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Hi all,<br>
<br>
I'm planning to migrate certain lightweight themes to web extension
themes on Monday(July 22 2018). After some discussion, I think it's
best to only migrate the top 1000 by (old) average user count. This
doesn't mean that the others will disappear into the ether: AMO
migrated all 450,000+ of them, so you will be able to find old
themes there. We could even link to AMO via the discovery pane as an
additional source of themes.<br>
<br>
There are two major reasons not to migrate them all on ATN:<br>
<ol>
<li>It would take a very long time, minimum 3 weeks, possibly
more. During this time, the website may be slow and errors may
happen more frequently.</li>
<li>Lightweight themes are very limited in functionality and this
lead to them being fairly low quality, since they only changed
the header image and two colors. Web Extension themes can
customize much more of Thunderbird, and as a result look much
better. Having fewer old migrated themes will mean that newer
themes have a much better chance of standing out and there will
be much less clutter of old, poor quality themes.</li>
</ol>
<p>AFTER the migration is complete and I've verified that it worked
as expected, the Themes section of the site will be switched over
to display only Web Extension themes. That means they'll show up
in search as well. This will likely happen on Tuesday(July 23,
2018), but I will send a followup mail with a specific time on
Monday. There should not be any downtime.<br>
</p>
<p>Note that although AMO themes don't work in Thunderbird 60, our
migrated themes will -- and it is very simple to "fix" an AMO
theme so that it can be uploaded to ATN and work in 60. <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-ons/web-extension-themes#use-a-manifest-json-file">The
manifest.json needs to have the 'id' (UUID for the add-on) in
the applications object, as noted in the documentation on
developers.thunderbird.net</a>. Our validator will not accept
themes without a UUID set, so no broken themes can be uploaded.
This is necessary because we don't sign add-ons. When AMO signs a
theme with no UUID, they generate and set one in the signing data.
Thunderbird 60.* does not read signing data correctly. 68+ does,
which is why themes downloaded from AMO work on 68 but not on 60.</p>
<p>Finally, the 1000 number is negotiable. If many people feel we
should migrate more than that, I will consider it. However I
really do think that giving new Themes the focus is better. Right
now very, very few people use lightweight themes at all. I checked
by manually querying the logs for attempts to hit the theme update
service(which we never set up because it was deemed not worth the
time) and 0.7% of users currently use lightweight themes. Yes,
less than 1%. My hope is that we'll get people uploading much
nicer Web Extension Themes and that percentage will go up.</p>
<p>P.S. To get an idea of how much you can do with WE themes, <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/manifest.json/theme">check
out the Firefox documentation</a>. Our docs are much more basic,
but I'd like to expand them over time. One cool example I've seen
is <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://github.com/mdn/webextensions-examples/tree/master/dynamic-theme">a
dynamic theme that changes background colors based on what time
of day it is</a>.</p>
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