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:
- 257 tickets were opened
- 275 tickets were closed:
- 254 tickets were made live.
- 20 new Themes were made live.
- 234 Theme updates were made live.
- 2 more were approved but are waiting to be made live.
- 21 tickets were not-approved.
- 0 tickets were closed-newer-version-uploaded.
The current waiting time for new themes is 4 weeks. 73 themes are in the new queue.
Using reusable blocks to ease the transition to block based themes
@aristath Has written a post about using reusable blocks outside the content.
Reusable blocks can be used as a stepping stone for themes that want to make use of the block editor for header/footer/sidebars etc. before FSE is officially released.
It was suggested during the chat that theme authors should try full site editing instead of a temporary solution. Full site editing is not stable enough to be used in production, but reusable blocks are stable and can be used with existing themes.
Theme uploads that are blocked by Theme Check because of their images
Older themes with images from Unsplash and Pixabay, where the images were added to the theme before the website’s license change, have been blocked by Theme Check when uploaded to the WordPress.org theme directory.
The check in Theme Check does not only prevent the images but the use of the word Unsplash. Related: https://github.com/WordPress/theme-check/issues/259
It was decided that Theme Check will be updated to no longer block the images. This is a very small code change.
Allowing themes to place their admin page outside the appearance menu for increased visibility
This topic arose from a question about whether themes are allowed to add a panel with information to the block editor sidebar/tools panel. This is not allowed.
To keep the editor free from clutter, advertising and upsell, with the customizer being used less, and no dashboard widgets being allowed, can we give theme authors a better place to include their information, and limit upsell to that area?
If a top level menu item would be allowed, these restrictions were suggested:
- No priority may be used.
- No UI or color changes are allowed for the menu item.
- The title must be kept short and not include spam.
- If a custom icon is used it must be a single color.
- No more than 3 subpages.
A longer more heated discussion took place after the meeting, and the decision was postponed. A new post will be created on the teams make blog to discuss it further.
We want to remind everyone that the requirement for not adding any obtrusive upsell is still in place.
How do we best handle updates to themes that have not been updated in two years?
Updates to themes that had not been updated in two years used to “get stuck” because reviewers were not able to see that they did not go live automatically.
We now have these updates listed in their own queue on the themes Trac https://themes.trac.wordpress.org/report/1 And while the new queue is 4 weeks, this queue is 3 months.
- There are not enough reviewers to cover all queues.
- Theme authors may not be aware that their update is not going live automatically
- Theme authors may not be aware of that old themes has to follow the current requirements.
It was suggested that these themes should be set live, and there was a short discussion about if it was safe to set them live. It is common for these themes to not follow the current requirements.
The discussions resulted in no changes being made to the queue. We need to remind theme reviewers to also review themes from this queue.
Update on the navigation block/navigation screen
The navigation block and navigation screen will not be ready in time for WordPress 5.5. Please help test these features.
There is a new meeting about navigation on Wednesdays at 07:00 UTC in the #core channel on the WordPress slack.
@aristath Has created and written about a menu filter that helps theme authors add markup and CSS classes used by the block to the current nav menu.
This will help theme authors use the same styling for their current navigation and the navigation block.
It was suggested during the navigation meeting that the Navigation block should output markup that is as identical as possible to existing menus.
Date and time of the next meeting
It was agreed that the next team meeting will be on Tuesday, August 4th, 2020 at 1700 UTC.