The meeting started with a quick round of updates. There is still no resolution about the trusted authors (TA) issues.
After that we started discussing the proposed meeting agendas.
The following is the recap of the meeting, you can read the meeting transcript in the slack archives (a Slack account is required).
Docs team discussion about the theme developer handbook
There was a discussion on the #docs slack channel about handover of the theme developer handbook to the TRT.
The idea is to have a single responsible person from the TRT team that will take care of the developer handbook for the themes. This means updating it with new requirements and keeping it up to date in general.
It was agreed that the person in charge of the theme developer handbook will be @acalfieri, who is an experienced reviewer and has been an active member of TRT for a long time.
Of course, if there will be interested volunteers to help you can always ask in the slack channel.
Accessibility (a11y) requirements
In the accessibility team meeting it was proposed to add some of the requirements from the themes which use accessibility-ready tag to standard themes in the repository.
The emphasis is on making the themes easier to use, especially for the people with certain types of disabilities.
The proposal included incorporating the keyboard navigation, control, skip link, and form labelling requirements from the existing accessibility-ready requirements.
This is the first step in making all themes in wordpress.org repository accessible.
The changed requirement wouldn’t encompass all the accessibility-ready requirements to be present on the standard themes, nor would it automatically make them accessibility-ready, but by incorporating one by one requirements, through longer time period, the idea is to encourage theme authors to write accessible themes out of the box.
It was agreed that the skip links requirement from the accessibility part will be moved to the required section of the review handbook, and that the team will implement new a11y requirement every two months. This will give theme authors enough time to make their themes more accessible.
Removing Demo Content from the theme
It was already agreed with removing demo content files (xml, json or some other format) from the themes. But there needs to be alternative to that.
It was agreed that the requirement should be updated with following to make it more clear:
Importing or Downloading:
Themes are not allowed to import content to a user’s site.
Themes are not allowed to link directly to an XML, JSON, ZIP, or other file for direct download or import.
Themes are not allowed to bundle demo content via an XML, JSON, ZIP, or other file.
Also, a meeting will be held in the #design slack channel about updating the wordpress.org previewer content which can then be used as a starting content for the developers to develop their themes.
Theme generated notices
All the notifications generated by a theme should use the admin_notices API and follow the Core design pattern. They must be dismissible. Everything wrapped in the admin notice needs to follow Core UI design for the notices.
This will be a requirement on all the themes.
Open floor discussions
There was a mention of the tool that can help reviewers review a theme – WPTRT-Cloud-Launcher. It’s a Chrome extension that launches a cloud instance that comes pre-configured with the theme and theme sniffer/check plugins installed.