Episode Details

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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 been developed before in the core product. Sales and corporate stakehodlers get excited because this could be a shiny new toy. CEO tells product team to develop it by end of next week.

Time marches on, market shifts, and now that killer-feature is just worthless tech debt. CEO turns back to the stakeholders and wants to hold someone accountable for a failed product. Product Team says that the squeaky wheel sales person is the one that wanted this in the first place, but that sales person quit 6 months ago and is now working for Sales Force.

There was no true process in place for the product team to pull from the lifestream of customer feedback from the rest of the organization.

Remember, I said there were two issues…

Humans be huma’ning and out for for commercial interests.

Call a spade a spade. Maybe in this case, a theme author a Jetpack?

Seriously. Automattic/Matt aren’t the only entity out to commercialize their product. I assume, based on my interview with McCalister from seven years ago, he’s going to have a commercial option. And, as I’ve said countless times before, there’s nothing wrong with it, just say it, and not just Mike — everyone.

This is the same issue I’ve been cove