Top 10 themes - add logic to extract and analyse selected themes

[bobbingwide]

It's been on my wish list for some time. Today at the WordPress Cambridge Meetup the topic is "My Favourite Theme". I've already written a poem entitled "My Favourite Theme". So I thought I'd talk about the new default theme for WordPress Twenty Twenty Two. Could this be my favourite theme for performance reasons? Yes and No! So then I started thinking about how people choose their themes, if they do, from wordpress.org.

9,000 themes to choose from and you want me to pick one?

And to work that out I felt it's time to extract the theme summary and produce reports.

Requirements

• ability to report most popular theme by total downloads
• ability to report changes to the top-n over time
• other requirements as already implemented for plugins
• Also focus on Full Site Editing (FSE) themes: their templates, template parts and patterns

Proposed solution

• [x] Extend downloads.php to extract theme details: command themes
• [x] Extend downloads.php to report on theme details: command fse

[bobbingwide]

The WordPress API to list themes documented at https://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress.org_API is different to the documentation.

• v1.2 of the theme API for action=query_themes doesn't support the fields query parameter.
• The output from query_themes does not include downloads.
• In order to get fields the action needs to be theme_information.
• Again this doesn't match the docblock documentation https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/themes_api/
• I tried using v1.0 or v1.1 but the results from the server are the same.

Consequently, I determined that it's not as easy to obtain the same figures for themes are for plugins. It's possible to get a complete list of the 9061 themes, using browse=updated. But in order to get the downloads each theme needs to be queried individually.

Additionally, the REST API doesn't appear to work for themes.

Approach chosen

• As there are only 31 of them at present

• List all the FSE themes using tag=full-site-editing

• Then get the details for each theme using action=theme_information

• Store each result in the cache_t2 folder as wporg_saved.themes.slug.json eg wporg_saved.themes.aino.json

• For the fse command, load the indvidual files in order to get the required information

• For the Twenty something themes access them individually from a hardcoded list.

• Forget about the other themes for now.

[bobbingwide]

A Fatal error occurs when a themes json file gets created due to a theme not found error. This was the case with wporg_saved.themes.x3po-reflections.json

{"errors":{"themes_api_failed":["Theme not found"]},"error_data":[]}

which was created on 21 Feb and not updated on the last run.

[bobbingwide]

Well, this has been implemented for a while. What's missing is a listing of the most recent themes. It would be nice to be able to get a list of the themes added since the previous report. It's OK to require a little editing of the generated block.

[bobbingwide]

What's missing is a listing of the most recent themes.

Ditto for plugins.

[bobbingwide]

What's missing is a listing of the most recent themes. It would be nice to be able to get a list of the themes added since the previous report. It's OK to require a little editing of the generated block.

Another approach would be to generate a query block that lists the n most recent themes. This would work in wp-a2z.org once the themes routine has been run. The query block would be dependent on the theme's creation date being set to match that on wordpress.org