[theme-reviewers] Questions on my first review

[Amy Hendrix]

As Otto said, way more memorably than I would, base64 is an absolute,
instant, do not pass go FAIL. But I wanted to give a little more
detail on your other questions, for future reviews.

1. "Warning" and "Required" are, well, required. "Recommended" means
just that: It's a flag for something that might be considered
desirable or a good practice, but it's NOT required. Don't fail them,
but point out to them that it's recommended that they do something a
better way. "Info" is strictly for information purposes, and you don't
need to bring those up at all.

2. There's no set number of strikes that you have to count up before
rejecting a theme -- if it fails on required issues, you can stop
there. That said, it's easy enough to copy/paste the list of errors
from Theme Check, along with some firmly worded advice that they
should actually run through the review criteria and theme check
themselves before submitting themes.

3. Child themes are allowed: They just have to be significantly
different from the parent theme. "Significant" is a bit fuzzy, but you
can always ask here for opinions ;) They don't have to have any files
that they haven't altered (that's the whole point of a child theme),
but the parent theme MUST be in the repository and up-to-date -- in
other words, you can presume that the parent theme already passes
review.

4. MIT and WTFPL are both GPL-compatible. We use Gnu's official list
of which licenses are compatible, which is here:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html. Again, if you run into
a license that isn't anywhere on the list (it's pretty exhaustive),
you can ask here. It's perfectly possible for a license nobody's heard
of to be compatible, it just has to guarantee the same kinds of rights
and freedoms the GPL does.

If they're using a framework that isn't their own, they must give
proper credit and license information -- it sounds like they do, if
you know that it's MIT and WTFPL, but don't assume that's always the
case for third-party code.

5. They should be asked to remove the credit link if it's not leading
to a current and acceptable page. Unfortunately, credit links are a
huge spam thing, and we have to police them really tightly after a lot
of really bad experiences with people who only distribute themes
because they think it's a way to get thousands of links back to their
spam sites :(

On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 9:54 PM, J.J. Springer <jjgspringer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey everyone,
>
> I'm trying to do my first review and I'm running into some questions. Any
> help would be appreciated:
>
> 1. When I run Theme Check, I need up getting two warnings and a bunch of
> other "INFO" lines. Is the theme automatically rejected if it generates the
> following errors:
>
> Here are the warnings:
>
> WARNING: Found base64_encode in the file
> admin/classes/class.options_machine.php. base64_encode() is not allowed.
>
>     Line 489: $output .= '<textarea id='export_data'
> rows='8'>'.base64_encode(serialize($jaguza_data)) /* 100% safe - ignore
> theme check na
>
>     WARNING: Found base64_decode in the file
> admin/functions/functions.interface.php. base64_decode() is not allowed.
>
>     Line 223: $jaguza_data = unserialize(base64_decode($jaguza_data));
> //100% safe - ignore theme check nag
>
> ALSO, are the INFO "errors" counted as errors and cause the theme to be
> rejected?
>
> 2. If I get any error of any sort, I assume that means that the theme is
> automatically rejected. As soon as I run into an error, do I stop and mark
> it rejected or keep going and try to find as many errors as possible? Is
> there a point at which I should just stop and send it back?
>
> 3. The theme that I'm reviewing is a child theme of twentytwelve and
> therefore doesn't have the "required" theme template files (missing
> comments.php). Are child themes allowed? Is there some special way that I'm
> supposed to be reviewing them?
>
> 4. The person that I'm reviewing used a lot framework stuff that's MIT or
> WTFPL licensed. Is that ok?
>
> 5. Author's API link is "under construction" is that ok?
>
> Thanks everyone. I tried looking up the answers for these questions, but
> couldn't find them online. Thanks!
>
> J.J.
>
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