Wp-calypso: Gutenboarding: Add Some Theme Demo Sites as Starter Designs

[ianstewart]

We have many theme demo sites prepared for our "template-first" themes that could work well as starter designs in Gutenboarding.

This issue presents a few sets of them. One set that could be added immediately and another set that could be added with some work done to the theme demo sites.

Note: these designs do not include a default font pairing for our Global Style plugin. I would imagine that these designs would be presented with a "default" set of styles that someone could still modify in Gutenboarding. Alternately, we can easily create new variations of these demo sites to use in Gutenboarding with default font selections chosen.

cc @alaczek @iamtakashi

Set One

We could potentially add these theme demo sites as starter designs immediately.

• Barnsbury
• Mayland
• Rivington
• Maywood
• Balasana
• Alves
• Stratford
• Rockfield

Set Two

We could potentially add these demo sites as starter designs with a little more work on the demo sites. (There's just too much content to edit for a starter design, in my opinion.)

• Twenty Twenty
• Coutoire
• Leven

Set Three

This is the bonus set. :) We have some travel-specific theme demo sites that we might want to add. Along with some other potential starter design content sets that might shine with a different theme or font selection to better set them in for Gutenboarding.

[ianstewart]

cc @dubielzyk

[ianstewart]

I made copies of the Set One demo sites on the following linked WP.com sites for inclusion in Gutenboarding.

• Barnsbury
• Mayland
• Rivington
• Maywood
• Balasana
• Alves
• Stratford
• Rockfield

I expect using gutenboarding-specific sites will give us a bit more freedom for making quick changes as needed, not worrying about the purpose of the theme demo sites. For example, we could just set default fonts on these sites.

@alaczek or @iamtakashi would either of you be able to self-assign for making some default font choices there this week? If you see any other helpful updates like exposing blog posts on the home pages — let's make those updates.

[ianstewart]

I've set up sites for Set Two as well. With these sites I've chopped large chunks of the content/layout-design reducing them down to what I think is enough to work as a starter design.

• Twenty Twenty
• Coutoire
• Leven

@alaczek or @iamtakashi same as above, would either of you be able to self-assign for making some default font choices there this week? If you see any other helpful updates like exposing blog posts on the home pages — let's make those updates.

[ramonjd]

I think this PR addresses the introduction of those new themes, right?

https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/pull/42354

[ianstewart]

I think so. Since making this issue the technical aspects of how we set up these sites has turned out to be a bit more complicated. :)

There's also the question on the UI side — @dubielzyk @olaolusoga — of how many designs we want to show on the current design screen.

[ramonjd]

Since making this issue the technical aspects of how we set up these sites has turned out to be a bit more complicated. :)

Got it thanks!

I generated those templates in https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/pull/42353 They'll probably need updating I guess eventually?

42354 has been fairly slow going. Should we be prioritizing it? I've put those design behind a production feature flag.

Also, I played fairly loose caboose with the fonts, basically checking the CSS of the heading and body text in the demo sites

https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/pull/42354/files#diff-0f4e64986d19371bf4dd609c38d48bacR263

[dubielzyk]

There's also the question on the UI side — @dubielzyk @olaolusoga — of how many designs we want to show on the current design screen.

I don't see a huge downsize in adding more while we rethink how this page with filters. How many are we thinking of adding?

[ianstewart]

@alaczek did a pass on eight new starter designs based on existing theme demo sites so … anywhere from 2–8. (Starting at two because at least two would fill out that bottom row.)

[dubielzyk]

I don't see a big issue in adding more. We'll soon have designs with categories, but can't really introduce that until we have a significant amount anyways.

[ianstewart]

Also, I played fairly loose caboose with the fonts, basically checking the CSS of the heading and body text in the demo sites

@alaczek can you do a review here of the templates that @ramonjd set up?