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:

• 289 tickets were opened
• 287 tickets were closed:
  • 267 tickets were made live
    • 7 new Themes were made live
    • 260 Theme updates were made live
    • 14 more were approved but are waiting to be made live
  • 17 tickets were not-approved
  • 3 tickets were closed-newer-version-uploaded

How to gain new reviewers and keep the experienced ones

Theme Review Team discussed the issue of the lack of reviewers in general. New reviewers often leave because they have no supervision and have no feedback on whether their review was good. The feedback often comes in the admin review, and by that time reviewers lose interest in doing any reviews.

Incentives usually don’t work (as was demonstrated by the trusted author programme).

One idea was to close the reviews to the public. This would lessen the pressure on the reviewer from any negative feedback from the author. But would be hard to accomplish from the technical side.

Another pain point is the number of requirements that have grown over time.

The second idea was to focus our efforts on improving our automation tools as much as possible. For that to happen we would need to get more code-savvy contributors.

The issue that team reps are battling with at the moment is handling authors that try to game the system with multiple accounts.

@aristath proposed a possible system we could impose

• 1 theme limit – just like now.
• If an author successfully completes a review, they get the ability to upload an extra theme.

What constitutes a “successful” review:

• If on the final review we find more than 3 issues that were not covered by the initial review, then it’s a fail.
• If they do 5 rushed/incomplete/bad reviews, they lose the ability to participate for 3 months in the multi-themes thing.

First, they do a good review, then after the theme goes live and we’re satisfied it was an OK review, they get the ability to upload a 2nd one. If we catch them with multi-accounts after that is in effect, we’d suspend the author for 6 months.

The idea is to try to make authors see what the issues are and in that way educate them to write better code.

We’d also need a way to track the success of such implementation. The team reps will discuss how an implementation of this would look like in more detail and post the plan on the make blog.

Focus areas for 2020

The key focus area the TRT will have to focus on is the full site editing with the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. editor (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/).

Changes are already happening and we need to educate and prepare theme authors and theme reviewers for the upcoming changes to the way the theme role will be in the future of WordPress.

One thing is clear: if we want to have any impact, we (the TRT) need to participate actively in the development of Gutenberg.
Participation and contribution don’t necessarily have to be code additions. It can be testing out the new features and providing valuable feedback to the core editor team. This will steer the editor in the way that is favorable to both end-users and theme authors.

An option that we can consider is to try to allow experimental themes to the repository in order to get more valuable feedback.

If you want to contribute, the best way is to discuss and get involved with the Gutenberg tickets labeled [Feature] Full Site Editing.

Other than that you can explore the experimental themes, play with them and offer your insight by opening issues in the repo.

Every contribution, no matter how small, is beneficial.

Other news (open floor)

There is a proposal to start having regular polls so that we can see the public opinion on certain theme review related issues.

We will look into it and we’ll try to get some help into formulating interesting and valuable poll questions.

#meeting, #meeting-notes, #trt

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:

• 352 tickets were opened
• 354 tickets were closed:
  • 333 tickets were made live
    • 5 new Themes were made live
    • 328 Theme updates were made live
    • 3 more were approved but are waiting to be made live
  • 21 tickets were not-approved
  • 0 tickets were closed-newer-version-uploaded

Suspended themes submission

It was agreed that if the authors’ theme was suspended you cannot submit it again with a different name and account.

Theme Review Team Badge Assignment

We got the access to the badges so we are calling people to comment if they did the review so that we may give them the badges 🙂

They need to reply to the pinned slack message, and we’ll look at the reviews and decide: if someone did a poor, incomplete review, that we had to reopen for very basic issues, then no badges will be rewarded.

We need to check the review quality and dedication. A complete review is necessary in order to get the badge.

Get Ready for WordPress 5.3

Theme authors should get ready for the upcoming WP 5.3. You can read more in the make post.

If there will be any problems we encourage theme authors to contact us 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/..

Open floor

The ticket for the core to read the 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. version for themes was opened (and closed shortly after). The coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. themes were updated to move required fields to style.css instead of readme.txt.

The fields the theme authors should have in the style.css are

Requires PHP and Requires at least.

Core won’t be affected if those fields are in the style.css but your theme will benefit from having them, so we recommend authors adding them.

@aristath recommended using the code from Justin Tadlock’s theme for handling graceful failures: https://github.com/justintadlock/mythic/blob/master/functions.php

The 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. is undergoing some updates and the releaseRelease A release is the distribution of the final version of an application. A software release may be either public or private and generally constitutes the initial or new generation of a new or upgraded application. A release is preceded by the distribution of alpha and then beta versions of the software. will be out soon. One of the changes will be the above validation – readme.txt will no longer be checked, only style.css will be checked.

#meeting, #meeting-notes, #trt

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:

• 300 tickets were opened
• 305 tickets were closed:
  • 276 tickets were made live
    • 12 new Themes were made live
    • 264 Theme updates were made live
    • 3 more were approved but are waiting to be made live
  • 28 tickets were not-approved
  • 1 ticket was closed-newer-version-uploaded

We removed some inactive reviewers from trusted lists and added one new reviewer who has the ability to self-assign the tickets.
The trusted reviewers who were inactive for more than 6 month period were removed.

How to make an interest in Review Shindig?

The idea of a Shindig was to inspire people to do more reviews, but also to give new contributors a chance to ask questions and introduce themselves.

One idea was to maybe rename them to ‘workshops’ and make it more about teaching. Also, we could do shindigs where we make introductions about how sniffer works, and how sniffs work.

There was no concrete solution, but for now, we won’t do them until we sort out other priorities (automation tools, etc.).

Follow Up – Featured page issue

The suggestion that was made at the last meeting was that a curated list of themes would be made and that a group of people would decide on which theme gets featured.

This issue was polarizing because of the possible corruption it would bring. How to check the people who are deciding on which theme would be featured?

In the end, the following was decided:

We’ll try with the curated list. Once every 2 or 3 weeks, we’ll hold a meeting where people can recommend themes based on their unique looks, code quality and other merits (to be fully agreed upon by the team reps in the following days). The reps will then decide which to put on the featured list. We’ll see how this works for a few months, gauge what the community thinks about this and see how it goes.

The team reps will hold a meeting where we’ll agree on the fine details about this decision and publish this on the make post.

Other news

@aristath made progress on the color-alpha package. The color-alpha control ended up a bit more complicated than initially planned and it will have 2 modes of operation:

• Simple (default)
• Advanced (opt-in)

Both modes look, feel & work exactly the same, the difference is in the way the data is saved.

There are some details in the README.md file and more details/instructions/examples will be documented in the releaseRelease A release is the distribution of the final version of an application. A software release may be either public or private and generally constitutes the initial or new generation of a new or upgraded application. A release is preceded by the distribution of alpha and then beta versions of the software. post on make blog.

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The triage meeting will be postponed (I cannot attend it due to personal reasons).

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The look of the themes front page was changed to look a bit more like the plugins page.
In addition to styling changes, the upload button was removed from the top bar to prevent uploading themes by mistake – people used to use it thinking that would upload themes to their own websites.

We still haven’t seen a decrease in the erroneous theme uploads so we need to see how to further prevent this.

#meeting, #meeting-notes, #trt