Block-based Themes Meeting Notes – May 6, 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

#block-based-meeting, #core-editor, #themereview

Happened in #themereview channel, facilitated by @kjellr.

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/ Roundup

Gutenberg 8.0 was released! Here are some highlights:

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. patterns now live in a tab of the inserter: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/20951
All center-aligned blocks now include float clearing in the front end and in the editor: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/21608
The default inserter now correctly inherits paragraph font styles. No need to write an additional style rule in your editor styles: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/21725
Button markup changes and issues were reverted / resolved: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/21923 https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/21816

Folks are working to bring feature parity between FSE blocks and other existing coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. blocks, eliminating a lot of extra CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. we’ve had to write for block-based themes: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/21087

Lots of good discussion around whether template parts should specify their own 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. tag, and include group block controls: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/20997

Support for dynamic content (relative media paths, translations) in block templates: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/21932

Adding a button to the full-site editor to download a theme including changes you’ve made: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/21958

There are concerns about the increased volume of themes that are essentially copies of other themes.

Discussion Topic: Keeping up with Gutenberg Changes

@poena recently asked:

How do all of you theme authors keep up with the changes to Gutenberg?
— Carolina Nymark (@carolinapoena) April 29, 2020

Where does your news and updates come from?

GithubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can 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/ notifications
#core-editor chat summaries
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. changelog
Tags for in-progress work, e.g. [Feature] Full-site Editing, [Feature] Themes

A longer, nuanced discussion ensued around the challenge of influencing changes before they are made / released happened 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/..

Two primary suggestions emerged that the team is going to try out!

A weekly news digest focused on in-progress work and changes related to themes. @itsjusteileen and @kjellr will take a pass at the first post next week!
Using the [Feature] Themes tag on the Gutenberg repo more often as relevant, and using tags in general.

#block-based-meeting

WordPress.org