Themes Team Meeting Notes – January 25, 2022

Hello everyone. These are the meeting notes from the themes review team discussion on January 11, 2022. The themes team meets second and fourth Tuesday of every month at 15:00 UTC.

This week’s meeting agendas can be found here. Thank you @kafleg for preparing the agenda. The meeting was facilitated by @kafleg. The note was taken by @Benachi. You can read the full transcript on our #themereview channel. 

1. Weekly updates

The themes team published weekly updates about tickets and HelpScout emails. See this week’s updates here in the past 7 days,

• 320 tickets were opened
• 323 tickets were closed:
  • 299 tickets were made live.
    • 29 new Themes were made live.
    • 270 Theme updates were made live.
    • 0 more were approved but are waiting to be made live.
  • 24 tickets were not-approved.
  • 0 tickets were closed-newer-version-uploaded.

Number of reviewers: 4

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. Themes
6 block themes are live in the past 7 days.  

2. Noteworthy Updates

The themes team continues to update the Theme Handbook with the block theme information. Big thanks to @poena for her extensive help.

• Block themes
• Block theme setup
• Templates and template parts
• theme.json
• Converting a classic theme to a block theme
• Creating new themes using the Site Editor
• Internationalization
• Accessibility

There are great ongoing discussions related to converting classic to block and customizerCustomizer 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.. We will continue to update the theme handbook as we get more inputs from more people. In case you are interested in joining the conversations. Please share your thoughts and experiences. 

• FSE outreach experiment slack channel 
• From classic to block-based themes

3. Get ready for WordPress 5.9

We all have been waiting this moment. WordPress 5.9 has finally arrived. We encourage theme authors to test your theme with WordPress 5.9 for any issues. 

4. Open floor

We discussed the upcoming WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe on June 3-4 2022. You can find more information here. 

We also discussed what kind of block theme examples should be included in the Theme Developer Handbook? (per @poena). @kafleg commented that a very basic theme with some settings on theme.jsonJSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML. and minimum templates parts and patterns would be fine. He also recommends the Block theme generator and an empty theme that authors can generate from here.

#themereview, #themes-team