34. Community Themes

The Themes Team is shifting its focus away from reviewing classic themes to becoming a generator of themes for experimentation.

Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.

• [CA] Aquest episodi, en català.
• [DE] Diese Folge auf Deutsch.
• [EO] Ĉi tiu epizodo, en Esperanto.
• [ES] Este episodio, en español.
• [FR] Cet épisode, en français.

Program transcript

Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.

In this program, you’ll find the information from May 20th to 26th, 2024.

There’s no longer a need for extensive theme reviews. Well, not entirely true, but the shift to Block Themes has allowed the Themes Team, previously the Theme Review Team, to greatly reduce their review workload since most of the submissions to the repository are those that don’t require reviews.

So, if there’s not much to review, there isn’t a need for as many reviewers, and the team is undergoing a major change: focusing on helping developers and designers transition to blocks.

If this is the case, the team and the tools need a significant shift; for a simple example, the Slack channel called “themes review” should be renamed to simply “themes.”

But that’s not all. If there’s no longer a need for many reviewers, what happens to those people? The idea is for community members who want to make this transition to help in the creation and maintenance of themes. And let’s not forget that although the “Twenty Something” themes are created between Core and Themes, there’s also a community theme repository, all block themes, which can serve as a basis for the development of new functionalities or ideas. Archivist, Atlas, Blue Note, Poetry, Purr, Stacks, and Term are already available.

Following the latest minor version of WordPress and the included changes, WordPress 6.5.4 is proposed as a version that tries to fix the mess created in all of version 6.5.

To set the scene, with WordPress 6.5 an interesting feature called Plugin Dependencies was introduced, which helped a plugin know if it depended on another. Another feature of WordPress is the ability to activate a plugin directly after its installation in asynchronous mode, simply by pressing the Activate button without having to go to the plugin list.

Combining both features, we encounter a small situation: the system that activates plugins cannot validate if it depends on another plugin.

The last patch that was applied displayed a message at the top that asks you to reload the page, something that people simply don’t do.

The biggest problem is with those plugins that need to execute something after activation, or take you to a configuration screen, screens or redirections that are now not executed.

Basically, this version attempts to correct this situation so that if something has to be executed after activating a plugin, it will be executed.

Although this is just the first step, as WordPress 6.6 will incorporate the new plugin onboarding framework, which would help standardize what plugins can do when they are activated.

The Core team has presented Gutenberg 18.4 which activates grid mode by default, allows grouping blocks with a keyboard combination, and includes custom aspect ratios in theme.json.

On the Developer’s Blog, we have an example of how to create a plugin that includes multi-blocks.

With an example of a plugin that has a title, a rating block that allows voting between 1 and 5 stars, and an introductory text, we have the entire process and sample code to achieve this. Creating the base, registering it, developing the rating block, and rendering it until you can test it in your WordPress is what this mini manual proposes.

The Design team has shown various open lines of work, such as the work being prepared for Blocks Bindings and the best way to display blocks that are related to other elements.

The Community team has proposed a change in the policies related to the venues where events are held, primarily related to those with religious indicators.

The change, to facilitate access to certain places, is that venues owned by religious entities can be used, but not those halls where the practice actually takes place, maintaining a policy of events open in general to everyone.

And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the WordPress Podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information at WordPress Podcast .org.

You can follow the content in Catalan, German, Esperanto, Spanish, and French.

Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!