Pagination broken on themes

[jonoaldersonwp]

Attempting to navigate to paginated states of theme results (e.g., ​https://wordpress.org/themes/tags/right-sidebar/, and ​https://wordpress.org/themes/browse/popular/page/3/) results in a 302 redirect to the series root.

This should instead return the correct paginated state.

[Otto42]

I'm somewhat confused, as the themes directory has no pagination. It's an infinite scroller.

[jonoaldersonwp]

Disable JavaScript / look at the source code.

[dd32]

Duplicate of #4092.

[jonoaldersonwp]

This did work previously, and has since broken. It's currently a critical issue, and we can't wait on an ethereal timeline for a backbone/JS solution.

[dd32]

See [8126] on #4092 - Intentional

[jonoaldersonwp]

I'm not sure what I'm looking at in that changelog, but intentional or otherwise, this needs fixing.

It was previously the case that it was possible to request and return paginated states of these archives. That's now not the case. That functionality needs to be restored.

[dd32]

Replying to dd32:

See [8126] on #4092 - Intentional

Sorry, that was [9064] via #4613

This seems fine as-is.

[dd32]

Closing as wontfix instead then.

We don't support pagination on the current-generation theme directory, and no links should exist to it.

We may add pagination in the future, when/if the theme directory gets re-engineered.

[jonoaldersonwp]

Ah, so these should 404, not 302.

[dd32]

Replying to jonoaldersonwp:

Ah, so these should 404, not 302.

In an ideal universe, but if links exist in the wild as you suggest, directing to the index is the best user experience here.

[jonoaldersonwp]

Gah. Yes, but this is really bad. Can we up the priority on the JS fix stuff? OR, support pagination here?

[dd32]

Replying to jonoaldersonwp:

Gah. Yes, but this is really bad. Can we up the priority on the JS fix stuff? OR, support pagination here?

Both are super-low priority, and realistically will never be supported unless the directory has a new UI and backend added.

[jonoaldersonwp]

Revisiting this one, as it's an absolutely crippling SEO, UI and accessibility nightmare.

TL;DR, the themes directory uses JavaScript to provide an 'infinite scroll' mechanism, but conventional pagination (whilst exposed) is broken.

With JS disabled, the themes template(s) contains/reveals a pagination component (which links to a series of /page/n/ derivatives of the current query).

However, requesting paginated URLs triggers a 302 redirect to the series root.

In short, we _have_ to support pagination on themes, regardless of the complexity or resource cost. This is non-negotiable, as theme discovery, crawling and indexing is currently severely impacted.

Requests to ​https://wordpress.org/themes/page/4/ (and similarly, filtered flavours, like ​https://wordpress.org/themes/browse/new/page/4/) must return the (server-side) appropriately paged results for the query in question.

This may require some additional adjustment of the JS 'on top' of the server-side response.