Samuel Wood (Otto)

Welcome to the Themes team!

We are a group of volunteers who review and approve themes submitted to be included in the official WordPress Theme directory.

We do license, security, and code quality reviews.

We help build and maintain default themes.

The primary focus of the team is to help theme authors transition to 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 themes.

If this sounds interesting, read more about the team here. Check out our guide for new reviewers and the frequently asked questions.

Handbooks and review requirements

The team maintains the official Theme Review Requirements, the Theme Unit Test Data, and helps the documentation team with the Theme Developer Handbook.

Coding standards and plugins

We maintain the WPThemeReview Standard for PHP_CodeSniffer, the Theme Sniffer plugin and Theme Check

Code Packages

We have code packages for themes available for use on Github and Packagist

Communication

Meet us in the #themereview 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.

Meetings:

Twice monthly at Tuesday @ 15:00 UTC.

#themereview

Not sure how to codify this into a rule or something, but putting it out there for thought and discussion.

Themes should not “do” anything merely from their files being loaded. I know there’s been ways to have themes do something on “activation”, but in general, this is bad.

This gets really, really bad with 3.4 and the theme 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.. See, a theme has no idea if it’s actually live or just being displayed in the customizer. So if a theme does something like changing the blog settings or some such thing just because it’s loaded, then this could cause weird side effects when it’s not actually the active theme. Nobody wants to preview a theme and have their main blog page suddenly change.

This “don’t do anything by default” includes changing anything in the database whatsoever, writing files, making posts, etc. All actions taken by a theme must in some way actually be user-initiated.

Discuss.

Welcome to the Themes team!

Handbooks and review requirements

Coding standards and plugins

Code Packages

Communication

Author Archives: Samuel Wood (Otto)

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Not sure how to codify this into a…

I’ve made a few changes to the theme up…