Meeting notes Tuesday 12 May 2020

Welcome to the Themes team!

We are a group of volunteers who review and approve themes submitted to be included in the official WordPress Theme directory.

We do license, security, and code quality reviews.

Code reviews are a great way to learn more about developing themes and improving your own skills.

If this sounds interesting, read more about the team here. Check out our guide for new reviewers.

Handbooks and review requirements

The team maintains the official Theme Review Requirements, the Theme Unit Test Data, and helps the documentation team with the Theme Developer Handbook.

Coding standards and plugins

We maintain the WPThemeReview Standard for PHP_CodeSniffer, the Theme Sniffer plugin and Theme Check

Code Packages

We have code packages for themes available for use on Github and Packagist

Communication

Meet us in the #themereview 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.

Meetings:

Note that we are having a summer break for the bi- weekly Theme Review meeting.

Next review meeting is on August 4 17:00 UTC.

Twice monthly at Tuesday @ 17:00 UTC Second Tuesday in the month is open floor and the fourth Tuesday is with a fixed 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 Themes meeting twice monthly at Wednesday @ 16:00 UTC

Triage Meeting twice monthly at Wednesday @ 18:00 UTC

#meeting, #meeting-notes, #trt

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

216 tickets were opened
241 tickets were closed:
199 tickets were made live.
- 13 new Themes were made live.
- 186 Theme updates were made live.
- 2 more was approved but are waiting to be made live.
42 tickets were not-approved.
0 ticket was closed-newer-version-uploaded.

We have managed to cut down on the queue length, which is always a good news.

We thank to all the reviewers, keep doing a great job 🎉

Changing the name of the team

The representatives decided, in the light of recent changes that new editor brings to the landscape of the themes, to rename the team from Themes Review Team to just Themes Team.

We always did more than just review the themes that end up in the wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ repository, but in recent years we started working more around themes in general – open-source packages, work on full site editing, actively participating around 2020 theme, etc.
So it was a natural progression.

Discussion regarding using “Guten” in theme names

There is a growing trend of themes starting with ‘Guten’ prefix, or containing it in their name. This, of course, alludes to the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. editor – codenamed Gutenberg.

Since that name, or part of the name, is not trademarked in any way, we won’t forbid authors from using it.

Selecting a date and time for WCEU office hours

This was a discussion regarding this post about WCEU online contributors day.

It was agreed that the office hours will be held in the same time we hold the meetings, that seems to be the most convenient time.

Closing 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 the plugin directory and Github. Themes are not required to pass the Theme Sniffer scan without warnings or errors to be included in the theme directory. in the 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 directory

As some may have noticed we removed the Theme Sniffer from the plugins repository.
With all the projects I’m working on, it just wasn’t possible to keep maintaining it, and it had some nasty issues present that, in a way, kept reviewers jobs harder.

The plugin is still in the GitHub repo, so if anybody wants to contribute, feel free to do so.

Open Floor

Making the Tested up to and Requires PHP fields required instead of recommended in order to push folks to update the 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. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. versions.

Since the core blocking installs based on this value will land in WP 5.5, it will be good to let the authors know to implement this.

As explained by Marius Jensen:

If a theme says: Requires PHP 7.2, and the user has their WordPress installed on PHP 5.6, the theme will be shown in the theme search in wp-admin, but it will have a badge saying they can’t install it, why they can’t, and how to fix it. And if they try to upload it, they will get an error instead of the upload completing.

The readme tag is required, but the theme authors should be aware that they will need to add it in their style.css as well.