[theme-reviewers] Goals and Process

[Joseph Scott]

On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 5:58 AM, David Damstra <david at mirmillo.com> wrote:
> First, is it Joseph or Joe?

For me, my preference is Joseph :-)


> Second, can you clarify what exactly the goals are of a theme review?  What
> are we trying to accomplish? I realize we are trying to improve the quality
> and reliability of themes, but how is that going to work?  You've assigned
> some theme reviews to participants here, but they are reporting "problems"
> back to us, not to the author to fix.  Is there a process I am not seeing?

I wanted the feedback to start on the list for now because we have a
large group of people who are new to reviewing themes.  Best way for
people to start learning what sort of issues come up is to both dive
into themes and see feedback on other themes.  This also gives me
chance to look the review feedback before sending it along to the
theme author.

There is a theme review admin UI on WordPress.org (such as it is, I
wrote it), and my goal with this group is find people who do well at
theme reviewing and get them access to the theme review admin.  Those
will hopefully be the same people who can go on to be leaders in the
review group, providing help and assistance to others and bring new
people up to speed.


> It seems to me, and I apologize if I am speaking out of turn, is that all of
> the information on
> http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development_Checklist#Theme_Unit_Test could
> be turned into a scorecard.  It's already broken up into sections.  Give
> each bullet list a line item with a 1-5 rating or a y/n and set a comment
> section for free form comments at the end of each sub  section. Then a theme
> submission could come in, be assigned to 3-5 of us, and we each complete a
> scorecard.  (heck portions of it could be automated.)  Then send these
> scorecards back to the theme author where they can digest what they have
> done right, and what needs improvement.  Without being too rigid, this
> process is crying for some formality of method.  This also gives the theme
> author feedback, but not at the whim of one reviewer since some of the
> points (aesthetics in particular) are very subjective.


Distributing a single theme review across several people has been
brought up a few times.  I'm not sure yet if that's a good idea.  I'd
like theme reviewers to be able to go through a whole theme, instead
of just picking parts here and there.



-- 
Joseph Scott
joseph at josephscott.org
http://josephscott.org/