Focusing contribution on the Default Theme Task Force

Back in December last year, there was a proposal for a task force focusing on the default themes. This came from discussions at the Community Summit titled ‘“Improving the maintenance of older default themes’. This was a great discussion that went in many directions, the key point was in order to progress we need to fix what we have.

The idea is summed up in the proposal post as the following:

• Triage the list of open tickets for the Bundled Theme component.
• Address bugs in a future-proof way.
• Individually evaluate enhancements and feature requests, closing any that are no longer relevant or not supportive of project priorities.

This comes from discussions at the Community summit last year and needs doing before any changes to processes or even which might become block based. As Jonathan says in the post:

“Once this ticket list is under control, further discussion can be had around potential tooling changes (GitHub vs SVN), frameworks or methodologies that can be implemented to make maintenance easier, etc.”

It’s essential theme work, there are quite a few issues to go through one by one – the point is though to methodically go through each theme and clear the backlog. Default themes are critical for the project, many learn how to theme through them and also they are the starting point for many work.

Themes hold a strong place in my heart, having been a thread and drive throughout my journey in WordPress. I have been part of several default themes. For me being able to be part of this task force and work on it was something I was passionate about. It’s also something I can contribute to as a committer and someone that has worked on many of the default themes previously.

I am pleased to announce that with an initial six month contract, I am going to be a sponsored contributor for 2 days a week, thanks to Automattic on this task force. My primary goal will be to close as many tickets as can, theme by theme.

Thank you for those that helped co-ordinate this sponsorship, getting sponsored enables contributors like me to focus on projects like this and means so much to each of us when it happens. I am excited to focus on this and begin the work at the start of March. Let’s do this and work through that backlog!