Second call with Matt & Community Summit

Jose, Carolina and I had another call with Matt at the beginning of June to give an update and see what the next steps should be. We presented the summary that we had written about the goals going forward.

There were a things of that Matt mentioned

  • Using the one star reviews as a way to find possible issues with themes like 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. Something like this page but with only one star reviews and specific to themes. This was to help with reporting issues #meta1598 & #709-meta
  • There should be only one team lead who makes decisions.
  • When we mentioned needing to check the licensing of themes, a solution that we were suggested was to add a checkbox to the upload page that the theme author accept that their themes are GPLGPL GPL is an acronym for GNU Public License. It is the standard license WordPress uses for Open Source licensing https://wordpress.org/about/license/. The GPL is a ‘copyleft’ license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html. This means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses, of which the BSD license and the MIT License are widely used examples. compatible. This moves the responsibility to the Theme Author from WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/. The metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. ticket for this is #meta1513.
  • Matt would like to see in the future that theme authors can upload their themes via 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/.. We talked about using git instead but this does not seem to be viable option for WordPress.org.
  • We discussed about improving the theme test data  and improved previews #meta30 and supporting multiple screenshots #meta969.

Before WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe in Paris we had two days for the Community Summit. On the first day in Morning we had time to chat within our teams. The rest of the two day, we discussed the proposed topics in small groups with people joining in from different teams. The summary of these discussions will be published soon on https://make.wordpress.org/summit/.

We had a really good discussion with Mika and Otto from the 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 team where we compared our processes and they shared their plans for the future. At the moment the theme and plugin review process is different with each using different tools. Today any improvements that we make only affect on process. As plugin directory was recently revamped the plugin review workflow is being changed to work in the WordPress.org backend. Otto explained this the #themereview channel.

The discussions for the theme review team were between myself, @poena, @sakinshrestha and @ionutn.

Being a team lead is a lot of responsibility and the regular conflicts and long discussions are draining. The conclusion that we came to that the only way it was going to work with having a single team lead is that if they are supported by the theme mods. The theme lead should be able to delegate responsibilities and decision making. If a decision is needed from the team lead then it should be escalated through the theme mods.

The ideas on improving the team meetings have been already implemented.

We tried to come up with some short term goals while the plugin review workflow plugin is being completed and then can be activated for themes too.

Short term goals:

  • Looking at the theme upload process and see how we can improve the whole process. This could renaming the button “Upload Your Theme” to upload the theme and the text on the getting started page https://wordpress.org/themes/getting-started/ #meta1513
  • Working on Documentation:
    • “How to do a code review” project which @thinkupthemes is leading which is related to “Improving the requirements”. This will be a slow process where there will not be a drastic reduction of the requirements which @poena is leading.
    • “How to get started with projects” Some which are listed here.
  • Automation is still a focus point. There is a patch to add the new PHPCSPHP Code Sniffer PHP Code Sniffer, a popular tool for analyzing code quality. The WordPress Coding Standards rely on PHPCS. checks to the upload process #meta2902

In the long term we are waiting for the new plugin review process which will replace TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. and automatically bring new features like support for readmes and multiple authors.

#meta1598, #meta2902