williampatton 6:41 pm on August 11, 2020  

What should happen when a theme in the directory doesn’t follow the guidelines?

Sometimes a theme that is listed in the directory is updated in ways that don’t match expectations for themes outlined in the guidelines. The team has tried different ways to address issues like this.

Inconsistent results have come from warning theme authors that their theme could be suspended if they don’t resolve the issue. Suspending a theme immediately upon finding an issue is an effective way to motivate theme authors to fix problems, but it can be confusing for end users and stressful for theme authors and reviewers.

There’s been a lot of discussion (in 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/. and elsewhere) lately about the best way for this team to resolve these issues, moving forward. Collecting opinions and suggestions in one place, like this blog post, seems like a good way to ensure that good ideas aren’t lost in a backscroll. 

When sharing your ideas and feedback, please remember:

  • This team is staffed by volunteers.  
  • There is a lot of work to do, and not many people to do it. 
  • This discussion should follow WordPress.org etiquette. 

To help direct the discussion toward productive solutions, please consider answering the following questions in your comment:

  1. Are there teams in WordPress or in similar organizations whose policies / communication processes might be a good model for the Theme team? 
  2. What is the right balance between the needs of WordPress users and the needs of theme authors? 
  3. If you could change only one thing about this team’s policies / communication processes, what would it be? 

Thanks to @acosmin, @poena, and @andreamiddleton for their input with editing this post.

Jeff Ong 4:00 pm on August 7, 2020
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Gutenberg + Themes: Week of Aug 4, 2020

Hello! This is the 13th weekly roundup of theme-related discussions, fixes, and developments in 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/. It was relatively quiet due to the focus on testing and improvements for 5.5.

Please weigh in on the tickets below — your voice and feedback are welcome! 

In progress / Discussions:

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

  • Articulate requirements for porting existing themes. 24313
  • How to sync edits from theme to site editor. 22469
  • Improve template part visibility and enable browse mode. 24252

Global Styles

  • Global styles affecting non-FSE themes. 24326
  • Tracking and consolidating style attributes for blocks. 22700 
  • Add support for more styles at the global level 24298
  • Make `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.` cross-platform (web & mobile). 24165

Merged:

FSE Blocks

  • Post title block: add style attributes 24246
  • Add color support to the post content block. 24014

General Resources:

Thanks to @itsjusteileen, @kjellr, and @joen for help pulling this post together. Please let us know if it was helpful in the comments!

#gutenberg-themes-roundup

Jeff Ong 3:50 pm on August 6, 2020
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Block-based Themes Meeting Summary: Aug 5, 2020

This week we held our bi-weekly 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 meeting in the #themereview channel. The conversation starts here.

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/ Theme-related Updates

“Keeping up with Gutenberg” was launched, a single place to follow Gutenberg related posts across the make blog universe. 

Discussion: porting existing themes to block-based themes

We had a discussion about easing the path for theme authors to make the switch to FSE, by allowing block templates to work with existing php templates. Specifically, the group discussed how template resolution could work, and the challenges that will arise around how the site editor will handle pages that use existing php templates.

The discussion arose from this GitHub issue, and continues there.

Open Floor

  • “it is difficult to get an overview of what we are working towards”
  • “Is FSE still targeted to being stable, in core, in 5.6? Or stable in Gutenberg at 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. of 5.6?”

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

Jeff Ong 4:25 pm on August 4, 2020  

Block-based Themes Agenda: August 5, 2020

Below is the agenda for this week’s Block-based Themes meeting.

Time: Wednesday, August 5, 2020, 16:00 UTC
Channel: #themereview

Agenda

  • 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 theme related updates in 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/
  • Discussion
    • Compatibility between block-based themes and existing themes
  • Open Floor / Q&A

Please comment if you have any topics you’d like to see discussed!

We also need a volunteer to take notes.

+make.wordpress.org/core/ #agenda