Meeting notes Tuesday, August 25 2020

weekly updates:

In the past 7 days:

• 412 tickets were opened
• 425 tickets were closed:
• 401 tickets were made live.
• 19 new Themes were made live.
• 382 Theme updates were made live.
• 9 more were approved but are waiting to be made live.
• 24 tickets were not-approved.
• 0 tickets were closed-newer-version-uploaded.

Summary of the comments regarding theme suspensions

(Summary authored by @poena and proofread by all team leads).

Are there teams in WordPress or in similar organizations whose policies / communication processes might be a good model for the Theme team?

The common denominator in the replies is that people want the themes team to consider using policies and communication processes that are more similar to the plugins team.

Details of the policies or the differences in policies were not provided, with the exception of the affiliate requirement. In this policy, plugins allow affiliate links, while themes do not.

What is the right balance between the needs of WordPress users and the needs of theme authors?

The majority expressed that the needs of the users must be prioritized.
Several replies related to one specific situation, not the balance in general.

If you could change only one thing about this team’s policies/communication processes, what would it be?

Several replies related to one specific situation, not the policies / communication process in general.

On one side, people want information about suspensions to be public or published for more visibility.

On the other side, they want the communication about the suspension between the team and the theme author to happen via email, not publically.

Whether these are mutually exclusive is unclear.

Other noteworthy points

The replies suggests that:

• Theme authors must be treated equally without bias.
• Guideline violations and consequences should be tiered or leveled, where:
  • A major guideline violation leads to a more severe consequence.
  • A security problem leads to an immediate but likely temporary suspension.
  • Minor guideline violation leads to the team requesting the author to solve the problem within a time period.

Correction of the top menu link requirement.

@acosmin made corrections to the make post, and the requirements page:

The priority can be null, 59 or exactly 60.

Since a lot of themes use TGMPA, a pull-request will be submitted by @acosmin to fix a discovered issue with the way admin pages are added.