The term "Current Theme" is ambiguous

[Presskopp]

For example in the themes view the active theme is marked as "current theme", while in the Customizer it is marked as "active theme". I'd like to switch all ocurrences of "current theme" to "active theme" to be consistent on the one hand and to avoid misunderstandings on the other, because it can be read/translated as "updated"

[Presskopp]

ocurrences occurrences

Trac ticket: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/54770

[audrasjb]

This totally makes sense to me.

In order to make it easier to ship and because there is a lot of changes in the whole source code, I'd suggest to make an early 6.0 change to replace "Current theme" with "Active theme" in user facing strings, first.

Once it's committed, we can update the various docblocks accordingly.

The above PR is a first step and replaces all the user facing strings in core.

[audrasjb]

Thanks @costdev for reviewing the PR. I edited the string change you pointed out ;)

[audrasjb]

Checks are passing. Marking this for commit.

[audrasjb]

In 52580:

Administration: Replace "Current theme" with "Active theme" in user facing strings.

This change replaces "Current theme" with "Active theme" in user-facing strings. It brings better consistency across the Administration.

Props Presskopp, audrasjb, costdev.
Fixes #54770.

Committed in https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/52580

[audrasjb]

In 52610:

Docs: Replace "Current theme" with "Active theme" in various DocBlocks.

This change replaces "Current theme" with "Active theme" in various DocBlocks for better consistency with user-facing strings.

Follow-up to [52580].

Props Presskopp, audrasjb, costdev.
Fixes #54831.
See #54770.

[johnjamesjacoby]

I won’t suggest reverting all of this work 😅 but to me “current” seems more accurate – “currently active” would be most accurate, both relative to “previously active”.

I think that “active” makes sense for plugins, which can be activated or deactivated independent of one another, but you can’t have multiple themes active, there is simply the current(ly active) one and never any others (parent and child themes, not withstanding).

Thoughts? 😬

[audrasjb]

Let's reopen this ticket to discuss this change (or should we move to the original ticket #54770?)

[Presskopp]

I'd like to know what impact a decision here would have on various international translations. As we can see, at least for german we created an issue of possible misinterpretation. "Current" (without context) would obviously be translated as "updated" and that's just not correct. So we need to be able to descern between "THE active/current" theme and all the other themes. "currently active" could work, but I'm not sure if it gets understood the way it needed to be. I don't see a problem when a theme is marked as active when no other theme can be active.
Somehow related: #54533

[peterwilsoncc]

To keep the report accurate, I am removing the commit keyword while discussion ensues.

FWIW, I think "active" is a fine term. The number of items permitted to be active at any one time doesn't affect whether they are active.

[costdev]

With 6.0 Beta 1 released yesterday, I'm mindful that this enhancement ticket is still in the queue for the 6.0 milestone. Do we have any further input on this discussion?

[costdev]

This is an enhancement that had commits in the 6.0 milestone.

With Beta 3 and soft string freeze arriving on Tuesday, is there anything actionable left for this ticket?

My thoughts on the discussion:

The theme
Which one?

The current theme
Currently what? Installed or active?

The currently active theme
What was the previously active theme? We don't have that functionality.

Being able to change the active theme is the same as being able to change the site title. We don't say "Current site title".

The active theme
Clean and simple.

[knutsp]

On Multisite, when editing a site, the site can have none, one, or multiple active themes. This means available for the site admin to choose from. If that is not changed (to, say "Available Themes" and Activate to "Make available"), I would prefer the term "Current Theme" in a single site context.

I can't see "Current Theme" can mean anything else than the currently active theme, as other installed themes are not "current". And then the verb Activate for a theme should may be change to "Make current".

[costdev]

This is an enhancement ticket that also touches strings. As we are past feature freeze and soft string freeze, I'm going to close this as fixed so that the original commit stays on the correct milestone. Further discussion/changes should be done in a follow-up ticket.