pbking 6:34 pm on March 18, 2022  

Gutenberg + Themes: Week of March 14th, 2022

Hello! This is the 77th roundup of theme-related discussions, fixes, and developments in 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/ coinciding with the 12.8 release.

New features:

Webfonts APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways.: Font Configuration via theme.jsonJSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML.

#37140 adds support for a Webfonts API allowing themes to express configuration of the fonts to load using only theme.json!  This is pretty exciting.  It’s just a beginning; tooling still needs to be built around this so that it’s easier to manage from the interface but this is a strong step toward the (very tricky) concept of Font management for themes.

Included in the Zip: Global Styles and More

#39048 adds the theme.json to the resources exported from the Full Site Editor.  This is a step closer to having a fully operational theme exported from the FSEFSE Short for Full Site Editing, a project for the Gutenberg plugin and the editor where a full page layout is created using only blocks..  (Note: how that might work is being discussed… see below!)

#39173 takes that even further and adds an index.php and style.css file as well.

Pattern Registration with theme.json

With #38323 we can now register wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org//patterns to a theme via theme.json.  This documentation helps clarify a bit.

Discussions:

Export what?

How do we build themes exclusively with the FSE?  This tracking issue explores what we need to do to get there.

An abstraction too far?

The abstract property appearanceTools in theme.json might not be the right approach. It’s convenient but potentially confusing.  Discussion started in 39586.

Semantic Abstractions?

The Standardization of Colors (among other things) has been discussed quite a bit but we still have no standardized resolution.  39372 opens a discussion regarding standardizing more of that in theme.json.   39371 does the same but for standardized spacing names and 39370 for typography.  Please add your voice!

General Resources:

Tellyworth 5:42 am on March 16, 2022
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X-post: Coming soon: Block Pattern Directory Submissions

X-post from +make.wordpress.org/meta: Coming soon: Block Pattern Directory Submissions

Benachi 5:44 pm on March 8, 2022
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Themes Team Meeting Notes – March 8, 2022

Hello everyone. The meeting notes from the themes review team discussion on March 8, 2022. The themes team meets second and fourth Tuesday of every month at 15:00 UTC.

This week’s meeting agendas can be found here. Thank you @kafleg for preparing the agenda. The meeting was facilitated by @kafleg. The note was taken by @Benachi. You can read the full transcript on our #themereview channel. 

1. Weekly updates

The themes team published weekly updates about tickets and HelpScout emails. 

Here is the theme statistic for the past 7 days. The most current stats can be found here.

  • 441 tickets were opened
  • 447 tickets were closed:
    • 435 tickets were made live.
      • 22 new Themes were made live.
      • 413 Theme updates were made live.
      • 0 more were approved but are waiting to be made live.
    • 12 tickets were not-approved.
    • 0 tickets were closed-newer-version-uploaded.

Number of reviewers: 2

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. Themes: 
0 block themes are live in the past 7 days.  

2. Updates

AccessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) guidelines update:
Headings requirement has been revised for accessibility-ready themes. The following requirements are now acceptable. 

  • Multiple <h1>
  • Skip hierarchical levels

Please note the above practices are acceptable but still highly discouraged. Learn more about the headings requirement.  Big thanks to @joedolson.

Accessibility for block themes:
Currently, there are no block themes that meet the accessibility requirements. This ticket discusses how block themes can be more accessible by identifying current accessibility problems in blocks and improving the accessibility testing process.  Learn more detail here. 

Defining guidelines for the child themeChild theme A Child Theme is a customized theme based upon a Parent Theme. It’s considered best practice to create a child theme if you want to modify the CSS of your theme. https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/child-themes/.:
@thinkupthemes suggested defining guidelines for the child themes. View full conversation here. 

3. Open Floor

No questions or comments related to the theme review were brought during the open floor. But @kafleg asked the attendees about their plan to attend WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe 2022. Some of the attendees are planning to attend. We’ll come up with the details about Contributors Day soon.

#meeting-notes, #themes-team

KafleG 9:54 am on March 7, 2022
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Themes team meeting agenda for March 08, 2022

Channel: #themereview | Time: Tuesday, March 08 2022, 15:00 UTC

The themes team conducts a meeting on the second and fourth Tuesday of the month.
The meeting takes place in the #themereview channel on the WordPress 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/. and you need an account to participate.

Along with the fixed agendas, we have an open floor at the end where you can ask or share anything related to themes.

We encourage all members and anyone interested to attend.

Meeting agenda

  1. Weekly updates
  2. Noteworthy Update
  3. Clearer guidelines related to child themes
  4. Open floor

1. Weekly Updates

Current statistics can be found on: https://themes.trac.wordpress.org/ 

Themes TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. ticket graph: https://themes.trac.wordpress.org/ticketgraph

Check regular weekly updates here.

Also check,

2. Noteworthy Update

We will share some important updates of WordPress and themes related things in this section. Attend the meeting or wait for the meeting notes for the detailed information.

3. Clearer guidelines related to child themes

@thinkupthemes commented in a ticket saying “When should theme authors expect clearer guidelines related to child themes? As 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/ is becoming increasingly used, the role of child themes will no doubt increase. So clear guidelines would be most welcome.”

He added, “traditional themes are clearly not going away anytime soon, so such guidelines will be important to both new and long-standing theme developers”.

4. Open floor

We will discuss everything related to themes. Attendees can ask or share themes-related things.

Please comment in the comment box below if you have anything to bring up during the open floor.

#meeting-agenda, #themes-team

Maggie Cabrera 4:06 pm on March 1, 2022
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Block themes meeting: March 2nd, 2022

We are going to skip this week’s meeting while we distill the feedback on the future of these meetings that we got from the post after the latest meeting. This week a lot of us are AFK and we don’t want to make a hurried decision about the subject. So please take this opportunity to keep up with the discussion over at the original post, feel free to add any ideas as to how we can improve engagement on these meetings and how we can make them useful for the community.

+make.wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org//coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress./ #meeting, #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-meeting