Tag Archives: reviews

Carolina Nymark 10:38 am on October 3, 2019
Tags: reviews, shindig   

Review weekend

On Saturday October 5th we will have our first review weekend in a long time. The plan is then to have a review shindig on the first Saturday of every month.

The goal of the review weekend is to get together and do as many quality reviews as possible.

We will have a short meeting to get us started at  Saturday at 10:00 UTC. Experienced reviewers will be available on Slack to answer questions through out the day.

We will then review themes from the top of the new and approved queues.

Authors with themes in the queue are also encouraged to participate with reviews and to submit their theme updates if needed.

-We would like to remind everyone that you do not need to be assigned to a ticket to do a review.
When you select a theme, remember to leave a note in the ticket to show that you are reviewing the theme.

At ca  Saturday 13.00 UTC we hope to have a live presentation or Q&A on Zoom. We will share the link to join in the Theme Review 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 before we start.

You can suggest topics in the comments below. Example topics may be:

  • How to review licensing
  • How to review themes with 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 GitHub. Themes are not required to pass the Theme Sniffer scan without warnings or errors to be included in the theme directory. 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
  • How to review skip links and keyboard navigation

If you are interested in holding a presentation, or would like to lead a live chat session to introduce new theme reviewers, please let us know.

If you wish to participate and this is your first time reviewing themes, we recommend the following guides:

Become a Reviewer
Onboarding for new reviewers

#reviews, #shindig

Lance Willett 4:37 pm on November 10, 2013
Tags: , , reviews   

Guidelines Shouldn’t Fail a Theme

Chip’s great post on Points of Emphasis and a recent discussion about a specific Theme Unit Test guideline (failing themes with long titles that overflow) point to a need to change our attitudes to the theme review guidelines.

If you step away from that specific TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. ticket and look at the bigger picture you’ll see a change is needed to make all WP theme reviews less dogmatic and more pragmatic; not only WP.org directory but also for WP.com, ThemeForest, MOJO, any other marketplace that accepts some submissions and rejects others.

The items in the Theme Unit Test are guidelines not hard and fast rules. Highly recommended and encouraged and we should feature and love and promote the themes that nail them all. Shout from the mountaintops if a themer manages to achieve the full list! Themes that don’t nail them all can sink to the bottom of the list organically because people might end up not liking them as much.

Guidelines shouldn’t cause a theme to fail or be prevented from being in the directory. That should be limited to blockers like licensing, security, and spam/malware. What Chip said.

By letting theme designers choose to implement guidelines in full—or not—you give the power to end users to vote for the best ones by activating them. Instead of keeping out hundreds or thousands of potentially amazing themes that fail the too-strict rules we have now. The themes—and the people behind them—that we lose out on might never come back; and there’s evidence this has happened many times already.

Changing a strict philosophy of enforcing guidelines as rules to encouraging more experimentation and variety will go a long way to remove negative friction from reviews and make the themes in the collection better in the long run.

In summary: let’s enforce the “Points of Emphasis” (security, license, no spam) and leave the rest as recommended guidelines. We absolutely love if you follow them all, but none are blockers to your theme being included in the directory.

#community, #guidelines, #reviews