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…
Menu Customizer on WP Tavern
Sarah Gooding wrote a nice article on WP Tavern about my Menu Customizer GSoC Project: http://wptavern.com/preview-the-wordpress-menu-customizer-alpha-plugin-ready-for-testing.
GSoC Menu Customizer Revised Schedule/Scope
Previously: GSoC Project Proposal: WordPress Menu Customizer. Week 1 – 5/19: Introduce the ability to view all existing menus as customizer sections with menu items as customizer controls. Week 2 – 5/26: Add the ability to edit menus (change labels, attributes, re-order items), including a temporary solution that includes the screen options found on the existing menus screen. Run user tests on…
Concrete Canoe: DiSCovery II
For the second year, I was a part of USC ASCE‘s Concrete Canoe Team. We had a great year, placing 6th overall in our competition a year after placing 14th. The Concrete Canoe competition is one of the biggest competitions for civil engineering students in the country, with hundreds of schools participating each year. USC is in the Pacific Southwest Conference, which has 18 universities that bring over 1,000 students each year.
GSoC Project Proposal: WordPress Menu Customizer
Please note that this post only contains the Project Description and Schedule of Deliverables sections, as they are the most relevant to public discussion. Project Description Describe your idea in detail: WordPress 3.9 introduces the Widget Customizer: a better way to edit widgets. This is a major step in the process of migrating every component of WordPress’ Appearance menu to…
Reducing Pollock’s “Number 1” to a Familiar Language of Symbols
Jackson Pollock’s Number 1, painted in 1949 via his revolutionary “drip” method, is essentially incomprehensible. As it hangs on the wall at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Downtown Los Angeles, countless visitors stare at its incredible depth. Rich, layered details of varying colors form a multitude of shapes, intertwined to create a work that is considered art. The…
Sculpting “The Other Tiger”
This essay was originally written for the course “Symbols and Conceptual Systems”, with Professor Roberto Díaz at the University of Southern California. It is relevant here for its interactive format and interdisciplinary approach, and the underlying topic of abstraction in visualization. “The Other Tiger” by Jorge Luis Borges conjures a tiger with its text. Next, Borges compares his imaginary tiger…
Content Slideshow Plugin
I released the Content Slideshow plugin on WordPress.org a few weeks ago. It’s intended for a very specific use-case, but is extremely useful if you’re looking for this type of a solution.
We use it at USC ASCE to automatically create a slideshow of all of the pictures we’ve uploaded to our blog. This is pretty useful when we’re recruiting members because we can open it on a tablet or project it and have it running in the background while we talk to prospective members.
On Contributing to WordPress Core
I’m honored to be featured on the WordPress 3.8 Credits page as a Contributing Developer/Recent Rockstar (Matt decided to list everyone in one big group this time instead of breaking it up, but the group is ordered randomly by a level of regularly active developers—the traditional “Contributing Developers”–and a level of developers who showed increased involvement and significant help in…
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”…