Hi All,
I’ll answer the questions asked so far:
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All themes need to meet the Mandatory Gutenberg requirements. They are now part of the current WP Requirements. So to be eligible for the badge, yes, all your themes need to meet these.
Note: You have until 31 May 2019 for existing themes to meet the requirements, but you won’t be eligible for the badge unless they meet them now.
Your themes don’t have to implement the things outlined in the Strongly Recommend section (although obviously we’d like you to) or the Gutenberg Optimized section (unless you turn on the Gutenberg Optimized attribute), so these have no bearing on whether the WP Requirements Compliant badge is awarded.
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Yes, all existing themes need to meet the requirements by 31 May 2019. We are still working out what action will be taken for authors with themes that don’t meet the requirements by then. We’ll announce more about the implications closer to the date.
If you have all your themes ready before that, then you can can submit the form and if everything checks out, then you’ll be awarded the badge. We will not check every theme (unless you only have a few), but we will be checking a cross selection of your themes, including newer ones and older ones.
We’re still considering whether there will be a search boost as well. I can’t promise if or when that will happen, but we are looking at it. If it does happen, it will be at the author level, rather than item level.
So, yes, if you haven’t been able to update all your themes, then there may be implications for you in the search results. The badge and search boosting are incentives to encourage authors to update their items as soon as possible.
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I’ll be monitoring this post and will be answering questions in batches.