Welcome to the Themes Team
This section is intended to guide you through different ways that you can contribute to the Themes Team and contribute to making WordPress themes better.
If you need any help at any time you can always ask the contribution day lead or organizer and you always find people to ask on Slack at #themereview.
This section is a work in progress. Most of the documentation is related to how to do theme reviews. The team is hoping to extend the documentation in the future, as there are many other ways to contribute.
Don’t be afraid to amend the document or leave comments, particularly if you’re at a contributor day and find that we’ve missed something.
What is the themes team?
We are the humans that check every theme that goes onto the WordPress.org theme directory.
See more under the “What do we do?” section below.
Who are the team?
You can find out more about the team here and meet the members here.
Why get involved?
There are many reasons why it’s important to get involved in the themes team, not only to review themes. WordPress themes are changing fast with the introduction of block themes and site editing. The Themes Team helps increase awareness of the changes and members of the team actively work on bug fixes and changes related to block themes.
If you are a theme developer, reviewing themes raises your game, helps you improve your skills, and lets you get exposure to a lot of code. Being a theme reviewer is a win-win situation. You get to give back, but you also get to improve your own skills and learn how to create themes correctly.
The Themes Team keeps alive the valuable resource of the free theme directory. Without the themes team, the directory wouldn’t be a place people could go to download themes. Quite simply, we keep it alive.
Why do we need reviewers?
Having your theme in the WordPress.org directory is desirable, so there is always a need for reviewers. Humans can catch things machines can’t, that is simply why we need people to become theme reviewers.
What do we do?
We review themes. Every theme that gets uploaded has a theme reviewer assigned and we run it through a series of tests. We check that the theme works, that there are no PHP errors, and that the theme is secure. No theme is able to go onto the theme directory until it has met these requirements.
The Themes Team:
- Reviews and approves themes submitted to the official WordPress theme directory
- Helps build and maintain community themes and default themes
- Contributes to the Theme Developer Handbook
- Reviews and approves patterns submitted to the official WordPress Pattern directory
- Maintains the theme review handbook, and requirements for including a theme in the theme directory
- Maintains the theme test data, and the theme check plugin.
- Contributes to solving theme-related enhancements and bugs in WordPress and Gutenberg
Keeping in touch
As a team, we have a few ways we keep in touch.
- We use Slack and our channel is #themereview. You can find out more about Slack here.
- We have a weekly meeting every second Tuesday at 15:00 UTC in #themereview on Slack.
- We use the team blog for all our updates and frequently post articles there. We advise all new members to subscribe to this blog.
Prior Knowledge
You do not need any previous experience to contribute to the Themes team. We simply ask you to have a willingness to learn. There are a few skills we always encourage people to work on though as that makes contributing easier:
- The ability to test.
- Theme structure knowledge.
- HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and basic PHP skills.
- Knowledge about licensing
- Knowledge about Git or GitHub
What to work on during a contributor day
If you are organizing a contributor day there are several things you can choose to work on:
- Recommended: Learn about block themes and create a new block theme together, which is then submitted to the theme directory as part of the Community Themes project:
- Recommended: Contribute to the Theme Developer handbook by writing and reviewing content. Read more about updates to the handbook: Theme Handbook Overhaul (Tracking Ticket)
- Contribute to the default themes that are included in WordPress, for example by testing reported bugs
- Review themes that have been submitted to the theme directory. See Onboarding for new reviewers
We continue to add useful resources and you can find them here.
Preparing for contributor day (WCEU 2019 post)