The first version of the refresh is now up and live under Handbook. The main changes in this first version are:
- Structure
- Menu and navigation
- Requirements and Recommendations
We also now have a new main menu for the team:
- About
- Handbook
- Review
- Trac
- Become a Reviewer
First a few notes about what has happened.
- No old content is lost. It’s all there just behind. No pages have been deleted.
- Most old content has been merged into the new structure.
- A lot of phrasing and words have changed in an attempt to simplify and solidify things.
- This is very much version one. There will be updates all throughout the next few weeks.
- Where existing content was brought over links have been updated to developer.wordpress.org from codex as is the plan to as a project move onto that. We need to ‘catch em all’ and make sure we update links.
- The idea is this becomes a living document. In particular we should review this frequently.
We now have the following main sections:
I’m going to go through the main new sections a little to explain them.
The Team
This section now has the following sub sections:
- Communication
- Members
This is where the ‘About’ link goes to.
Get Involved
This is now the section where you can learn about being a reviewer and contribution days:
- Become a Reviewer
- Contribution Days: Sub pages on getting started and running a session.
- Being a Good Theme Citizen. This is a page we talked about at SF and since. It’s going to be something we can build on and help encourage the behaviour we want in theme authors.
- Mentoring
Review
This is the core of the handbook now. Explicitly named. The big difference is the simple splitting removing all required into one single document.
- Review: Lists what a review is, how to do it and what to expect.
- Required: This now lists every requirement as it stands today. Nothing has been changed that hasn’t been discussed and agreed as a team. Also under this is the theme check plugin to list all it checks (this is a work in progress documentation).
- Recommended : This will be a section that builds up over time to include all the ‘nice to haves’ we have all talked about. No theme should fail these.
- Reviewer workflow. For now this has a suggested ticket format and also explanation of queues. This will grow.
- Accessibility . This document is from the Accessibility team and needs reformatting along with them.
Resources
This is a single page for now but may grow into sub section. We can fill this up with useful make.blog posts – so they don’t get lost. Also useful articles we come across. We should consider this as a place to really build a good library of useful resources. If you’ve got something you think should be listed there lets hear about it!
Next phase
The next phase is going to focus on the extra pages and fleshing out recommended. Also going over the handbook style guide is important – I’ll be doing that too.
Sections that will get attention are:
- Handbook landing page itself
- The Team
- Get Involved
- Recommended
- We also need to work with the Accessibility team and get their new page inline with the changes we’ve done.
For at least a few weeks I’ll be doing weekly maintenance checks on pages to ensure we are on top of things.
Requirements not set in stone yet
There are a few requirements we’re going to be debating over the next few weeks. That’s ok, this exercise was about refactoring the handbook not just requirements. For now, it reflects what stands today.
Any issues?
If you see any issues like spelling mistakes and you can edit those please do – that’s helpful. But, if there is something you would like to see done differently we need to have discussion about this rather than just change. A group of us have worked on this to get it this far. I’m excited about where we can all start to take this now as a larger group. We can also collect issues here and in Slack. I’m around most of the time for questions.