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Theme Review Team Meeting Agenda for march 10

Theme review team (TRT) conducts a meeting on the second and fourth Tuesday of the month. Along with the fixed agendas, we have open floor meeting at the end where you can ask or share anything related to themes.

We encourage all members and anyone interested to attend.

Channel: #themereview | Time: Tuesday, 10th of march 2020, 18:00 CET

Meeting Agenda

  1. Weekly updates
    1. Full Site Editing Road map: No news to report.
    2. Experimental themes: Two suggestions so far, 0 accepted.
    3. Updated Welcome box with improved design and information.
  2. Announcing the new team rep
  3. Discussion: Opening up a place for theme author collaborations.
  4. The remedial program
  5. Open Floor

The discussion about the meeting agenda can be held in the comments below. You are encouraged to propose the topic for the agenda.

Meetings usually last around 60 minutes. Attend and share your valuable feedback and suggestions.

#agenda, #meeting, #trt

Block-based Themes Meeting Notes for March 4, 2020

Moderated by @kjellr, the full conversation can be found here: http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200310163153/https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C02RP4Y3K/p1583337635468900

Global Styles Update

A PR led by @nosolosw has Global Styles working within the beta site editor: http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200310163153/https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/20530

The main takeaway for theme folks is that this update pulls in style variables from a theme file (currently named experimental-theme.json).

You can see how this is applied in two PRs in the theme experiments repository:

Updating Core blocks to support the Global styles variables is one of the main focuses for Gutenberg this month, so expect to see more developments soon.

Blocks for full site editing

The comments count, comments form, featured image, and tags blocks were all included in Gutenberg 7.6, which came out last week. The following blocks are in progress:

Lighter DOM

Please check out two PRs led by @ella on the Lighter DOM:

The goal is to create 1:1 parity between blocks’ front-end and editor DOM structure. This gets us a bit closer to being able to provide one set of styles that cover both the front-end and editor.

You can follow along the Lighter DOM work here: http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200310163153/https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pulls?q=is%3Apr+%22Lighter+block+DOM%22+

Block Patterns Overview

@nrqsnchz provided an overview of the Block Patterns concept.

“Block patterns are predefined block layouts that users can add to a document. Think of them as a combination of blocks that create a specific layout. These can be used to let users quickly add a contact form, a testimonials sections, an editorial section, etc.”

Github issue with more details and explorations can be found here here: http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200310163153/https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/17335

The team has been exploring how to surface block patterns to users in this PR: http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200310163153/https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/20354

Your feedback and suggestions are requested!

Call for Experimental Themes

@poena wanted to remind folks that all kinds of submissions are welcome in a call for experimental themes:

Q&A

Following the updates, a lively discussion ensued. Please refer to those conversations in Slack if they are of interest to you:

#block-based-meeting, #meeting, #meeting-notes, #trt

Block-based Themes Meeting Agenda for March 4, 2020

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

Time: Wednesday, March 4th 2020, 16:00 UTC
Channel: #themereview

Agenda

If you have any questions you’d like to see raised at this week’s meeting, or any topics or demos you’d like to see in future meetings, please share below.

@jffng has volunteered to take notes. 🙌

#agenda

#block-based-meeting

Call for experimental themes

Experimental themes are themes that may not fit under the current theme requirements but have exceptional code quality and a unique idea and / or niche.

The theme directory has always welcomed special case themes, but the process has not been well known.

The team would now like to officially call for experimental themes. So show us your best, funniest and weirdest!

Communication is key:

To be able to submit a special case theme, you need to present your idea and the theme itself to the Themes team before you submit your theme.

You can leave a comment on this post or reach out in the #themereview Slack channel.

If we love our idea, you will be allowed to submit a blank theme (that passes the checks made by the uploader). The moderators will perform some magic in the admin area of the directory, and will let you know when you can submit the experimental theme.

The theme will be placed in the same review queue as the other themes but will be reviewed by the moderators.

Examples of special case themes:

Themes using the WordPress REST API.

JavaScript based themes.

Exceptional block based themes (full site editing).

Exceptional niche themes.

Something hilarious.

What is not a special case theme:

Themes that only include a custom post type like portfolio, testimonials and similar that are already well covered by plugins.

Basic one page themes or basic multipurpose themes without a particular niche.

A theme submitted only to avoid specific requirements, but without a real purpose.

Requirements

Be 100% GPL compatible, be secure, no PHP or JS errors, no obtrusive upsell. Only one theme by the same author can be submitted to the queue at the time.

Very good initiative @poena.

Would this theme design qualify? We could create a lite version of it.

Keep up the good work,
Vlad
Pixelgrade

We have a few themes that we haven’t submitted yet, and they’re almost entirely made of blocks outside of the default templates.

How do we know if our block-based themes are ‘full site’ enough?

Our themes still have the navigation integrated with the WordPress Customizer navigation… which I would think would disqualify them as full site block building–but literally everything else besides the header navigations and footer widget areas are block-based…

Meeting notes, Tuesday 25th February 2020

Last Tuesday, 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

  • 265 tickets were opened
  • 288 tickets were closed:
  • 261 tickets were made live.
    • 20 new Themes were made live.
    • 241 Theme updates were made live.
  • 9 more were approved but are waiting to be made live.
  • 24 tickets were not-approved.
  • 3 tickets were closed-newer-version-uploaded.

Recap of the online contributor day

As we announced in this post, we tried to replace the contributor day in the cancelled WordCamp Asia with an online contribution day. Therefore, @poena and @kafleg conducted an online workshop on theme review for the Bangladeshi developers. It was very fruitful. Even though participation was less than expected, we managed to review together around 25 themes. Some of the themes reviewed could not be approved and we had a couple of suspensions, but we could nevertheless set live several themes. All in all, we are rather content with the results of the day. We ran the online contribution day with Zoom and the session lasted more than 6 hours.

We would like to have feedback about this type of exercise, so if you were one of the participants, please feel free to leave your opinion in the comments. Also, if there is a group of people interested in contributing online to other events like this, we can repeat the exercise in the future. We would love to share ideas to improve the reviews. Ping us if interested, here in the comments or in the Slack #themereview channel.

Removal of the Featured themes tab in the theme directory

The Featured themes tab in the themes directory page has been removed on the wordpress.org site. The meta ticket associated with this removal is here. Besides, there is a core ticket to remove the Featured tab in the Add themes screen of the administration menu. There has also been a discussion to improve the Featured themes tab in this ticket, but it never reached an operable conclusion.

Full Site Editing Road map: Requirements for block based themes

Next, we shared some information about the roadmap for the block-based themes.

Block-based themes can still not be submitted for review. Neither we have a date for when they can start to be submitted. However, you can experiment and try to develop your owns and also you can contribute to Full Site Editing (FSE) in Gutenberg.

Remember that we do not allow custom blocks in themes and that will continue to be so. Block-based themes do not have to register blocks.

A list of the proposed requirements for block-based themes can be found here, but it is work in progress. The new requirements are based on the fact that block-based themes will use HTML templates instead of PHP templates. HTML templates musk work without errors in Gutenberg. We will adapt the requirements, deleting those we don’t need anymore and adding new ones as we move along.

Next meeting is planned for Tuesday 10th March.

#meeting, #meeting-notes, #trt