Category: WordPress Themes

A Strategy for Custom Colors in the Customizer

The customizer is a framework for live-previewing any change to a WordPress site. It is particularly useful for previewing visual change and has always included a color control and the ability to easily preview custom colors. But the previewing experience has often been a bit slow. This post outlines a strategy for custom colors that leverages instant JS-based previewing in…

Screenshot of version 1.2 of the Figure/Ground WordPress Theme

An Update for Figure/Ground

I’ve updated my Figure/Ground theme on WordPress.org (which also powers this blog) with a few nice enhancements:

  • All options in the customizer are now instantly live-previewed with postMessage.
  • Add support for selective refresh in the customizer for widgets, and generated colors.
  • There is now a social icon menu.
  • Redraw the background canvas when the page is resized to avoid pixelization.
  • Improve keyboard navigation (although this still needs additional work).
  • Update Genericons to version 3.4.1.

The new customization experience is the most notable enhancement. See every color change instantly as you play with it in the color picker, without any delay. Enjoy!

Interactive Geometry Apps

Three years ago, I created several interactive geometry apps while working for Saltire Software. As part of the process, I built the collections functionality for Euclid’s Muse (which I had created the previous year at Saltire), which includes the ability to download a collection of web-based applets as a standalone mobile app that can be processed through PhoneGap and published on app stores. The original intent was to publish a few of these apps on the app store and Google play myself, but I never got around to it. So, I decided to publish them as another site on celloexpressions.com. The five apps are:

I also created an index page based on the pseudo-random experiments page. I’m thinking about turning it into a simple WordPress theme with a fun background (animation off by default), anyone interested?

Featured Audio in WordPress

Featured images are native to WordPress core, allowing themes to represent posts and pages with images. But for many users, there are more important content formats than visuals. As a musician, I’ve explored different approaches to integrating WordPress’ audio functionality with post objects, most recently with the Sheet Music Library plugin. I recently began exploring a new idea — a premium…

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…

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…

New Sheet Music Library: The Story

After nearly two years of planning, false starts, and development, I finally launched a new sheet music library. In this post, I’ll discuss the development and implementation process, design decisions, and how I created this project in a way that the source code will be available for anyone to use for free. History I started posting my cello ensemble compositions…

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…

A screenshot of the Twenty Fourteen theme with the Fourteen Colors plugin, featuring a light gray contrast color and a light blue accent color

Custom Colors in Twenty Fourteen

Twenty Fourteen is WordPress’ shiny new default theme, released Thursday alongside WordPress 3.8. I worked with the Twenty Fourteen development team throughout the cycle, doing everything from proposing features to removing features to proposing design tweaks, fixing bugs, and testing the theme everywhere. Twenty Fourteen features black, white, and green as its primary colors. In September, I introduced an “Accent Color”…