[theme-reviewers] THX38 Meeting #1 Report

[Josh Pollock]

I attended the first THX38 meeting yesterday and volunteered to keep the
Theme Review Team in the loop. THX38's goal is to improve the experience of
browsing and selecting themes both in the theme directory on WordPress.org
and inside of WordPress itself via themes.php. The main goals we discussed
potential solutions for were making searching and displaying the results of
those searches in both locations more useful.

There was a fair amount of discussion about filtering results based on
theme tags in a more efficient way. Everyone agreed that this will require
introducing new tags that are more descriptive and more useful to end
users. This is probably the change that would have the most impact on us as
theme reviewers. Personally, as a developer and user, I think this would be
a great change, but as a theme reviewer I worry about adding another highly
subjective set of judgments to the theme review process. I suggest that we
consider what this would involve as far as new themes go and adding the
tags to existing themes in this thread. I will post a link to the thread in
the discussion on the make UI blog and I summarize it at the next THX38
meeting. Everyone is also welcome to comment directly on the make UI blog
or participate in the next meeting.

We also spent a lot of time discussing what information should be available
in search results and how it could be better presented. We briefly
discussed several other theme/ template browsing systems (squarespace,
tumblr, etc.) and decided to investigate them more before next week's
meeting. There was also discussion of the feasibility of live previewing
the themes returned by a search like on Tumblr, but with the current site's
data instead of with stock data like Tumblr does.

You can read a report of the meeting at from the team leader at:
http://make.wordpress.org/ui/2013/08/20/thx38-first-meeting-summary/

The next meeting will be held in #wordpress-core-plugins on Tuesday, August
27, 2013 14:00 UTC-4, which is 2PM eastern/ 11AM Pacific.

The development itself will be happening in this plugin:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/thx38/ Please note that all it does currently
is break themes.php, but you may wish to follow the development in svn or
check it out as updates occur.

Please let me know if anything needs clarified or if I can answer any
questions. Also please let me know if there are any other issues that you
think should be part of this re-design process.

-Josh
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