Summary: Community Themes Project Kickoff

More than 20 members of the WordPress theming community gathered for an initial discussion on the proposed Community Themes project on March 7, 2023. The primary goal of the conversation was to gauge interest and discuss what this project might look like.

The Community Themes Initiative is a collaborative effort to create 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 in much the same way as the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Twenty* themes are built. However, it should afford designers and developers more room to experiment with ideas without all of the same limitations of a default theme. For more information on the project, please read the Community Themes Initiative proposal.

The meeting was recorded live over Zoom and is now available on WordPress TV:

Much of the meeting centered on what types of block themes participants could build. The short answer? Pretty much anything that falls within the WordPress theme review guidelines.

Some items were decided or reiterated in the meeting:

• Discussions will continue on the #core-themes-projects 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.
• Theme names will not follow the “Twenty” series and can be named according to the directory rules.
• Themes will be released under the WordPress username to the directory.
• Theme development will happen in the WordPress Community Themes GitHub repository.

The biggest unanswered question from the discussion was around administrative expectations. In particular, there was a worry that the themes wouldn’t be updated as often as needed, which is an issue stemming from experience with the core Twenty* themes.

Because this is not a formal team with its own reps there are some undefined roles and guideposts that may need to be defined at some point. There seems to be enough excitement around the project that such a small issue is unlikely to be a major roadblock. However, it is worth continued discussion.

For now, the most important thing is to get the project moving. If you want to contribute themes back to the WordPress community, you can get started by visiting the WordPress Community Themes repository. This is a collaborative project, so you can participate to varying degrees, such as submitting a design mockup, adding a ticket with an idea, running code reviews, or testing. There are no hard and fast rules. The more people, the merrier.

Feedback, suggestions, and continued discussion on this project are encouraged. Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Props to @onemaggie for co-hosting the meeting and feedback on this followup post.

#community-themes, #hallway-hangout