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”…
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.
WordPress 3.8 Is Going to be Awesome
WordPress 3.8 development is heating up, with huge developments in the last few days. MP6, the now-infamous visual redesign of WordPress, DASH, a much-needed refresh of that Dashboard screen that we all habitually ignore, THX, a gorgeous new theme-browsing experience, and many smaller components have been merged into WordPress trunk, the development branch, after being developed as plugins first. And…