https://make.wordpress.org/themes/ states:
“The primary focus of the team is to help theme authors transition to block 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.”
Let’s bring that in with the description of what the team does and their priorities.
The current issues:
- The name of the team’s Slack 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 doesn’t fit anymore: the team is no longer called the Themes Review team, but the slack channel is still called #themereview. This creates confusion for contributors, especially in the context of contributor days and general onboarding.
- Team competencies have expanded: so far, the main task of the team members has been reviews. With the advent of block themes, the queues have become much shorter, and not many reviewers are needed anymore. Some team members have moved on to participate in theme-related tasks such as creating new default themes, helping maintain past default themes, and also contributing to community themes. Some have created patterns or even moved to focus on easing the gap between classic and block themes with work in the editor itself. All of this combines to focus on helping those creating themes move and grow in using block themes.
- The need for visibility of an expanded team: If the team’s competencies expand, onboarding new theme members allows for a greater diversity of profiles. We want to collaborate closer with the design team, core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. editor team and empower designers to collaborate and contribute.
What now?
The next steps we recommend are:
- Rename Slack channel to #themes.
- Meetings:
- Continue to have a team meeting focused on theme reviews. This remains an opportunity for theme authors to ask questions about submitting their themes.
- Begin to have a weekly bug scrub for default themes on Monday afternoons at 14:00 BST.
- Team reporting:
- The team will continue to report stats on the number of submitted and closed themes, reviews, and emails…
- Default theme stats will be reported each month at the end of the month.
- Team reps:
- Team reps don’t need to cover all the new areas of focus of the team, but hopefully, this change will encourage people from outside the scope of reviews to volunteer as representatives in the future
- Encourage contribution days to have theme tables to embrace this new focus.
- Update the team handbook to reflect the changes.
Let’s discuss this proposal and see what the rest of the missing pieces here are.
This post was a collaborative effort of @acosmin @poena @kafleg @luminuu @desrosj @shivashankerbhatta @karmatosed @onemaggie
Props @chanthaboune for pre-publish review.