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X-post: Community Conduct Project – Kick off meeting scheduled for 17:00 UTC on the 5th September 2017

Community Conduct Project – Kick off meeting scheduled for 17:00 UTC on the 5th September 2017

July Meeting Agenda

The Theme Review Team holds a monthly meeting with an agenda and we encourage all members to attend.

Channel: #themereview | Time: Tuesday at 17:00 UTC 17:00 UTC

Topics to discuss

Community Behaviour / Code of Conduct

Proposal: WordPress Community Conduct Project

Name collisions

Currently the WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ Theme Updates APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. only uses the theme slug to check for updates. This can cause conflicts if a theme outside of WordPress.org repo has the same theme slug. The two main issues are:

  1. Name collisions are bad for end users if they update to different theme.
  2. The number of active installs have an affect on the position of theme on the popular page.

In the past we have decided not to police theme names other than “WordPress” and “Theme” which have been added as checks to the upload process.

The root cause for this issue is that the WordPress.org Themes API only checks the theme slug when checking for updates or tracking number of installs. The CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Ticket for this is #14179-core. The core track ticket has been opened a number of years ago and it is not going to be fixed unless we get buy in from the core and metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. teams.

There are a few short term solutions that we can implement but they require support from the meta team. The meta ticket for this is #2114-meta. These solutions are

  • Change the algorithm of the popular page so that it is not so heavily dependant on number of installs.
  • Deduct the initial number of active installs from the current active installs. This does not help if two themes are gaining new users together.
  • When measuring the number of active installs compare the author field. The number of installs may be slightly off for themes that have been transferred from one author to another but these numbers should be minimal as they would be only users running older versions of the theme.

The solution that we can implement as of now is: If any theme name has any more than 500 active installs then that theme would need to be renamed.

  1. This would not retroactively apply to existing live themes. Removing the themes would affect the users which we do not want. The short term solutions will fix this for the existing themes.
  2. This wouldn’t apply in those cases where the theme author has had the theme released for a while and a quick Google search doesn’t pull up alternatives.

Monthly meeting with meta team

Currently there are 44 open meta tickets for the components “Theme Directory” and “Theme Review”

By having a monthly meeting we can track the progress of these tickets and define which ticket should be prioritized.

Discussions on improvements outside the meetings

There have been a number of discussions in the 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/. #themereview channel which have lead to turning in circles. Unless there is a meeting these discussion will not go anywhere. If there is a topic to discuss please mention it for the next meeting.

The Theme Review process is not perfect. Here are a list of projects in addition to the meta tickets mentioned about that are known but have not had anyone to lead them.

The structure for solving the problems that we would like to try is

  • In the meetings we can discuss if it is this a problem that needs to be addressed (regardless of the team that addresses it)?
  • If yes then we collect proposals for addressing it.
  • The we decide which one of these proposals should we pursue?” and then commit to pursuing the winning proposal

Mentoring

@thinkupthemes has created a list on the mentor’s availability.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ClUWZoNIIqKYmdgb08QRNWUmgebhxM-f3mm-9FqC6Kw/edit#gid=0

#14179-core, #2114-meta

Second call with Matt & Community Summit

Jose, Carolina and I had another call with Matt at the beginning of June to give an update and see what the next steps should be. We presented the summary that we had written about the goals going forward.

There were a things of that Matt mentioned

  • Using the one star reviews as a way to find possible issues with themes like 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. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. errors. Something like this page but with only one star reviews and specific to themes. This was to help with reporting issues #meta1598 & #709-meta
  • There should be only one team lead who makes decisions.
  • When we mentioned needing to check the licensing of themes, a solution that we were suggested was to add a checkbox to the upload page that the theme author accept that their themes are GPLGPL GPL is an acronym for GNU Public License. It is the standard license WordPress uses for Open Source licensing https://wordpress.org/about/license/. The GPL is a ‘copyleft’ license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html. This means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses, of which the BSD license and the MIT License are widely used examples. compatible. This moves the responsibility to the Theme Author from WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/. The metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. ticket for this is #meta1513.
  • Matt would like to see in the future that theme authors can upload their themes via SVNSVN Apache Subversion (often abbreviated SVN, after its command name svn) is a software versioning and revision control system. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS). WordPress core and the wordpress.org released code are all centrally managed through SVN. https://subversion.apache.org/.. We talked about using git instead but this does not seem to be viable option for WordPress.org.
  • We discussed about improving the theme test data  and improved previews #meta30 and supporting multiple screenshots #meta969.

Before 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 in Paris we had two days for the Community Summit. On the first day in Morning we had time to chat within our teams. The rest of the two day, we discussed the proposed topics in small groups with people joining in from different teams. The summary of these discussions will be published soon on https://make.wordpress.org/summit/.

We had a really good discussion with Mika and Otto from the PluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party review team where we compared our processes and they shared their plans for the future. At the moment the theme and plugin review process is different with each using different tools. Today any improvements that we make only affect on process. As plugin directory was recently revamped the plugin review workflow is being changed to work in the WordPress.org backend. Otto explained this the #themereview channel.

The discussions for the theme review team were between myself, @poena, @sakinshrestha and @ionutn.

Being a team lead is a lot of responsibility and the regular conflicts and long discussions are draining. The conclusion that we came to that the only way it was going to work with having a single team lead is that if they are supported by the theme mods. The theme lead should be able to delegate responsibilities and decision making. If a decision is needed from the team lead then it should be escalated through the theme mods.

The ideas on improving the team meetings have been already implemented.

We tried to come up with some short term goals while the plugin review workflow plugin is being completed and then can be activated for themes too.

Short term goals:

  • Looking at the theme upload process and see how we can improve the whole process. This could renaming the button “Upload Your Theme” to upload the theme and the text on the getting started page https://wordpress.org/themes/getting-started/ #meta1513
  • Working on Documentation:
    • “How to do a code review” project which @thinkupthemes is leading which is related to “Improving the requirements”. This will be a slow process where there will not be a drastic reduction of the requirements which @poena is leading.
    • “How to get started with projects” Some which are listed here.
  • Automation is still a focus point. There is a patch to add the new PHPCSPHP Code Sniffer PHP Code Sniffer, a popular tool for analyzing code quality. The WordPress Coding Standards rely on PHPCS. checks to the upload process #meta2902

In the long term we are waiting for the new plugin review process which will replace TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. and automatically bring new features like support for readmes and multiple authors.

#meta1598, #meta2902

The goal going forward

The goals for the near future are:

  • Comparing the theme and plugin review processes to see how we can work towards a goal of making both processes very similar so that any improvements made to one will also profit the other.
  • Put a team together to tackle the theme previews as this is a major issue. Ask Matt to put resources towards this.
  • Automation is still a priority to catch common issues and giving us more confidence that themes cannot be shipped that give sites a white screen of death.
  • Define the minimum requirements that need to be manually reviewed for the themes to be hosted on w.org
    • Licensing
    • Security Issues
    • 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. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. Errors
    • Illegal
    • Dishonest
    • Morally offensive
    • Egregious issues that we haven’t listed
    • AccessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) Reviews will be done after the themes go live.
  • Agreeing to try out a way to get more feedback from users on different aspects of themes and using the extra data on the theme to rank them appropriately in the repository.