Block-based Themes Meeting Summary: Sept. 16, 2020

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

Updates

The first iteration of a Global Styles sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme. has been merged: 24250

Two in-progress PRs that explore how themes can set font families and font weights via Global Styles. These could use theme author feedback: 24868, 24978

There’s been big update to the experimental theme.json documentation.

Discussion about specifying content widths in Global Styles: 25160

Issue about reverting 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. templates to their default state: 23421

Discussion

After the updates, the group discussed what sorts of experimental theme demos they’d like to see built to test the capabilities of block-based themes:

Themes with a static/fixed sidebar.

Magazine-style layouts.

Store themes.

@jffng filed an issue on GitHub to track these ideas. Contributors are encouraged to push experiments to the theme experiments repository on GitHub so everyone can learn from them.

Kjell Reigstad 11:44 am on September 21, 2020

After the updates, the group discussed what sorts of experimental theme demos they’d like to see built to test the capabilities of 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:

• Magazine-style layouts.

Following this discussion, I pushed a theme experiment for a magazine-style block-based theme. You can see how that worked out in the Theme Experiments repository:

https://github.com/WordPress/theme-experiments/pull/54