[theme-reviewers] New review workflow

Otto otto at ottodestruct.com
Wed May 22 18:06:28 UTC 2013


You all may have noticed that the review process in Trac is changing.
This is a work-in-progress, in an attempt to streamline the process
and make it a little more obvious and clear. Additionally, we will
(eventually) be automating the "push-to-live" process to attempt to
make that faster and to hopefully eliminate the 1 week delay emails on
this list.

You can thank/blame Andrew Nacin for all of this. He knows the ins and
outs of Trac far better than I do. :)

Here's a brief overview of the process:

Reviewers: You will have the ability to go to a ticket and choose one
of two things:
 * review
 * resolve as closed-newer-version-uploaded

The idea here is that you pick a ticket to review, then change the
status to "review". This will mark the ticket as being owned by you
and say that you are in the process of reviewing it.

Once you're done, you can post your review, and you have the ability to:
 * resolve as not-approved
 * resolve as closed-newer-version-uploaded
 * approve

The first two are obvious, but the "approve" is changing. Now it will
no longer close the ticket. Instead, it will mark the ticket as
approved, and go into a separate queue for the admins. This queue will
let the admins, from Trac, choose to either "reopen" the ticket,
leaving comments and explaining what more needs to be done, or they
can mark the theme as ready for going live.

Marking the theme as ready for live will, eventually, do the process
automatically and make the theme live on WordPress.org/themes. Still
working on that bit. :)

The admins can also choose to assign themes to individual reviewers.
The reviewer at that point will still need to go to the ticket and
mark it as "review" to let the theme authors know that it's being
actively reviewed.

The goal is to streamline the process, make theme authors know what's
going on better, and to eliminate the manual portions here.

Eventually, we hope to simplify the newer-version part as well, but
for now, the standard rule applies. If you pick a theme in the queue,
the first thing to do is to check if any newer versions of the theme
exist, and review the newer version while marking the old versions as
"closed-newer-version-uploaded". Please, again, do NOT mark a theme as
closed-newer-version-uploaded without doing a review of the latest
version. This is to maintain the queue ordering.

Hope that helps. More changes to come. :)

-Otto


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