Month: November 2010

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You Could Be WPTRT

How do I get involved with the WordPress Theme Review Team (WPTRT)?
It’s really rather simple. Just follow these steps below.

  1. Subscribe to the Theme Review mailing list.
  2. Make sure you have a WordPress.org username.
  3. Send a message to the mailing list expressing your interest in helping out with Theme Reviews.
  4. A current WPTRT member will contact you (generally via a reply to your message). If you are ready they will assign you a ticket in the Theme trac and you will be on your way to becoming a Theme reviewer.

Of course, there is more to reviewing Themes as part of the WPTRT, the above is just how you get started.

Let’s have a quick look through these steps.

  1. Subscribing to the mailing list gets you involved in one of the main discussion areas of the WPTRT. It is one of the places we discuss ideas about various items that may, or may not, affect how the Theme Review guidelines are interpreted or used when reviewing a submitted Theme.
  2. Your WordPress username is a common focal point for all of your WordPress activities. If you are a Theme author, or a plugin developer, you already have one and this is the one that will be used on the Theme trac system. It could also be the username you log into the WordPress Support forums with although current members generally use their “developer” username.
  3. We need to know you are interested, although you can also log into the #wordpress-themes channel on freenode.net and chat via IRC with one of the theme reviewers as well. The mailing list is generally the more common approach.
  4. We assign the first few tickets to new reviewers just to help with the learning process. Once you have shown you understand the process we’ll make a few changes behind the scenes and you will be able to assign yourself your own tickets in trac and carry on reviewing Themes.

We expect that sometime during this process you have thoroughly familiarized yourself with the Theme Review guidelines as well as a few other relevant pages in the codex. Here are the links to the pages I always recommend reading:

NB: Just in case, I would suggest reading these pages at least once a week, although generally our intent is to not have them change very often.

Also, you should create yourself a test-bed installation; import the Theme Unit Test data (from the link above); and, install the following few very useful plugins:

I also suggest installing a plugin that writes viewable text to ‘wp_footer()‘ for testing as well, if you do not have your own preference you are welcome to download and install my BNS Login plugin.

Now, you might be asking why would I want to join the WPTRT?
There are many reasons and many ways to get involved with the WordPress community. This one will offer you: insight into how the Theme submission process works; the opportunity to influence positive change in the Theme Review guidelines; a wealth of new ideas and code possibilities; and, interactions with some of the best and the brightest current Theme authors involved with the WordPress Themes repository.

N.B.: The above “guest” post was written after a suggestion from Jeff Chandler during the 106th episode of the WordPress Weekly podcast; and was posted by Jeff at the Weblog Tools Collection site.
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Strokes

It’s Friday and another week has passed by without any other posts being made here. I really do like to write. Often times I will have a stroke of genius only to realize it was just a stroke of madness when the idea hit me.

I was going to write a post about lists … seriously?! Lists?!! I must have been mad. No matter how many times I tried to start the grandiose Lists post I could get no further than the second sentence; then, it became unbearably boring, in a psychologically painful manner, to add even a few more characters let alone more words.

It seems a lot of the time I want to sit down and write I often find myself distracted or pulled in another direction … or just simply drawing a blank when the blank screen is staring back at me, as if taunting me to fill the space with anything … gibberish, Jabberwocky excerpts, badly written haikus?!

Are you a writer? blogger? digital philosopher? I still really like that term, digital philosopher, it brings to mind a vision of new-age poets and scribes. Individuals who can bring together words and phrases and bon mots that share an idea, simple message, an epiphany that others will read … and share.

Let your thoughts be genius and your madness creative for in these strokes of writing madness comes the ideas of creative genius.

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Where To Begin …

… that always seems to be the hardest point when I start writing. Especially when I have no real idea where I want to go to. Perhaps the question that should be asked when I am staring at a blank screen is where to end?

An alpha-omega moment when both the beginning and the end are equally and clearly in sight is a writer’s dream as I see it. If I know precisely the opening I want to have and know the exact ending I want to reach then all the rest in the middle should simply fall into place. It’s simply connecting the dots.

Today I knew I wanted to write a post, almost a need to write if you will … it something that just had to be done. Did I know this would be the topic, getting from the beginning of a post to the end of the post and filling in the middle with something other than mindless drivel? Not really, and hopefully it serves more than just filling this digital space with pixels in the shapes of letters and spaces strung together to form words.

This sort of writing, free streaming conscious thoughts, is always interesting in that it can go just about anywhere the fingers want to take it as the thought behind it is minimal for the most part. I simply just type as fast as I can think clearly, as I pointedly say the words clearly in my mind.

Which brings to mind it is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. Give it a try, you’ll never know if you don’t.