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Justin Tadlock 5:09 pm on August 20, 2015  

Proposal: Better front page previews

The front page shown in 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 previewer has been a subject of much debate. There’s some movement on getting better demo content, but the front page is the first impression. We want it to look good and best represent what our themes are capable of.

Given the prevalence of non-blog themes, there needs to be a bit of balance here. I’ve thought long and hard about what the best route would be for handling this. The following is my proposal. I’d like to get all of your feedback as well as check in with @otto42 on the feasibility of it before creating a ticket.

Let me know your thoughts.

How the front page should be shown

I wanted to keep this simple and make sure that it works with both regular blog themes and themes that have a custom front-page.php.

The previewer should have some code that checks:

  • If front-page.php exists, override front page setting to show a page.
  • Else, show regular blog posts.

The idea in code

Note: This is potential code for the previewer to better describe my idea. It’s not something to put in your themes.

The following bit of code is a rough draft of how I think a feature should work.

<?php

add_filter( 'pre_option_show_on_front', 'wptrt_show_on_front' );
add_filter( 'pre_option_page_on_front', 'wptrt_page_on_front' );

function wptrt_show_on_front( $show ) {

	return wptrt_has_front_page() ? 'page' : $show;
}

function wptrt_page_on_front( $page ) {

	// 100 is the page ID to show.
	return wptrt_has_front_page() ? 100 : $page;
}

function wptrt_has_front_page() {

	// Need a check to see if the current theme being previewed 
	// has a front-page.php template. If it does, return TRUE.
	// Else, return FALSE.

	return false;
}
Samuel Sidler 5:50 pm on July 14, 2015
Tags: translations   

Theme Translations on WordPress.org

tl;dr: Theme translations and language packs are coming to 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/ and they’re awesome.

Howdy all you wonderful themers and theme reviewers,

The meta team has been working hard to enable theme and 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 translations on translate.wordpress.org. For themes, we plan on importing all active themes into WordPress.org – that is, any theme updated within the last two years. We expect to import them in the next few days or weeks, at most. This will involve importing ~1500 themes, which, combined, have about 315,000 total strings. After duplicates, the number drops to only 80,000 unique strings.

Below are some things you might want to know.

Why do I want WordPress.org managing translations for my theme?

WordPress.org provides translations in dozens of languages and is ever expanding as new contributors join. (There are currently 140 locales on translate.wordpress.org, but not all are active.) While you may have translated your theme into a few languages (or none!), there are likely more translators on WordPress.org in more languages.

But that’s not all! Themes in the WordPress.org directory will be able to take advantage of language packs! That means smaller download sizes for users, because themes will no longer need to ship translations. Eventually, we also plan to give priority to localized themes in localized directories; e.g., someone searching the Romanian theme directory will see Romanian themes prioritized over English-only themes.

What if my theme already ships translations?

Translations that are already shipped in themes will be initially imported into translate.wordpress.org. Again: we’ll import the strings and the translations on the initial import. We won’t continue to do that because the end goal would be for theme authors to remove the translations from their download, allowing language packs to fill the void.

What if I don’t want to use WordPress.org to manage translations for my theme?

Then you don’t have to! Translations shipped in a theme take precedence to language packs. If you continue to ship translations with your theme, WordPress will ignore the language packs. However, if a translation is available in a language your theme doesn’t support, WordPress will use the language pack for that language.

How do I add support for translations and language packs?

@Otto42 wrote up a great post on the topic back in 2013. (Wow, it’s been a long time!) There’s also a great page in the theme developer handbook which walks through how to internationalize your theme.

To fully support language packs, you’ll want to remove translations from your theme in your next update.

What if I want my translators to approve translations on WordPress.org?

We’ve written up a plan for working with the polyglots teamPolyglots Team Polyglots Team is a group of multilingual translators who work on translating plugins, themes, documentation, and front-facing marketing copy. https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/. to enable this. There will be some initial pain in adding new, project-specific (aka theme-specific) translation editors, but afterwards your translators will join a growing group of WordPress translators and help make the entire ecosystem better.

Other questions?

Just ask! We’ll watch this thread and answer any questions you might have.

#translations

Tammie Lister 7:18 pm on June 23, 2015  

Theme review team weekly meeting notes The logs…

Theme review team weekly meeting notes

The logs are here:
https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/themereview/p1435082246001621

Points from meeting:

1. Directory survey: https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2015/06/22/survey-results-directory/

  • We should reconsider our keywords in our roadmap. Can we automate them? Can we have people able to update them?
  • We need to do a survey just on tags.
  • We began talking about how we should improve the admin interface for those with themes on org. The UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. needs to be more friendly. How can they manage their entire theme?

Actionables: @greenshady to think about tags and with me come up with survey suggestion. @grapplerulrich: to get an easy cull list of tags. Add to roadmap: tag survey, redoing tags, theme admin on org.

2. Review survey: https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2015/06/22/survey-results-review/

  • Documentation is an issue. Could this be a language issue?
  • We talked about setting expectations for review time. This could be added to the uploader intro we are going to think about adding licenses to.
  • Would partial reviews be a solution, or do they cause more issues and create a bad experience?
  • Auto approving updates can speed up queues.
  • More we automate the better our queues.

Actionables: @grappleulrich is moving the button to help with abandoned. v2 of the workflow will be put as make.blog post before our planning meeting on July 7th.

3. Using WordPress.org themes survey: https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2015/06/22/survey-results-using-themes-from-wordpress-org/

  • We should consider in our roadmap the preview.
  • @otto42 is working on the preview and we should support what he is doing. This will bring the 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. to the front end securely. The user can then change things.
Tammie Lister 10:45 pm on June 16, 2015  

Theme review team weekly meeting notes The logs…

Theme review team weekly meeting notes

The logs are here:
https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/themereview/p1434477307000108

Points from meeting:

  • Recent duplicate theme issue was talked about as raised by @otto42.
  • Proposed change: props @poena: Upload becomes ‘Add your theme’
  • Force theme uri field to be unique. Disallow same uri from being uploaded again
  • @karmatosed will make a 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.
  • There will be no meeting this Thursday.
  • The doing_it_wrong theme and theme unit test are not our focus currently. GithubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ is a good place to still add tickets though.
  • @grapplerulrich a link in the admin bar so long as not spammy we decided is valid.
  • The first meeting in July we will be a planning one.
Tammie Lister 3:31 pm on May 29, 2015  

Update queue automation.

Currently if you send an update in you have to wait for it to be reviewed again. What is being suggested would be that this gets removed. Themes that are updates get automatically updated.

As we want to be transparent about any change, we are posting here for 24hours to get opinions before we implement this. We need to work out how to make it happen automatically, this may for a short while therefore be a manual batch process. The actual how is something we’re going to need to work out with this hopefully @otto42 can help us there?

Other ideas include adding a check every 5 maybe updates to get human eyes on the theme. Is this something we should add as a clause?

All opinions are welcome, so lets hear what you think.