Getting to know the requirements

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

This is step 7 of our onboarding guide to becoming a reviewer

For a theme to be added to the Theme Directory, the theme must:

be 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.

be secure.

be free of 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. or JS notices/warnings/errors.

not be in conflict with plugins (e.g. prefixing).

be translation ready.

use WordPress functions, hooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same., filters and libraries.

not do anything illegal, dishonest, or morally offensive.

These are the basics, but the list of requirements is much longer than that.

The important thing to remember is that you are not expected to know or remember every requirement. No one can do that, not even experienced reviewers and theme authors.

But it is important to know where to find the requirements, where to find the code reference, and where to ask questions.

Please browse through the requirements to get a better idea of the expectations that we have on the themes:

Whenever you have a question about how a function, hook or filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. works, always refer to the official code reference: https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/

And when you need help, you can ask other reviewers and theme authors on 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/., in the #themereview channel. https://wordpress.slack.com/messages/themereview

Last updated: June 6, 2023