As you may have heard, a German court fined a website using Google-hosted webfonts for violating Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

This decision affects many themes in the directory. Most of us have been using Google Fonts by enqueuing from Google CDN. While it improves performance, it reveals a user’s IP address which consequently violates a user’s privacy.

How does the decision affect the existing themes?

The themes team strongly encourages the theme authors to update their themes. We recommend updating by switching to locally hosted webfonts. Luckily Google Fonts can be downloaded and bundled in a theme. Bundled font files allow users to host webfonts locally and comply with GDPR.

How does the decision affect the new themes?

We are planning to discuss further at our next meeting whether the remotely hosted font is allowed in a theme as we move forward. Please use the comment box below if you’d like to leave any comments.

Ways to locally host webfonts files

You can check out the default theme, Twenty Twenty-Two, to learn how to bundle locally hosted webfont files using theme.json.

For those using functions.php, you can check out the Implementing a Webfonts API in WordPress Core post by @aristath. It explains how to generate styles using bundled font files in detail. 

Alternatively, the theme authors can use the Webfont-loader package in conjunction with the webfonts APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways.. It allows authors to download Google Fonts locally and then use them in the API, which currently only supports local fonts.

Default themes

WordPress core contributorsCore Contributors Core contributors are those who have worked on a release of WordPress, by creating the functions or finding and patching bugs. These contributions are done through Trac. https://core.trac.wordpress.org. are moving forward with updating the default themes, Twenty Twelve through Twenty Seventeen. You can follow the conversation at this link. Props to @luehrsen and @luminuu

Resources

• The WordPress Web Fonts API Has Arrived
• Webfonts API

Thank you @aristath and @kafleg for reviewing the post.

#themereview, #themes-team

Hello everyone. These are the meeting notes from the themes review team discussion on January 11, 2022. The themes team meets second and fourth Tuesday of every month at 15:00 UTC.

This week’s meeting agendas can be found here. Thank you @kafleg for preparing the agenda. The meeting was facilitated by @kafleg. The note was taken by @Benachi. You can read the full transcript on our #themereview channel. 

1. Weekly updates

The themes team published weekly updates about tickets and HelpScout emails. See this week’s updates here in the past 7 days,

• 320 tickets were opened
• 323 tickets were closed:
  • 299 tickets were made live.
    • 29 new Themes were made live.
    • 270 Theme updates were made live.
    • 0 more were approved but are waiting to be made live.
  • 24 tickets were not-approved.
  • 0 tickets were closed-newer-version-uploaded.

Number of reviewers: 4

BlockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. Themes
6 block themes are live in the past 7 days.  

2. Noteworthy Updates

The themes team continues to update the Theme Handbook with the block theme information. Big thanks to @poena for her extensive help.

• Block themes
• Block theme setup
• Templates and template parts
• theme.json
• Converting a classic theme to a block theme
• Creating new themes using the Site Editor
• Internationalization
• Accessibility

There are great ongoing discussions related to converting classic to block and customizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings.. We will continue to update the theme handbook as we get more inputs from more people. In case you are interested in joining the conversations. Please share your thoughts and experiences. 

• FSE outreach experiment slack channel 
• From classic to block-based themes

3. Get ready for WordPress 5.9

We all have been waiting this moment. WordPress 5.9 has finally arrived. We encourage theme authors to test your theme with WordPress 5.9 for any issues. 

4. Open floor

We discussed the upcoming WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe on June 3-4 2022. You can find more information here. 

We also discussed what kind of block theme examples should be included in the Theme Developer Handbook? (per @poena). @kafleg commented that a very basic theme with some settings on theme.jsonJSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML. and minimum templates parts and patterns would be fine. He also recommends the Block theme generator and an empty theme that authors can generate from here.

#themereview, #themes-team