Plans and priorities for the community theme

[hubbobubbo]

Hi

I know everyone is eagerly waiting for 1.0.4 but I wanted to start a separate thread on the community theme to learn more about what plans, if any, for it.

I understand that the theme in its current format has focused on speed and compliance with some new techs. However from a usability perspective out of the box it is not exactly user friendly. I think PS 1.7 did a decent, even if not perfect, job having a fairly attractive theme out of the box.

I bring this up for a couple of reasons. 1. A new user trying out TB will not have a very nice UX experience with the community theme which might lead them to discard the platform.

1. I ran some tests with other themes in Lighthouse and they do not perform that well so I was thinking about starting from the community theme if I migrate to TB, but it seems like a massive task. Having something to baseline from which has more of the basics covered would make it possible for new shops to start building their UX from something which is at least fairly attractive to begin with. I do not think there is an urgent need to have tons of visual tools to configure it to begin with, as long as the basics looks nice and are user friendly most people can do the basic tweaks.

2. It is a bit unclear to me in which state the theme is in technically. One user pointed out that retina support was not working completely. If there are other known issues it would be nice to have a better view of that and if it is a priority to work on.

What I am trying to say is that as part of the coming communications in April it would be really nice to get information on the plans for the theme as well. Will it be seen just as a test theme and getting another one would be required or are there plans to evolve it to have a working baseline theme like in PS 1.7 that has the basics looking fairly well out of the box?

I know the dev team is overloaded so please do not see this as critique. I would be happy to assist and make PR`s for the theme for your consideration but from the current state it seems quite an uphill battle to get where I need to go. For now it would simply be very helpful to know if there are plans for the community theme and if so what they are.

[MockoB]

If there is someone to design clear and light template with all basic thirty bees features, I'm sure there will be others who will convert it to working template. And it will be definitely great feature for thirty bees if there is more than one template out of the box.

[wakabayashi]

@mockob said in Plans and priorities for the community theme:

If there is someone to design clear and light template with all basic thirty bees features

This was actually the goal of the community theme. I guess for tb/1.6 ps it's almost impossible to make something like clear and light template. This is software is so big and the documentation is not really there.

I am not a big fan of 1.7 ps of course. But I like their idea of having a plain theme...

[hubbobubbo]

Sorry, I do not understand the comment. Are you saying that with TB it is not possible to design a lightweight theme that looks nice? Like the default theme of PS 1.7.

I am just reflecting on my situation, maybe this does not apply to everyone but even with my basic skills I would be able to tune something that looks fairly nice from the beginning into what I need. I much more prefer something lightweight but that works really well and then build from there instead of getting a massive commercial theme with millions of hooks and modules that I do not need.

[wakabayashi]

Maybe the leightweight word is very confusing. I meant it in a technical way... It's of course possible to build a theme, which looks nice. But what is nice?

To make my point more clear. For theme develeopers it's not easy to start. Should you just use the community theme and change it? But which class can you remove, which not? Very hard to understand. Is the community theme a good starting point? Some might even doubt that...

From my opinion a skeleton theme is needed and clear standards.

[lesley]

We have actually been thinking about purchasing the rights to an already made theme and using it going forward from 1.1.x.

[Troy.Roberts]

@lesley Now that's an interesting idea.