A big thank you to everyone who participated in the contributor day!

This year we tried something new: Not only was the contributor day run online, via Zoom and Slack, but we also tried a new format for how we introduce new contributors.

In previous contributor days, the contributors were given a short introduction and then they were assigned a theme each to review.

The results were always varied and it was hard for new contributors to get started because there are lots of requirements, a new process that is new to them and the Trac ticket system to learn. It also created extra administration overheads following up after the contributor day.

One feedback that we often receive is that learning how to do a review is not the primary reason for why contributors choose to contribute to the Themes team. The drive is to become a better theme developer – to learn and share thoughts and ideas with others.

That is why we had set a goal to both have a quick introduction on how to do a theme review, and build a basic full site editing theme together.

The goal of building a FSE compatible theme together was lofty and we were unable to reach that goal, but I hope that you still found the afternoon useful.

We had 6 contributors who attended a contributor day for the first time, and 3 contributors who had done theme reviews before. None of the new contributors had submitted a theme to WordPress.org.

Unfortunately, due to internet issues, we were only able to have one host on Zoom. We started an hour into the contributor day – as we all waited for people to find their way to the Slack channel and Zoom.

At most, we had 19 people on Zoom, and my experience as a host was that it was difficult to make everyone heard and engaged.

– If you have questions that I missed, please take the opportunity to ask them on Slack or as a comment to this post.

• We did a quick walkthrough of the Trac ticket system and how to select a ticket to work on.
• We downloaded and reviewed one theme that we tested with the Theme Check plugin.
  • We looked through the files of the theme and tested the theme options in the customizer.

Some questions that were asked was:

Q – How long does a review take?
A – It depends, it is faster to find errors in a theme with lots of issues, than to confirm that a theme has no errors.

Q – How do I get assigned to a theme?
A – You need to login to your WordPress.org account and add a comment to the Trac ticket that you want to review. You can start the review right away, and a moderator will go through the Tac list and assign it to you when they see your comment.

Q – How do we confirm if the license is compatible with GPL?
A – We follow an official list of compatible license from the Free Software Foundation: http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200629192703/https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses

The most common license issue is that theme authors forget to include license information.

Q – How can we spot a theme copy?
A – Sometimes, people submit themes and only change a letter or two in the theme name, and that is easy to spot. Other times, people change the screenshot and the name of the theme, but we can recognize that the code is a copy of a different theme. A common sign is that the theme description is copied from a different theme. We use http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200629192703/https://wpdirectory.net/ to compare code snippets, and Trac diff to see the difference between two themes.

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Second part -full site editing

I also did an introduction to full site editing on zoom for the 11 patient contributors who stayed with us until the end of the day.

I showed how to enable the full site editing experiment and where to find experimental themes to test: http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200629192703/https://github.com/WordPress/theme-experiments

We talked about designing sites with blocks and I showed what the structure of a full site editing theme can look like, with block templates and template parts. We looked at the block grammar used inside the .html files, and how to include template parts inside templates.

We talked about the new full site editing blocks, block patterns, and block pattern categories.

I showed how to find theme related issues and pull requests in the Gutenberg Github repo, and talked briefly about what kind of bugs it would be good to open issues for when testing full site editing.

The contributors had questions about the time frame (when full site editing will be available), how to support plugins in templates and block patterns, and how to build more complex websites like eCommerce sites using blocks.

Proofread by @williampatton and @dingo_d