Theme API Audit

I’m currently working through, reviewing all the open (and many closed) issues & PRs with the themes label. In doing this, I’m collecting together a set of quick wins & bigger changes I want to make as part of the alpha process.

This should feed into a set of subtasks/issues, and ultimately into a blog post about what’s changing.

• review open issues w/ theme label

Known things which need extended reviews:

• asset helper + envs
• excerpts?
• deprecations

Other tasks:

• write up the new package.json spec
• create a validator for the new package.json spec in gscan
• write a blog post about all the changes

The plan is that, with the exception of features that have been deprecated for over a year, like some of the body classes and page_url, although some changes may be required for a theme to work with Ghost 1.0.0, themes that work with 1.0.0 should also work on the 0.11 LTS branch. E.g, themes can be prepared in advance of the release of Ghost 1.0.0.

• Remove the deprecated features
• Get rid of validateActiveTheme
• scan themes with gscan when copied themes manual to themes folder (we could scan the active theme on the first http request to ensure it’s 100% valid or similar ideas)

Error handling:

• Revisit stack printing
• Simplify logic for finding the error template
• https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/issues/6894#issuecomment-221700724
• Split templates for error rendering in themes (see comment here

[ErisDS]

Have raised #8219, #8221 & #8222 to capture what’s left here.

[kirrg001]

@ErisDS Could we raise one or two separate issues with the missing pieces and close this big issue? Let me know 👍