Themes Team Meeting Notes – March 23, 2021

You can find the full meeting transcript on Slack (login required)

Meeting coordinator: @kafleg
Notes kept by @aristath

Weekly updates

Currently 56 new parent themes and 15 new child themes are waiting for review. Waiting time is currently 2 weeks.

In the past 7 days:

  • 310 tickets were opened
  • 326 tickets were closed:
  • 303 tickets were made live.
  • 19 new Themes were made live.
  • 284 Theme updates were made live.
  • 2 more were approved but are waiting to be made live.
  • 23 tickets were not-approved.
  • 0 tickets were closed-newer-version-uploaded.

Number of reviewers: 8

Discussion on Next Steps on Themes and Reviews

How will we help new authors feel confident in how to build themes?

@williampatton suggested to hold monthly meetings with new authors, guiding them and walking them through the process. This will help build confidence for authors, and hopefully result in higher quality themes. A post will be created asking for feedback about whether such an endeavor should be pursued or not.

@acosmin pointed out that in the Next Steps on Themes and Reviews post, the outlined goal is that “The human moderation process occurs post-commit and primarily for reported issues/spot checks”, which should also help with creativity.

Automated checks on 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 (FSEFSE Short for Full Site Editing, a project for the Gutenberg plugin and the editor where a full page layout is created using only blocks.) themes

automatic theme-checks will need to be modified for FSE themes. 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. https://www.php.net/manual/en/preface.php. can be checked with a modified subset of the current theme-checks, but HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. can’t be currently validated. The future of the repository as outlined in the next-steps post mentioned above relies more on user reports and reviews, so it’s more empowering for users and relies less on manual code reviews.

Open floor

@aristath mentioned a pull-request which was merged in GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/. It’s a first step towards hybrid themes and allows using a mixture of PHP and HTML templates. Details about the implementation can be found in the pull-request’s description.