Tag Archives: Meeting Notes

dingo-d 6:21 pm on September 10, 2019
Tags: , Meeting Notes,   

Meeting notes from September 10th, 2019

A meeting was held with the proposed agenda.

The following is the recap of the meeting, you can read the meeting transcript in the slack archives (a Slack account is required).

Updates

In the past seven days:

  • 399 tickets were opened
  • 374 tickets were closed:
    • 357 tickets were made live
      • 7 new Themes were made live
      • 350 Theme updates were made live
      • 5 more were approved but are waiting to be made live
    • 17 tickets were not-approved
    • 0 tickets were closed-newer-version-uploaded

Proposal: Revive monthly review shindigs

@djrmom Suggested that we revive the monthly review shindigs (https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2016/12/05/december-shindig-recap/)

For those who don’t know:

Every first weekend of the month we do a queue push where we try to review as many themes as we can. Please keep in mind that it is not just about numbers but we want to focus on quality reviews as well so don’t feel like you have to do 10 themes over the weekend.

Jose Castaneda (https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2016/11/04/november-review-shindig/)

It was agreed that we should schedule it, and see how it works.

Plan for the next team leads

@joyously wanted to know when was the last time since new leads were elected. Current team lead @williampatton had an announcement that we’ll share here

I have been acting as lead and dealing with various duties for a long time. An awful lot longer than I ever expected.

This month marks the 18 month point. Originally the intention was that a term should last 6 months only.

With uncertainty about what GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ would hold and the future for themes I felt lead transitions would be highly disruptive and I wanted to avoid that. Perhaps it was not my place to make such a decision however I have done what I thought best at all times.

There will never be a perfect time to do lead transitions and with that being said: now is as good a time as any.

Please think about who you want to be leading TRT going forward and decide how best to guide them the direction the Team wants to go in. As is always the case I am available through transition to assist where that may be needed or useful. I’m not going anywhere, just stepping aside to let someone else have their turn.

Let’s try to have the transition process underway by the end of this month at the latest.

For me now is the right time for 2 reasons.

1. First and foremost it is time for someone else to have a turn at this. Being a team lead has been an incredibly rewarding experience which has allowed me to grow as a developer and feel like a very welcome part of our amazing WordPress community. Someone else deserves to be able to have that experience as well.
2. Secondly, I cannot guarantee availability as-and-when needed in the same way that I used to be able to. The more limited time I have here I want to be able to spend on things other than admin or management tasks. I have projects in mind I want to pursue but have not had the time to do it.

William Patton

It was proposed that an election for the new position is held. Anybody that is interested should directly message @kafleg, he will consult with the senior and key reviewers and will try to sort out the list of names for the election.

William mentioned that he would like to have a Theme Review Team reps instead of leads.
There are many people here with lots of various skills but have issues with the time commitment. Nobody really has a guarantee on how much time they can manage.

@poena mentioned that reps should be people who know what they do best and do that.

In the end, it was decided that a list of possible rep roles will be made and proposed rep leads in those areas.

Some questions remained unanswered and will be covered in the next meeting, such as a decision about ‘starter themes’ in the repo, impact of skip links and keyboard navigation requirements and the existing themes in the repo.

Triage meeting reminder

And in the end a small reminder about the Theme Review Triage meeting that will be held tomorrow.

#meeting, #meeting-notes, #trt

dingo-d 7:00 am on August 28, 2019
Tags: , Meeting Notes,   

Meeting notes from August 27th, 2019

A meeting was held with the proposed agenda.

The following is the recap of the meeting, you can read the meeting transcript in the slack archives (a Slack account is required).

Updates

In the past seven days:

  • 284 tickets were opened
  • 290 tickets were closed
  • 263 tickets were made live
  • 20 new Themes were made live
  • 243 Theme updates were made live
  • 10 more were approved but are waiting to be made live
  • 25 tickets were not-approved
  • 2 tickets were closed-newer-version-uploaded

There were two proposed themes for discussions and an open floor discussions

Proposal: Removal of the 1 theme limit rule

@thinkupthemes proposed that, following the discussion from the last meeting, we remove the 1 theme in the queue limit for authors to make the review more fair.
The 1 theme limit rule was added as a trial to combat review queue size.
Some argued that the rule was put in place to keep the queue fair and equally accessible to all (individual authors vs theme companies).

The leads and mods are working on a way to make final queue shorter and are trying to get active reviewers to help with the new queue, so that they can keep the queues shorter so that the one theme rule doesn’t have to be changed.

The problem is that the current admin queue needs to be shortened.

Another issue that was raised was the problem of onboarding of the new reviewers. The training instructions are often long and this can cause reviewers to drop out of the review process early on.

In the end the leads said they need to step back and reevaluate the new reviewer onboarding process and then look to reevaluate the admin queues purpose.

For the time being the removal of this rule was rejected, and the 1 theme rule stays in effect.

Empty CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. rules issue

There is an issue where authors just paste empty CSS rules in order to pass the Theme Check during the theme upload.

In some cases this covers things like image alignment classes, in other things like sticky posts.

It was proposed to require the align* classes and screen-reader-text classes, but the sticky class or bypostauthor classes shouldn’t be required (as they are not targeting functionality but rather design).

Open floor questions

Review onboarding

One of the open floor questions was the problem of training of the new reviewers. The reviewer onboarding process can be overwhelming. William Patton (one of the team leads) offered to do a pair mentoring on a theme with a new reviewer.

It was mentioned that two weeks of onboarding is too much – there is a lot of repetitive information, not enough videos, audios or lists which can be very easy to condense for someone who is learning. Maybe a step by step video of an easy to understand reviewer showing the process would help out.

Default theme

This meeting we had a special guest: @chanthaboune the Executive Director of WordPress project.

One of the main questions asked was the future involvement of the Theme Review team (TRT) in the work of the new Twenty Twenty theme. There was some issues raised like the fact that in the previous years nobody from the CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team approached and asked the TRT for advice about the official requirements that themes 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/ repository need to follow.

This resulted in official themes often violating the rules set by the TRT, which was then used as an excuse for theme authors to break the rules (appeal to authority set by the official WordPress theme).

Josepha acknowledged that her research on how the default themes have been worked on in the past are to be blamed of the lack of involvement of the TRT in the build process (a closed process).

So, the default theme, by my understanding is meant as a showcase of features, not necessarily a lighthouse for how all themes should behave this year.

Josepha Haden

@williampatton suggested that the new theme could be a place to see if the TRT could loosen some of the requirements

… loosening slightly with a watchful eye on the effects. Some guidelines may not be as useful as they used to be. And yes with intent to extend to all themes 🙂

William Patton

If the Twenty Twenty team wants to do something outside the guidelines the team would revisit that particular guideline and decide if it’s worth keeping.

Besides that, a question about the leadership was also brought up. Josepha mentioned that the team lead training content is written, but that the questions need to be sorted out.
William also mentioned that he’d be glad to help until a suitable replacement is found.

#meeting, #meeting-notes, #trt

dingo-d 6:10 pm on August 13, 2019
Tags: , Meeting Notes,   

Meeting notes from August 13th, 2019

A meeting was held with the proposed agenda.

The following is the recap of the meeting, you can read the meeting transcript in the slack archives (a Slack account is required).

Weekly Updates

Some authors asked their themes to be closed, which was done. If you need your existing tickets closed you can pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” the leads.

In the past seven days:

  • 246 tickets were opened
  • 233 tickets were closed
  • 103 new tickets are waiting for review
  • 4 tickets are older than 4 weeks
  • 53 tickets are older than 2 weeks
  • 76 tickets are older than 1 week
  • 97 tickets are older than 3 days

Trusted Authors (TA) announcement

From today, the TA program is closed.

The program did not fulfil the intended plan and has ultimately caused more problems than solving.

Some reasons for removal of the program include:

  • Entry criteria was difficult to set, it was hard to maintain consistency.
  • Management of the queue required separate reports in tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. to be modified via SQL – that was unsustainable.
  • Being TA has benefits unavailable for other authors – how fair this is for everyone has been commented on a loads of times. 

The leads will make a blog post describing the reasoning behind removal of the TA program.

Open floor

A discussion was held about the removal of the TA. One issue that came up during the discussion, was the fairness of the admin queue. And of the review process in general, since some authors may get an experienced reviewer, and others may get a novice reviewer, which will require another inspection to see if they did a good job.

There were proposals to fix these issues, such as pairing new with experienced reviewers.

#meeting, #meeting-notes, #trt

dingo-d 7:35 am on July 25, 2019
Tags: , Meeting Notes,   

Meeting notes from July 23rd, 2019

A meeting was held with the proposed agenda.

The following is the recap of the meeting, you can read the meeting transcript in the slack archives (a Slack account is required).

Updates

We got positive and supportive feedback about the skip links (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)). Even though it is simple to implement, the authors were confused. But we have a post explaining what they are and how to implement them.

Authors are starting to change the admin notices, according to the guidelines.

Promoting other themes from within popular themes isn’t allowed. Few authors were caught doing this and they changed it upon request. Ignoring the request to remove the promotions will result in theme suspension.

After meeting with the documentation team, @acalfieri was selected as a representative from the Theme review team to update the theme developer handbook.

A new version of Theme Sniffer and WPThemeReview coding standards was released.

In the past seven days:

  • 449 tickets were opened
  • 463 tickets were closed
  • 416 tickets were set live
  • 25 new Themes were set live
  • 391 Theme updates were set live
  • 10 more were approved but are waiting to be set live
  • 39 tickets were not-approved
  • 8 tickets were closed-newer-version-uploaded

An automatic way of notifying theme authors

It was proposed that all the theme authors get automatically subscribed to the TRT blog so that they can be made aware of the announcements when they are made.

Another proposal was to send mass emails to all theme authors to make sure their themes are compliant with the newest requirements. Those whose email bounced would get suspended or changed to reviewing status.

An agreement was not reached. It was agreed that the TRT will reach out to other teams so that we can see how they are dealing with this issue, and if this can be solved on a more global basis.

Looking for good examples of keyboard navigation

A team needs a good example for keyboard navigation, especially for menus, so that we can provide an example for theme authors, as this is going to be the next a11yAccessibility 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) measure that will be implemented.

Currently, we don’t have an agreement to what is the best way to move forward with this so any contribution is welcomed.

Open floor discussion

The feature packages project needs active contributors, so if you are interested in contributing to the TRT open-source projects check out the official TRT Github repository.

#meeting, #meeting-notes, #trt

dingo-d 7:23 pm on July 9, 2019
Tags: , Meeting Notes,   

Meeting notes from the 9th of July 2019

The meeting started with a quick round of updates. There is still no resolution about the trusted authors (TA) issues.
After that we started discussing the proposed meeting agendas.

The following is the recap of the meeting, you can read the meeting transcript in the slack archives (a Slack account is required).

Docs team discussion about the theme developer handbook

There was a discussion on the #docs 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 about handover of the theme developer handbook to the TRT.
The idea is to have a single responsible person from the TRT team that will take care of the developer handbook for the themes. This means updating it with new requirements and keeping it up to date in general.

It was agreed that the person in charge of the theme developer handbook will be @acalfieri, who is an experienced reviewer and has been an active member of TRT for a long time.
Of course, if there will be interested volunteers to help you can always ask in the slack channel.

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) (a11yAccessibility 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)) requirements

In the accessibility team meeting it was proposed to add some of the requirements from the themes which use accessibility-ready tag to standard themes in the repository.

The emphasis is on making the themes easier to use, especially for the people with certain types of disabilities.
The proposal included incorporating the keyboard navigation, control, skip link, and form labelling requirements from the existing accessibility-ready requirements.

This is the first step in making all themes in 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/ repository accessible.

The changed requirement wouldn’t encompass all the accessibility-ready requirements to be present on the standard themes, nor would it automatically make them accessibility-ready, but by incorporating one by one requirements, through longer time period, the idea is to encourage theme authors to write accessible themes out of the box.

It was agreed that the skip links requirement from the accessibility part will be moved to the required section of the review handbook, and that the team will implement new a11y requirement every two months. This will give theme authors enough time to make their themes more accessible.

Removing Demo Content from the theme

It was already agreed with removing demo content files (xml, json or some other format) from the themes. But there needs to be alternative to that.

It was agreed that the requirement should be updated with following to make it more clear:

Importing or Downloading:


Themes are not allowed to import content to a user’s site.
Themes are not allowed to link directly to an XML, JSONJSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML., ZIP, or other file for direct download or import.
Themes are not allowed to bundle demo content via an XML, JSON, ZIP, or other file.

Also, a meeting will be held in the #design slack channel about updating the wordpress.org previewer content which can then be used as a starting content for the developers to develop their themes.

Theme generated notices

All the notifications generated by a theme should use the admin_notices 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. and follow the CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. design pattern. They must be dismissible. Everything wrapped in the admin notice needs to follow Core 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. design for the notices.

This will be a requirement on all the themes.

Open floor discussions

There was a mention of the tool that can help reviewers review a theme – WPTRT-Cloud-Launcher. It’s a Chrome extension that launches a cloud instance that comes pre-configured with the theme and theme snifferTheme Sniffer Theme Sniffer is a plugin utilizing custom sniffs for PHP_CodeSniffer that statically analyzes your theme and ensures that it adheres to WordPress coding conventions, as well as checking your code against PHP version compatibility. The plugin is available from the plugin directory and Github. Themes are not required to pass the Theme Sniffer scan without warnings or errors to be included in the theme directory./check plugins installed.

#meeting, #meeting-notes, #trt