Premium theme not activated when signing up with Premium plan or above

[seear]

Steps to reproduce

1. Starting at URL: (logged out of WordPress.com): https://wordpress.com/theme/photo-blog (or any other premium theme)
2. Select "Pick this design"
3. Complete the signup flow with at least a Premium plan

What I expected

Site should have the photo-blog theme activated after checking out.

What happened instead

Site has a default theme activated.

Browser / OS version

n/a

Screenshot / Video

Context / Source

Manual testing while investigating #20717

Notes

This happens because the Premium plan includes themes, so the theme is not added to the cart, but headstart does not allow switching to a premium theme (see class-headstart-lifecycle#maybe_switch_to_theme in Headstart repo).

[lancewillett]

I'd like to also fix this bad one: #14896

We shouldn't be charging customers for themes after they've upgraded.

[rachelmcr]

I tested and confirmed that this is still happening.

If I go to My Sites > Themes I can then activate the premium theme on my site at no additional charge, but if I go back to the URL I started at (https://wordpress.com/theme/photo-blog) I run into #14896 which is really bad.

[donpark]

Just started digging into this one.

One of the problems is that ThemeSheet, class that renders details about a theme, sort of works but can behave weirdly when site has not been specified. For example, it display "Pick this design $36" and, when its clicked, pops open ThemesSiteSelectorModal with a site pre-selected.

What action this flow takes is depends mostly on which site is selected (see themes-options.jsx) but it's only determined once at some point before ThemesSiteSelectorModal is opened and is not updated when site selection changes. If it did, wordings on the modal dialog would change from "Purchase on:" to "Activate on:" or "Customize on:" and main action button will proceed to non-purchase flow. I suspect ThemeSheet part of Calypso was originally designed to work with a site already created and specified then retrofitted later to be used during signup as well as through 'all-sites' mode.

But the fix appears to be a lot more complicated than just adding onSiteChanged callback to SiteSelectorModal and use the callback to dynamically determine what to show and where to flow based on which site is currently selected because what needs to be set is injected (Redux connect) from outside the modal.

[donpark]

Some ideas of best way to proceed:

1. To address The Premium plan should not need to buy the premium theme #14896, change how we handle /theme to work like how /customize is handled: require site selection before showing themes. This will fix the problem of Premium Plan site owners having to pay for premium themes and avoid the need to refactoring ThemeSheet to support dynamically changing target site.

2. To address this issue of how to handle theme selection before site plan is chosen, I think we can either patch headstart to activate premium themes or, if that is blocked by some unknown conditions, schedule an auto-theme switch as last step in the headstart.

[donpark]

@seear "Pick this design" button currently does not allow me to create a new website a selected Premium theme. Is this issue still valid?

UPDATE: Only just now realized I should try the test flow without being signed in. Doh.
UPDATE2: Yup, not being signed in leads to signup but now having difficulty running headstart in the sandbox. I'll need to research how all the sandbox related defines work and find the right mix to test with.

[github-actions]

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[ianstewart]

Adding this to the Design Selection program we're looking at for issue triage. Sounds fixed-ish? But we should test it. :)

[andres-blanco]

I confirm that this bug exists and it's reproducible.

A different theme needs to be used since the one cited above (photo-blog) does not exist anymore. You can use this: https://wordpress.com/theme/ovation

I am searching for possible fixes, seems complex

[ianstewart]

I am searching for possible fixes, seems complex

With the complexity and our priorities I'm going to close this one as wontfix. We can open it up again if there are user reports.