Tag Archives: Meeting Notes

dingo-d 1:47 pm on August 5, 2020
Tags: , Meeting Notes,   

Meeting notes Tuesday 4th of August 2020

Today we held a meeting with the proposed agenda. The recap of the meeting is below and you can read the meeting transcript in the slack archives (a Slack account is required).

Weekly Updates

In the past seven days

  • 288 tickets were opened
  • 334 tickets were closed:
  • 292 tickets were made live.
    • 23 new Themes were made live.
    • 269 Theme updates were made live.
    • 4 more was approved but are waiting to be made live.
  • 34 tickets were not-approved.
  • 8 ticket was closed-newer-version-uploaded.

The review waiting time is down to 4 week.

We thank to all the reviewers, keep doing a great job!

Announcement: Allowing themes to use a top-level menu item.

The team reps decided to allow themes to use one top-level menu item. The decision was made after careful consideration in order to prevent users from abusing the notification system, and potentially spamming the post screen with upsell.

Having one top level menu will give theme authors enough exposure and a dedicated place where they can put the theme documentation.

New Admin Menu Page Requirement

Open discussion: WordPress 5.5 theme changes

There are lots of new changes coming in WordPress 5.5. You can read the field guide that explains things more in depth: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2020/07/30/wordpress-5-5-field-guide/

One of the things that will change is that the jquery-migrate will be removed, as a preparation for updating the jQuery version in WordPress 5.6. Feel free to test this: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2020/06/29/updating-jquery-version-shipped-with-wordpress/

Another thing to take care of are custom logos. Please check your theme custom logos to ensure they do not target the anchor tag directly in the CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site.. Link will be removed from homepage (but kept on other pages).

There was mention of having a global system to notify theme authors of the upcoming changes using email, similarly to what plugins team are doing when there is a major WordPress 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..

Suggesting theme-related coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. tickets for WordPress 5.6

There are numerous tickets in core with Themes component tag: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?status=!closed&component=Themes

We should focus on the ones that have a patch so that they can be merged to the core, and focus on getting the nav 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., and other blocks in WordPress 5.6

Date and time of the next meeting

The next meeting will be on August 25.

#meeting, #meeting-notes, #themes-team

dingo-d 6:29 pm on June 9, 2020
Tags: , Meeting Notes,   

Meeting notes Tuesday 9 June 2020

Today we held a meeting with the proposed agenda. The recap of the meeting is below and you can read the meeting transcript in the slack archives (a Slack account is required).

Weekly Updates

In the past seven days

  • 251 tickets were opened
  • 250 tickets were closed:
  • 230 tickets were made live.
    • 15 new Themes were made live.
    • 215 Theme updates were made live.
    • 2 more was approved but are waiting to be made live.
  • 20 tickets were not-approved.
  • 0 ticket was closed-newer-version-uploaded.

We have managed to cut down on the queue length, which is always good news.

We thank to all the reviewers, keep doing a great job 🎉

Biweekly meeting schedule to Monthly meeting for Themes Team

Summer is closing in and we realised (and observed during the last few months) that having many meetings (regular, 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. themes and triages) can be a bit tiring – both to the reps and to the contributors.

The proposal is to cut the Themes Team regular meeting to once a month plus an additional one if we have some urgent thing to discuss.

This will give us a bit more breathing room both to recharge and focus on priorities set by phase three of the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. editor development that are tied to the WordPress themes.

Open Floor

An issue was raised about Themes team not being a team anymore due to the lack of public discussions.

It was mentioned that the decisions are made and just announced.

This one is definitely on us (the reps). We should have been more tactful of how we presented the news (like changing the name of the team).
Team reps are always discussing and finding ways to improve this team’s impact in the WordPress community.

It’s hard to get noticed without active contributors, and in the last few years we have seen a decline in the active participants. To many authors theme repository is just one of the advertising avenues, which is disheartening.

One of the ways we wanted to spark the interest is to be involved with the core editor more, show that we are doing more than just review themes.

We definitely need to improve our transparency towards the community as team representatives. Writing more blogs about what we think would be a good way forward, and listening to advice and discussing them in the comments and then in the meetings.
What we do want to avoid are empty discussions that lead nowhere, as this is what kills the team. We need to adapt, change, and even innovate.

Andrea Middleton shared her experience from working in the Community Team:

In my observation, leading in the open is really difficult, and the process of learning how to do it effectively isn’t necessarily linear.

I’ve messed it up bunches of times — I think humans are just really prone to forming small groups, it helps us feel safe — and when it’s pointed out to me, I usually feel really dispirited and embarrassed.

For me, the best way to recover from that realization of “whoops, this conversation could/should have happened in the public channel” is to then go to the public channel and summarize the conversation there.

Andrea Middleton

It was also suggested that we should come up with a mission statement draft. Some goals that we as a team want to achieve.

This year we have put focus on Full Site Editing. We will continue working on preparing the community for the upcoming changes in the themes ecosystem.

Proofread by @williampatton

#meeting, #meeting-notes, #themes-team

dingo-d 6:25 pm on May 12, 2020
Tags: , Meeting Notes,   

Meeting notes Tuesday 12 May 2020

Today we held a meeting with the proposed agenda. The recap of the meeting is below and you can read the meeting transcript in the slack archives (a Slack account is required).

Weekly Updates

In the past seven days

  • 216 tickets were opened
  • 241 tickets were closed:
  • 199 tickets were made live.
    • 13 new Themes were made live.
    • 186 Theme updates were made live.
    • 2 more was approved but are waiting to be made live.
  • 42 tickets were not-approved.
  • 0 ticket was closed-newer-version-uploaded.

We have managed to cut down on the queue length, which is always a good news.

We thank to all the reviewers, keep doing a great job 🎉

Changing the name of the team

The representatives decided, in the light of recent changes that new editor brings to the landscape of the themes, to rename the team from Themes Review Team to just Themes Team.

We always did more than just review the themes that end up 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, but in recent years we started working more around themes in general – open-source packages, work on full site editing, actively participating around 2020 theme, etc.
So it was a natural progression.

Discussion regarding using “Guten” in theme names

There is a growing trend of themes starting with ‘Guten’ prefix, or containing it in their name. This, of course, alludes to the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. editor – codenamed Gutenberg.

Since that name, or part of the name, is not trademarked in any way, we won’t forbid authors from using it.

Selecting a date and time for WCEU office hours

This was a discussion regarding this post about WCEU online contributors day.

It was agreed that the office hours will be held in the same time we hold the meetings, that seems to be the most convenient time.

Closing 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. in the 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 directory

As some may have noticed we removed the Theme Sniffer from the plugins repository.
With all the projects I’m working on, it just wasn’t possible to keep maintaining it, and it had some nasty issues present that, in a way, kept reviewers jobs harder.

The plugin is still in the GitHub repo, so if anybody wants to contribute, feel free to do so.

Open Floor

Making the Tested up to and Requires PHP fields required instead of recommended in order to push folks to update 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. versions.

Since the core blocking installs based on this value will land in WP 5.5, it will be good to let the authors know to implement this.

As explained by Marius Jensen:

If a theme says: Requires PHP 7.2, and the user has their WordPress installed on PHP 5.6, the theme will be shown in the theme search in wp-admin, but it will have a badge saying they can’t install it, why they can’t, and how to fix it. And if they try to upload it, they will get an error instead of the upload completing.

The readme tag is required, but the theme authors should be aware that they will need to add it in their style.css as well.

#meeting, #meeting-notes, #trt

dingo-d 6:01 pm on April 28, 2020
Tags: , Meeting Notes,   

Meeting notes Tuesday 28 April 2020

Today we held a meeting with the proposed agenda. The recap of the meeting is below and you can read the meeting transcript in the slack archives (a Slack account is required).

Weekly Updates

In the past seven days

  • 232 tickets were opened
  • 248 tickets were closed:
  • 217 tickets were made live.
    • 11 new Themes were made live.
    • 206 Theme updates were made live.
    • 1 more was approved but are waiting to be made live.
  • 30 tickets were not-approved.
  • 1 ticket was closed-newer-version-uploaded.

Some of the live themes were reopened because of licensing issues and because they broke the rules.

Please don’t break rules in the updates, because we do a regular cross-checks.

We thank to all the reviewers, keep doing a great job 🎉

Planning for the WCEU online contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. and office hours

There was an update about the upcoming contributor day for online WCEU 2020.

We do have two resource pages for onboarding the contributors during contributors day:

Getting Started at a Contributor Day
Preparing for WCEU 2019 contributor day

@poena also created an introduction video about the contributors day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11TbYfxuNHc

This contributors day we plan to focus on building a full site editing (FSE) based theme and explaining the changes along the way.

Besides that, we’d like to explain some rules that are important during the review session, like licensing and security issues.

Open floor

We had a small discussion about 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. primer and how to help authors understand the GPL compatibility better.

While there is a GPL primer available, as well as the text about GPL compatibility back from 2015, it’s still hard to convey the GPL compatibility to authors and reviewers.

One good suggestion is to have an iconographic that would help explain this in an interesting way.

We reached to the community team to see if something can be coordinated with the design team regarding that.

Another suggestion was to have a checkbox before uploading a theme, which is not ensuring that people would actually read it. There was a proposal to have a GPL quiz before upload, but we are not sure what happened with that.

There was also a suggestion to hold an interview before being granted the author status, but that’s not feasible since there are not that many senior reviewers, they are not paid to do that and the repository is free for all place (given you follow the rules).

#meeting, #meeting-notes, #trt

dingo-d 6:15 pm on April 14, 2020
Tags: , Meeting Notes, ,   

Meeting notes Tuesday 14 April 2020

Today we held a meeting with the proposed agenda. The recap of the meeting is below and you can read the meeting transcript in the slack archives (a Slack account is required).

Weekly Updates

In the past seven days

  • 246 tickets were opened
  • 253 tickets were closed:
  • 223 tickets were made live.
    • 9 new Themes were made live.
    • 214 Theme updates were made live.
    • 0 more were approved but are waiting to be made live.
  • 30 tickets were not-approved.
  • 0 ticket was closed-newer-version-uploaded.

We thank to all the reviewers, keep doing a great job 🎉

Theme Check – blocking common issues

The theme representatives got merge access to the Theme Check repo and @poena already started cleaning issues and adding lots of improvements.

We would like to invite experienced reviewers to help to point out the most common issues in the repo.

Also, input regarding the update of the severity of some checks is welcomed.

GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can 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/ review flow proposal

There was a proposal put in place to move reviews to GitHub.

Some interesting questions were raised during the meeting. There were some worry about this flow being too complicated to follow, and the GitHub being too complex to use. On the other hand, some said that they prefer GitHub for development and code review.

An issue that was mentioned was regarding forking the themes, especially if you have a theme in a GitHub repo already. This can be remedied using upstream remotes.

One concern was raised about jumps between the platforms (tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. and GitHub). The process seemed a bit complicated. But considering the current implementation, with some tutorials, this gap would be overcomed easily.

We would still need input from #meta team, to see how easy it is to implement this, the way it’s implemented on the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. trac.

Removing the 7 Day limit for replies during a COVID-19 virus outbreak

Current situation with the coronavirus made the reps think about loosening the requirement of having authors and reviewers having to wait for 7 days to close a theme. Some authors and reviewers may not have good internet connection, or have to take care of their loved ones, so they cannot focus on reviewing and updating themes.

Reviewers don’t have to remain assigned to a ticket if the response is taking a long time.

For a period of one month we won’t close tickets for inactivity.

Open floor

Input regarding the GPL primer page.

@kjellr added a quick background: The community team drafted that up late last year. @poena had mentioned that many theme authors don’t totally understand the 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., and there’s no great resource to help them understand it in the context of themes. If we were to create one and/or adopt that existing one:

  • What content should it include?
  • What do theme authors need to know about the GPL?

Another issues that were mentioned by @joyously were:

  • What is compatible?
  • What needs a license?
  • What is the difference between GPLv2 and GPLv3?
  • What to put in the readme?

One resource that we point the users is: 100% GPL Vetting Checklist.

@aristath pointed out the following:

GPL is not the only option, there’s also MIT which is quite popular. It depends on what we want to explain.
Do we want to explain to authors what the WordPress-Core license is, and what freedom they have with WP-Core?
Or do we want to help authors choose a license and understand what the pros/cons of each license are?
If we want the latter, then the GPL thing is of little importance, a multiple-questions survey thingy which would spit out the license at the end would be better suited.

It was decided that we should take these inputs as a good starting point for the discussion for the next meeting.

Another discussion was added from the announcement comment about multiple authors referencing the same brand. There was no conclusion, except that it could be misused the system to have multiple themes submit at the same time and get around the 1 theme rule. This could also be added as an agenda for the next meeting.

#meeting, #meeting-notes, #trt