In this post Helen Hou-Sandi suggests working on starter content to the new Twenty Seventeen theme. UX should be a major concern in all themes:

“While theme review guidelines need to be finalized and documented, it is anticipated that themes being submitted to WordPress.org will be expected to select from core-provided content to promote consistency and to help keep the theme review process from becoming lengthier, with exceptions being made on a case by case basis. Themes being distributed outside of WordPress.org are not subject to the same review process; however, it is recommended that consistent user experiences be the primary consideration in how starter content is chosen and implemented.” (HHS op.cit.)

Nick Halsey made a usability test on Twenty Seventeen. See the results here. The method seems to be observation of usage and notes during the test. Four users tested the new theme. According to the web guru Nielsen you could find around 90% of the usability errors in this way.

Now the Twentyseventeen theme will merge into the WordPress core. The developers worked on Github. The open source community is ready to present the new WordPress core theme. Here is David A. Kennedy’s official proposal.

As usual, a default theme couldn’t happen without the community. This year, Twenty Seventeen has benefited from 57 amazing contributors so far (up from 38 at this point last year). (Kennedy’s proposal op.cit.)

https://make.wordpress.org/core/2016/10/07/twenty-seventeen-meeting-notes-oct-7-2016/ Agenda and sum up from the meeting.

Of special interest is this discussion on costum colors.

If your method is waterfall, you’d have phases like:

• Design
• Code
• Tests
• etc.

But in Twentyseventeen there was a theme, it was forked and two weeks before launch color options are discussed. The method is clearly iterative. Problems are solves when they arise.

Videos and animated gifs are used for visualization of ideas. Interesting process indeed.

I suggested, that a closing div should have a comment. David A. Kennedy did the job. Here’s the code and change.

Here’s the updated code on Github.

But: how do you contribute with code as opposed to suggestions?

At this point the developers of Twentyseventeen will focus on costum usability for the website maintainers. A ticket on developing costumize panels bykarmatosed is here.