Welcome to theme reviews. This section is intended guide you through what it is to be a theme reviewer and into your first review. If you need any help at any time you can always ask the contribution day lead or organiser and you always find it on Slack at #themereview.
This page is a work in progress. Don’t be afraid to amend the document or leave comments, particularly if you’re at a contributor day and find that we’ve missed something.
Having your theme in the WordPress.org repo is desirable, so there is always a need for reviewers. Humans can catch things machines can’t, that is simply why we need people to become theme reviewers.
There are many reasons it’s important to get involved in theme reviewing. If you are a themer it raises your game, it helps you improve your skills and lets you get exposure to a lot of code. It also keeps alive the valuable resource of the free theme repo. Without the theme review team, the repo wouldn’t be a place people could go to download themes. Quite simply, we keep it alive.
Being a theme reviewer is a win-win situation. You get to give back, but you also get to improve your own skills and learn how to create themes correctly.
We review themes. Every theme that gets uploaded has a theme reviewer assigned and we run it through a series of tests. These tests fall into 2 sections:
Required: No theme is able to go onto the theme repo until it has met all these requirements.
Recommended: These are best practices but will not prevent a theme from going into the repo.
We also encourage reviewers to add notes about design and other not recommended items.
You do not need any previous experience to become a theme reviewer. We simply ask you have a willingness to learn. There are a few skills we always encourage people to work on though as that makes your reviewing easier:
