Theme tags overhaul

[greenshady]

I'm cross-posting this with the following Meta ticket: ​https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/1187 This needs to be handled in Meta and Core.

After several weeks of discussion and surveys, the Theme Review Team has come up with a proposal for an overhaul of the tags/filters available. One of the major pain points based on survey results is the tag system, which is outdated and not very useful.

Color Tags

All color-specific tags (e.g., blue, white, etc.) should be removed. Most don't seem to be using these tags for finding themes, especially given the prevalence of theme options for changing colors.

Layout Tags

The following tag is proposed for adding:

grid-layout

The following tags are proposed for removing:

responsive-layout
fixed-layout
fluid-layout

A note on "responsive": It seems that this is the no. 1 searched layout tag, followed by "fluid". Based on feedback and discussion, we believe most users are simply looking for a responsive theme. When a tag is always used by themes and by users, it becomes practically useless in distinguishing themes from one another.

Feature tags

The following tags should be removed:

blavatar

The following tags should be added:

footer-widgets

Subject Tags

This is a proposal for complete overhaul of "subject" tags. The following is the list of subject tags with additions and removals:

blog
e-commerce
education
entertainment
food-and-drink
holiday
news
photography
portfolio

Survey results: ​https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2015/06/22/survey-results-directory/

The original list of all tags can be found here to see where we started: ​https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2015/08/03/theme-directory-tagsfilters-round-2/

[samuelsidler]

The technical side of this is really easy, I believe. So what do we need to get this done for 4.4?

Updating the milestone so we can get some discussion going.

[DrewAPicture]

@greenshady: What needs to happen on the core end to move this forward?

[greenshady]

Replying to DrewAPicture:

@greenshady: What needs to happen on the core end to move this forward?

It seems to be something dealing with translations according to @Otto42 and @samuelsidler: ​https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/themereview/p1439924230000695

[samuelsidler]

Replying to greenshady:

It seems to be something dealing with translations according to @Otto42 and @samuelsidler: ​https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/themereview/p1439924230000695

This just needs a patch and commit. Translations of core are what's needed. They eventually make it into the theme directory. This can still make 4.4 with a patch.

[grapplerulrich]

Patch added. Hopefully this can be added in WP 4.4

[Shaped Pixels]

Thanks for the link to this ticket Justin; didn't know this was here.

Anyway, I agree the colour tags should be removed, especially because the current tags for them are actually irrelevant nowadays with themes having presets and having the ability for unlimited colours.

For Layouts....I'm not sure "responsive-layout" should be removed, but renamed to "responsive". There are still many themes that are not responsive, so giving the end-user the method of searching for responsive themes is important.

For "Feature Tags" such as adding footer-widgets, I'm not sure why that would be used or even searched for. I think most themes now have footer/bottom widgets.

For "Subject Tags", My starting point recommendations would be:

• Blog
• Corporate (or Business)
• eCommerce
• Education
• Entertainment
• Retail
• Photography
• Magazine
• Portfolio

Only problem though is that some of these subject categories can have sub-categories too. For example, one could add "Creative" to the list and then "Photography" and "Portfolio" falls into that one. Obviously we don't want a huge list, so perhaps Photography and Portfolio should be combined into "Creative".

[greenshady]

Replying to Shaped Pixels:

Thanks for the link to this ticket Justin; didn't know this was here...

The team has already spent several weeks coming up with the tags after a few rounds of open discussion. What we need to do now is get the changes in core.

I'm not saying we can't discuss some changes to the proposal, but I don't think we want to take a step back at this point because that would mean going back to the drawing board and more meetings. We had a lot of theme authors and users participate in this and get this list of tags just right. We want to move forward with that.

I'll touch on a few of your points though because all of them have already been covered several times in the dicussions. So, my replies are just a summary of what was already said.

For Layouts....I'm not sure "responsive-layout" should be removed, but renamed to "responsive". There are still many themes that are not responsive, so giving the end-user the method of searching for responsive themes is important.

The problem with searching for "responsive" is that it doesn't actually add value to the search results given the high number responsive themes. The point of the tags is to help narrow down the results. This particular tag doesn't help with that based on the data we have from the surveys.

Also, the -layout suffix is just how we name layout tags.

For "Feature Tags" such as adding footer-widgets, I'm not sure why that would be used or even searched for. I think most themes now have footer/bottom widgets.

Some themes do. Some themes don't. Definitely not most. This one was actually highly requested.

For "Subject Tags", My starting point recommendations would be:

"Corporate" or "Business" was decided to be too general. "Retail" kind of fits in as a sub-category of that, but we're not seeing enough retail themes to warrant a tag yet.

"Magazine" is a style rather than a subject.

We also decided to keep the list to a strict 9 subjects because that's what's considered the cut-off point for "choice overload" for most users. There's the possibility to add more, of course, in the future.

[melchoyce]

Based on our previous research, this update feels solid.

[davewarfel]

Fixed typo for the label of the "holiday" Subject Tag

[davewarfel]

I believe line 261 might also need to be deleted, but wasn't confident enough to patch it myself.

'Colors'   => __( 'Colors' ),

In addition, it looks like this file wp-admin/includes/theme.php is first pulling theme tags from the WordPress.org API, and only using the code in this file as a backup if the API call fails.

How do we go about getting the Theme API updated?

[grapplerulrich]

@davewarfel The ticket for the API is ​https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/1187

[davewarfel]

Replying to grapplerulrich:

Thanks Ulrich. I'm new to helping out with contributions to core, so this might be a silly question, but I was more curious how I could go about submitting a patch to change the code for the API. Similar to how we submitted patches for the /wp-admin/includes/theme.php file here.

I was able to find documentation on how to download the latest WordPress core code from svn and create a patch, but I can't find something similar for the API code. Or is the API code not available publicly?

[grapplerulrich]

Replying to davewarfel:
I could not find the code for the themes API so I expect it is not pubic. Quite a bit of wporg code is not public. You can see the other API code here: ​https://meta.svn.wordpress.org/sites/trunk/api.wordpress.org/

What Otto mentioned in the other ticket is that we need to come up with a solution of backward compatibility. When the API changes then it also effects the older WordPress versions.

[ocean90]

@greenshady, @grapplerulrich: Are you still interested in this? Is the list still up to date?

[grapplerulrich]

@ocean90 Yes, absolutely! :D The list is still up to date. Do I need to refresh the patch?

[ocean90]

Let's do this.

Do I need to refresh the patch?

No, patch still applies.

[ocean90]

In 37287:

Themes: Update list of WordPress theme features.

• Remove color tags.
• Layout: Add Grid Layout, remove Fixed Layout, Fluid Layout, and Responsive Layout.
• Features: Add Footer Widgets, remove Blavatar.
• Subject: Add Blog, E-Commerce, Education, Entertainment, Food & Drink, Holiday, News, Photography and Portfolio, remove Photoblogging and Seasonal.

Props grapplerulrich, davewarfel.
Fixes #33407.

[ocean90]

The API is updated as well. The theme directory will be handled in ​#meta1187.

If I don't see at least 10 themes in each of the new tags in two months I'm going to revert the change. Go #themereview!

[celloexpressions]

Should we make a new ticket for updating the tags in bundled themes?

[grapplerulrich]

Created a ticket for TwentySixteen ​https://github.com/WordPress/twentysixteen/issues/457

[ocean90]

In 37945:

Themes: Add "Custom Logo" to the list of WordPress theme features.

Props rabmalin.
See #33407.
Fixes #36744.

[ocean90]

In 37947:

Themes: After [37287], remove deprecated feature category.

See #33407.

[SergeyBiryukov]

#27332 was marked as a duplicate.