{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The WP Minute ","title":"One WordPress Theme to Rule Them All?","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":584,"description":"The dust is settling on the Ollie theme’s onboarding experience, which was set to be included in the theme’s core functionality when author, Mike McCalister, submitted it to the theme repo.The onboarding experience bucked the trend of traditional themes and included additional functionality like an onboarding wizard, building pages with the click of a button, and embedding helpful content. You can see a walkthrough of it in my video on YouTube.This was viewed as innovative and something that the WordPress experience desperately needed.However, guidelines from the Theme Team generally draw the line at this type of functionality to go beyond what a theme should serve as: a presentation layer.Innovation. Who is responsible for innovation in WordPress?I view the Theme Team as drawing up the rules of the road for a wider range of new contributors and to safeguard end users. Help usher along the WordPress theme development experience for new contributors, guiding theme on building themes the “WordPress way.”To maximize what WordPress core features gives us, in a safe fashion. Which trickles down to the enduser. They get a theme that works with WordPress core, with code that meets WordPress standards, and is safe from malicious intent.Encourage developers to meet end user desires, all filtering through a volunteer-lead program. It’s a true testament to Open Source.Back to innovation: Is the Theme Team also responsible for pushing innovation of WordPress?Sarah Gooding collected the feedback from WordPress leadership which was largely in favor of including Ollie’s onboarding and seemed to think that this could be a useful “experiment” to progress the block based theme experience.In my world, this brings up two issues: There’s no communication layer between WordPress Core and the Theme Team. No QA process. No product meetings. No roadmap overview.This is the most common issue in product development or enterprise software sales. Customer Z wants something that has never...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/B7hdlYwjqhl9eXRrYH3YmT0lK4oG1XC6kdnjd-ITW0w/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8zZDhl/YzIxN2QwOWRmYjQ1/OTM2ZjMwZWRiYzli/M2ExMC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}