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.-based themes.

If this sounds interesting, read more about the team here. Check out our guide for new reviewers and the frequently asked questions.

Handbooks and review requirements

The team maintains the official Theme Review Requirements, the Theme Unit Test Data, and helps the documentation team with the Theme Developer Handbook.

Coding standards and plugins

We maintain the WPThemeReview Standard for PHP_CodeSniffer, the Theme Sniffer plugin and Theme Check

Code Packages

We have code packages for themes available for use on Github and Packagist

Communication

Meet us in the #themereview 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/. channel.

Meetings:

Twice monthly at Tuesday @ 15:00 UTC.

#themereview

The goals for the near future are:

Comparing the theme and plugin review processes 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.
Put a team together to tackle the theme previews as this is a major issue. Ask 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
- Licensing
- Security Issues
- 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. Errors
- Illegal
- Dishonest
- Morally offensive
- Egregious issues that we haven’t listed
- AccessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) Reviews will be done after the themes go live.
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.

mp3ng 6:52 am on May 23, 2017

wow great
dingo-d 6:53 am on May 23, 2017

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.

Could we bundle unit tests 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? I mean if we can bundle phpcsPHP Code Sniffer PHP Code Sniffer, a popular tool for analyzing code quality. The WordPress Coding Standards rely on PHPCS., couldn’t we bundle PHPUnit as well?
Ulrich 7:06 am on May 23, 2017

Could we bundle unit tests 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?

There is not much in the plugin to add Unit Tests for. I am not sure if it is worth the effort in the beginning. Though PHPCSPHP Code Sniffer PHP Code Sniffer, a popular tool for analyzing code quality. The WordPress Coding Standards rely on PHPCS. has Unit Tests so we don’t need to do the work twice.

Another project related to the automation that is being worked on needs Unit Tests which I have started but I have not really used Unit Tests before so need to set it up: https://github.com/fklein-lu/checker-cli/tree/feature/testing
ThinkUpThemes 10:08 am on May 23, 2017

Great post! Very exciting to hear were planning to align with the plugins team.

Just my 2 cents, it would be good to have timeframes for what we want to achieve. Near future could mean months, or years. Defining dates will help with assessing how we’re progressing. Some of these look like quick wins (e.g. defining minimum requirements) others much more lengthy (e.g. changing how themes are ranked).

With regards to accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) review post release. I assume that the tag is not permitted to be added until the theme passes the accessibility review. The tag arguably is one of the most important, users who choose an accessible theme need it to work as expected.
- Carolina Nymark 10:59 am on May 23, 2017
  
  While we can define what needs to be manually checked, those requirements wont be in use until the first part of the automation is in place.

Welcome to the Themes team!

Handbooks and review requirements

Coding standards and plugins

Code Packages

Communication

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