WordPress Core Contribution Retrospective

I contributed to WordPress core from 2013 through 2021. WordPress core is the open-source software that powers 40% of the web. My contributions ranged from software code and designs to project management, documentation, and outreach. Most of this work happened as a volunteer. This post summarizes my involvement in the project. It’s long but hopefully successful in distilling eight years…

WordPress Plugin Status Updates

I have developed over 25 free plugins on WordPress.org. My plugins offer functionality for multimedia content, site customization, widgets, social media, and site utilities. I published most of these plugins between 2013 and 2016 and have made fewer updates in recent years. I still use many of them on my personal sites, some are simple enough that updates are not…

Building and Managing Dynamic Multi-part Pages with WordPress

Twenty Seventeen is the first bundled theme to provide a way to create multi-part pages with WordPress, via a front page sections option that features multiple pages on the front page. This is useful for largely single-page sites, but limits the functionality of a front page as a showcase for and gateway to content throughout larger sites. For sites with…

Twenty Fifteen, no sidebar

Twenty Fifteen is another great default theme that can be easily customized. I recently had to put up a quick site for my new themes site on halsey.co. I only wanted one or two pages, with a super simple layout. I decided to just remove the sidebar (remove the widgets first) and center the content area. On mobile, all we need…

Thirteen or Fourteen Colors

You may have noticed that I’ve added my eighth plugin to WordPress.org: Fourteen Colors. It adds color customization to the new Twenty Fourteen default WordPress theme, half of which was developed in the core theme before being removed yesterday, just over a week before the theme’s release (broader explanation coming soon).

In the next week, I’ll build out Fourteen Colors, creating what I hope is my most polished plugin yet, inside and out. I already know that I’ll be further utilizing the function that generates color variants, which I wrote when the feature was developed for the core theme, to ensure the highest color contrast possible given various contexts within the theme.

I also created a plugin to customize the (much bolder and more varied) colors of the Twenty Thirteen theme, entitled Thirteen Colors (that plugin is much less elegant than I hope Fourteen Colors will be). I’m starting to wonder why WordPress’ default themes don’t place an emphasis on built-in visual customization. Twenty Eleven was the last to have comprehensive color customization options, or even a link color option, for that matter.

The reasons that the custom accent color was removed from Twenty Fourteen seem referable to the broader lack of customization available in default themes. Hopefully, Fourteen Colors can successfully provide an answer to the concerns over giving users the power to make “bad” color choices, at least in terms of readability if not in terms of beauty. As for code complexity, maybe it’s time to consider customization as a component worthy of adding some weight, like featured content is in Twenty Fourteen. At the end of the day, these themes are the first thing users encounter when getting started with WordPress, and it seems wrong not to showcase the power and flexibility of the platform in the first-run experience (the ability to easily browse for new themes is also critical here).

Maybe Twenty Fifteen will bring the power of native visual customization back to the end user. After all, we have a wonderful Theme Customizer that works excellently for visual customizations. I’d love not to create a “Fifteen Colors” plugin next year.