A meeting was held with the proposed agenda.
The following is the recap of the meeting, you can read the meeting transcript in the slack archives (a Slack account is required).
Updates
In the past seven days:
- 284 tickets were opened
- 290 tickets were closed
- 263 tickets were made live
- 20 new Themes were made live
- 243 Theme updates were made live
- 10 more were approved but are waiting to be made live
- 25 tickets were not-approved
- 2 tickets were closed-newer-version-uploaded
There were two proposed themes for discussions and an open floor discussions
Proposal: Removal of the 1 theme limit rule
@thinkupthemes proposed that, following the discussion from the last meeting, we remove the 1 theme in the queue limit for authors to make the review more fair.
The 1 theme limit rule was added as a trial to combat review queue size.
Some argued that the rule was put in place to keep the queue fair and equally accessible to all (individual authors vs theme companies).
The leads and mods are working on a way to make final queue shorter and are trying to get active reviewers to help with the new queue, so that they can keep the queues shorter so that the one theme rule doesn’t have to be changed.
The problem is that the current admin queue needs to be shortened.
Another issue that was raised was the problem of onboarding of the new reviewers. The training instructions are often long and this can cause reviewers to drop out of the review process early on.
In the end the leads said they need to step back and reevaluate the new reviewer onboarding process and then look to reevaluate the admin queues purpose.
For the time being the removal of this rule was rejected, and the 1 theme rule stays in effect.
Empty CSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. rules issue
There is an issue where authors just paste empty CSS rules in order to pass the Theme Check during the theme upload.
In some cases this covers things like image alignment classes, in other things like sticky posts.
It was proposed to require the align* classes and screen-reader-text classes, but the sticky class or bypostauthor classes shouldn’t be required (as they are not targeting functionality but rather design).
Open floor questions
Review onboarding
One of the open floor questions was the problem of training of the new reviewers. The reviewer onboarding process can be overwhelming. William Patton (one of the team leads) offered to do a pair mentoring on a theme with a new reviewer.
It was mentioned that two weeks of onboarding is too much – there is a lot of repetitive information, not enough videos, audios or lists which can be very easy to condense for someone who is learning. Maybe a step by step video of an easy to understand reviewer showing the process would help out.
Default theme
This meeting we had a special guest: @chanthaboune the Executive Director of WordPress project.
One of the main questions asked was the future involvement of the Theme Review team (TRT) in the work of the new Twenty Twenty theme. There was some issues raised like the fact that in the previous years nobody from the Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team approached and asked the TRT for advice about the official requirements that themes in the wordpress.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/ repository need to follow.
This resulted in official themes often violating the rules set by the TRT, which was then used as an excuse for theme authors to break the rules (appeal to authority set by the official WordPress theme).
Josepha acknowledged that her research on how the default themes have been worked on in the past are to be blamed of the lack of involvement of the TRT in the build process (a closed process).
So, the default theme, by my understanding is meant as a showcase of features, not necessarily a lighthouse for how all themes should behave this year.
Josepha Haden
@williampatton suggested that the new theme could be a place to see if the TRT could loosen some of the requirements
… loosening slightly with a watchful eye on the effects. Some guidelines may not be as useful as they used to be. And yes with intent to extend to all themes 🙂
William Patton
If the Twenty Twenty team wants to do something outside the guidelines the team would revisit that particular guideline and decide if it’s worth keeping.
Besides that, a question about the leadership was also brought up. Josepha mentioned that the team lead training content is written, but that the questions need to be sorted out.
William also mentioned that he’d be glad to help until a suitable replacement is found.
#meeting, #meeting-notes, #trt
