A Year in Themes Team – 2024

Happy New Year 2025 to all!

Here’s a summary of the WordPress Themes Team’s contributions in 2024, including Trac ticket activities and 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. theme statistics.

We sincerely appreciate everyone who participated in reviewing and creating themes, attended team meetings, identified bugs in the Theme Developer Handbook, and contributed in other ways to support the Themes Team.

Please note that these statistics are based on WordPress TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. custom query filters and some manual counts. If you notice any inaccuracies in the data, feel free to let us know, and we’ll verify them promptly.

Major Highlights

General Overview

In the year 2024,

  • 39671 tickets were opened (Both new and updated)
  • 39796 tickets were closed
    • 39046 tickets were made live. (This includes news and updates)
      • 1926 new Themes were submitted for review.
      • 1566 new Themes were made live. (All Block, Hybrid, or Classic Themes)
      • 360 new Themes submitted for review are closed as not approved.
      • 37210 Theme updates were made live.
    • 725 tickets were not approved.
    • 25 tickets were closed-newer-version-uploaded.

The percentage of new themes live is 81.3% whereas 18.7% were not-approved.

Monthwise data for 2024 (New Themes Submission, Live and Not Approved)

Months/StatisticsTotalLiveNot Approved
January15011733
February13310627
March14910940
April16714423
May17614630
June15213418
July18215032
August20116734
September20316340
October16213032
November1309931
December645311

Bar graph showing the comparison data for 2024 (January – December)

Block Themes Statistics

  • The number of Block Themes submissions: 646
    • Block themes were made live: 549
    • Block themes were not-approved: 96
    • Currently under review: 18

Monthwise data for block themes 2024 (New Themes Submission, Live and Not Approved)

Months/StatisticsTotalLiveNot Approved
January150305
February1332912
March1493412
April167526
May1765311
June152494
July182499
August201658
September2036712
October162447
November130377
December64230

Bar graph showing the comparison data for block themes 2024 (January – December)

Top 10 Theme Authors

Here is the list of the top 10 authors by number of themes uploaded.

AuthorsTotal Number of Themes LiveNumber of Classic Themes LiveNumber of Block Themes Live
@automattic98098
@cretathemes32032
@ascendoor31310
@vowelweb31292
@pewilliams30030
@themagnifico5230300
@bosathemes29290
@classictemplate26260
@omegathemes26260
@themegrove26026

Theme Reviewers

In the year 2024, we have 9 reviewers. Here is the list of the top 5 reviewers with the number of reviews (including not-approved).

Theme ReviewerNumber of reviews (including not-approved)
@kafleg1192
@acosmin513
@fahimmurshed93
@vowelweb89
@bijayyadav25
@rabieelkheir3
@rinkuyadav9993
@shivashankerbhatta3

HelpScout Stats

In the year 2024,

Email Conversations 670Messages Received 920
Replies Sent 606Emails Created 38
Resolved 425Resolved on First Reply 84%

Blog Posts Statistics

Block Theme Handbook

Worked on the following chapters,

Huge props to @greenshady for his hard work to complete this handbook.

Thank you @acosmin for helping to collect statistics and data on 27th Dec.

#themes-team

Proposal: changes to the themes team

https://make.wordpress.org/themes/ states:

“The primary focus of the team is to help theme authors transition to 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.-based themes.”

Let’s bring that in with the description of what the team does and their priorities.

The current issues:

  • The name of the team’s 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 doesn’t fit anymore: the team is no longer called the Themes Review team, but the slack channel is still called #themereview. This creates confusion for contributors, especially in the context of contributor days and general onboarding.
  • Team competencies have expanded: so far, the main task of the team members has been reviews. With the advent of block themes, the queues have become much shorter, and not many reviewers are needed anymore. Some team members have moved on to participate in theme-related tasks such as creating new default themes, helping maintain past default themes, and also contributing to community themes. Some have created patterns or even moved to focus on easing the gap between classic and block themes with work in the editor itself. All of this combines to focus on helping those creating themes move and grow in using block themes.
  • The need for visibility of an expanded team: If the team’s competencies expand, onboarding new theme members allows for a greater diversity of profiles. We want to collaborate closer with the design team, coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. editor team and empower designers to collaborate and contribute.

What now?

The next steps we recommend are:

  • Rename Slack channel to #themes.
  • Meetings:
    • Continue to have a team meeting focused on theme reviews. This remains an opportunity for theme authors to ask questions about submitting their themes.
    • Begin to have a weekly bug scrub for default themes on Monday afternoons at 14:00 BST.
  • Team reporting:
    • The team will continue to report stats on the number of submitted and closed themes, reviews, and emails…
    • Default theme stats will be reported each month at the end of the month.
  • Team reps:
    • Team reps don’t need to cover all the new areas of focus of the team, but hopefully, this change will encourage people from outside the scope of reviews to volunteer as representatives in the future
  • Encourage contribution days to have theme tables to embrace this new focus.
  • Update the team handbook to reflect the changes.

Let’s discuss this proposal and see what the rest of the missing pieces here are.

This post was a collaborative effort of @acosmin @poena @kafleg @luminuu @desrosj @shivashankerbhatta @karmatosed @onemaggie

Props @chanthaboune for pre-publish review.

Blue Note: The second community theme is released

Blue Note, the second WordPress community theme is live on the WordPress themes directory. This theme is perfect for writers and bloggers. It is an elegant and fun 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. theme inspired by jazz and the record label “Blue Note Records”.

Community Theme Blue Note

Blue Note comes with 14 different patterns. It can be easily added to the post and page. It also includes 7 page templates and 4 template parts. The design of the patterns was inspired by Jazz record covers.

The theme was mainly developed during WCEU 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/.. During the keynote, it also got a shoutout from Josepha. The remaining work of the theme is finished by contributors afterward.

As per the designer @beafialho, the idea for the design comes after working on the State of Words slide 2020. There was plenty of inspiration around the Blue Note aesthetic and jazzy style, which gave us the idea of designing a theme that essentially had a very simple structure, and offered many styled patterns.

Community Themes

Community themes are a new initiative to provide high-quality themes for free. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to contribute to this effort on the Community Themes GitHub repository.

Credits

Thank you @beafialho for the nice design. And also thank you all contributors.

#community-themes, #themes

Themes Team Meeting Notes – February 09, 2021

At first, thank you all for your active participation in this meeting.

The meeting was held based on this meeting agenda.

Channel: #themereview
Notes Taken: @kafleg
Channel: #themereview 
Time: Tuesday, February 09 2021, 15:00 UTC

Meeting Agendas

  1. Weekly updates
  2. Get work update about theme unit test
  3. Open Floor

Weekly Updates

Currently 83 new parent themes and 24 new child themes are waiting for review. The waiting time is 7 weeks.

In the past 7 days,

  • 428 tickets were opened
  • 487 tickets were closed:
    • 445 tickets were made live.
      • 12 new Themes were made live.
      • 433 Theme updates were made live.
      • 3 more were approved but are waiting to be made live.
    • 28 tickets were not-approved.
    • 14 tickets were closed-newer-version-uploaded.

Number of active reviewers this week: 5.

Please check the weekly updates details here.

Thank you all the reviewers who helped this week.

Theme Unit Test work update

@technocrews gave an update about the theme unit test. He is looking for anything that needs to be updated.
He asked for some assistance regarding maintaining open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. projects on 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/. He has been in contact with @poena and @williampatton as well about GitHub. He is planning to have a meeting with all contributors this weekend.

During the meeting, we presented the current workflow with opening issues and pull requests, and this will be added to the project’s read me file.

If you want to contribute, you can comment below or contact @technocrews.
You can check the open issues for the theme unit test here.

Open Floor

In this part, @poena brought up short information to theme authors that, “If your theme gets stuck on the themes TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/., if it does not go live in the directory after the ticket has the “live” status, if your slug is incorrect in the directory, or if your preview is broken – then those questions need to be brought up in the #meta channel, not #themereview. The themes team has no access to troubleshoot or resolve those issues.”

She was also looking for ideas to make the review process documentation clearer. There was also a short discussion about changing the Unsplash image message that shows in trac.

You can read the entire meeting discussion via this link.

Any comments and discussion can be done via the below comment box.

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

Discussion: Requirements for full site editing themes

As explorations of the minimum viable full site editing theme continues and the outreach program is starting, it is time to have a first discussion about requirements for FSEFSE Short for Full Site Editing, a project for the Gutenberg plugin and the editor where a full page layout is created using only blocks. themes in the theme directory.

Having basic requirements is one of the steps needed for us to be able to open up theme submissions:

  1. Requirements
  2. Update the Theme Check 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 to allow full site editing themes
  3. Strengthen reviewer knowledge
  4. Activate 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/ on the theme previewer -Completed

These are discussions points and not a complete proposal.

You can compare the items below with the current requirements.

New code requirements:

Valid 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. markup: There must be no block validation errors on theme switch.

For this requirement, we need to research if it is possible to validate the block markup automatically.

Minimum required files:

  • style.css
  • readme.txt
  • functions.php
  • index.htmlHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. (placed inside the block-templates folder)
  • Temporary: Comments.php is required as without it, a 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. https://www.php.net/manual/en/preface.php. warning is shown.
  • Theme.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. (or experimental-theme.json).

Requirements that may need to be adjusted:

Plugins: Themes are allowed to require Gutenberg as long as Gutenberg is needed to enable full site editing.

Options and Settings
Theme options may only be included as:

  • Theme_support
  • Global style settings
  • Block patterns
  • Block variations
  • Block styles

Items under this requirement that become irrelevant or confusing because blocks are used instead of PHP functions:

  • Use 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. for implementing theme options
  • Save options in a single array
  • Don’t use transients for things they shouldn’t be used for, like storing theme options
  • Use sane defaults and don’t write default setting values to the database

Presentation vs Functionality: Images that are not plain placeholder images and essential for the design are allowed.

Items under this requirement that become irrelevant or confusing because blocks are used instead of PHP functions:

  • The theme options should not be pseudo custom post types and save non-trivial user data
  • Non-design related functionality is not allowed

CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Functionality and Features

Items under this requirement that become irrelevant or confusing because blocks are used instead of PHP functions:

If incorporated, features must support the WordPress functionality:  

  • Sidebars
  • Navigation Menus
  • Post Thumbnails
  • Custom Headers
  • Custom Backgrounds
  • Editor Style
  • Logo

Use template tags properly

Include comments.php (via comments_template())

Requirements that remain the same:

  • Licensing
  • 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) (temporary exception for skip to content link)
  • Readme file
  • Importing or downloading
  • Documentation
  • Naming
  • Screenshot
  • Image guidelines (exception for placeholder images that are essential for the design)
  • Stylesheets and Scripts
  • Privacy
  • Selling, credits, and links
  • Child themes

Requirements that it is not currently possible to follow:

Language / translation ready


Request for feedback

  • Which of the current requirements are relevant for full site editing themes?
  • What new full site editing specific requirements needs to be added?
  • How do we best present the requirements for full site editing themes?
    • On a separate page
    • In a separate section of the current requirements page
    • Other, describe your suggestion in the comment

#full-site-editing, #guidelines, #themes