The meeting started with a quick round of updates, mostly about the WCEU recap. After that we started discussing the proposed meeting agendas.
The following is the recap of the meeting, you can read the meeting transcript in the slack archives (a Slack account is required).
Trusted Authors (TA) issues
First on the agenda was the discussion of the TA issues. There was a question of the quantifiable improvements from the TA program.
TA started on 30th of April last year, so having some data about it would be useful way to base decisions on.
Besides shorter queue, and more themes being set live (in the TA queue), the quality of code hasn’t really improved (that we know of). As mentioned by one of the leads
The improvements I have seen so far are faster throughput for SOME authors and slower for others. Code quality of non-TA has remained consistent. Code quality of TA has remained consistent too (but functionality and originality dropped).
There was a good point raised during the meeting, about pushing the authors to do more, but not better, since the program focuses on the quantity of themes, rather the quality. This can impact the originality and quality of the themes.
Underlying issue is that the review process in it self is too complicated, which affects the queue length.
Also there is no data to support either closing the TA or not. The discussion mostly went back and forth about what are pros and cons of the TA program without any conclusion
Customizer 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. upsell status
The repository with the customize section button was created and is currently being worked on – it’s working as is, there are some possible improvements in the build process that could be added.
This repository example doesn’t have to be used for upeslls exclusively. The 1.0.0 version should be out this week.
What we need is a code review to make sure everything is ok to be used in themes.
Another project that was started was the PHP autoloader for the people not using Composer to be able to use the customize section button in their themes.
Some members were worried how to use the above code without the use of Composer, but it was explained that the code can be copy/pasted – authors can download the ZIP, use Git Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning fast performance. Most modern plugin and theme development is being done with this version control system. https://git-scm.com/. clone, Git sub-module, or Composer dependency in their themes.
Removing child 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/. queue
The advantage of the child theme queue is that those themes get set live pretty fast, and this makes authors submit more child themes.
A lot of people were for removing the child theme queue, as the requirements regarding them are not clear enough, and it makes the regular queue longer.
The conclusion to close it wasn’t reached, and the leads mentioned that they will reach a conclusion based on the provided discussion.
Final remarks
In the end, one of the theme review leads recommended that we try halting the TA queue until the final queue gets cleaned, because if only TA themes get set live, this puts the non TA authors in a bad position.
We will try the idea that if final queue has more than 50 themes then TA approvals are halted.
#meeting, #meeting-notes, #trt
