Category: WordPress Core

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…

2018 Update on Cello Expressions Projects

Cello Expressions has existed in its current form for nearly six years. After briefly serving as the website for my high school cello quartet, it has been the home of my various digital projects for most of its existence. As this site and its content reach a level of relative digital maturity, it’s time to update the status if its…

Customizer Themes in 4.9

WordPress 4.9 includes a new experience for discovering, installing, and previewing themes in the customizer. It is now possible to set up every aspect of a site except for content within the customization workflow with live preview. I’ve been working on integrating themes with the customizer for several years. Back in 2014, when I was deep into the process of…

Annenberg Digital Lounge Video Tutorials

I worked at the USC Annenberg Digital Lounge from 2014 – 2016 as a resident WordPress expert. In addition to written tutorials, I created several video tutorials and workshops to help communications & journalism students create WordPress websites. These are tailored to students and paired with the in-person helpdesk available at the (physical) Digital Lounge. Here are a few selections:

Short Topic Videos

These videos cover specific tasks and troubleshooting that come up for lots of students.

Creating Navigation Menus with Categories and Tags

Fixing a Broken WordPress Site Address

Setting up a Site Workshops

These videos serve as complete workshops for students to follow along with when setting up a site.

Getting Started with WordPress and Twenty Fifteen

WordPress Themes & The Customizer

Advanced Theme Customization (with CSS)

Written Tutorials

AnnenbergDL.org

I also built the website for the digital lounge: AnnenbergDL.org. It hosts numerous resources similar to the tutorials above across a range of design software, authored by staff experts. The author and tool pages showcase the power of WordPress taxonomies. And there is even a (mostly hidden) course registration and management system that could eventually become available as a WordPress plugin. The Digital Lounge team will continue to build out this library of resources for USC students and the general public.

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…

Trust WordPress with Live Preview

When most of us walk into a building, we assume that it’s safe. We trust that it’s built to code and structurally sound. And we trust that the engineers and architects behind the building know what they’re doing. If a room is too hot or cold, bright or dim, spacious and sprawling or tight and cramped, many people are uncomfortable…

The Customizer is the Future for Themes and Theme Options

There has been a lot of backlash from the WordPress community recently over the theme review team’s decision to require theme options to be implemented in the Customizer. But this decision really is in everyone’s best interest. WordPress 4.2 shipped with the ability to switch themes in the Customizer. When theme-installation is incorporated in a future release, the entire theme…

Proposed WordPress Customizer Theme-Switching UX

This is a proposal for how theme-switching and theme-installation could be incorporated into WordPress’ Customizer. This will eventually be attempted in some form as a feature-plugin to later be merged into WordPress core. The goal is to soften the distinction between themes and theme options and to make theme switching a fast, streamlined experience built-in with other Customization options in…

WordPress 4.0 Customizer API Improvements

I cross-posted much of this post to Make WordPress Core before WordPress 4.0 Beta 1. I’ll be updating this version with more examples throughout the beta period. WordPress 4.0 features several new additions to the Customizer API (see also Theme Customization API). In this post, I’ll discuss the improvements in detail. Customizer Panels The Customizer now includes a new way to…