In this episode, John James Jacoby joins me to discuss the news of the week. We give our take on the new WordPress.com commercials and whether or not they hit the mark. We share what’s new in Storefront 2.2.0 and the problems some people are facing trying to get visas (more…)
WordPress 3.4 introduced the WordPress Customizer API and over time it has evolved from being a theme customizer to a framework for live-previewing changes to WordPress. Since its inclusion, one of the most common complaints about the Customizer is its narrow sidebar. Even on widescreen monitors, the Customizer sidebar is only 300px wide. (more…)
In January 2017, WordPress core design contributors posted a survey titled What are you using the Customizer for? The link was published on the Make WordPress Design blog and wasn’t widely shared, so it only received 50 replies. Responses were anonymous, but most seem to have come from the WordPress (more…)
WordPress core development is kicking off in 2017 with the new focus-based development process that Matt Mullenweg announced during the 2016 State of the Word. The new approach to releases shifts WordPress from the familiar time-based release cycle to one that is more project-based. The idea is that design and (more…)
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I are joined by Weston Ruter and Nick Halsey, lead developers of the Customize component in WordPress. I invited Ruter and Halsey on the show to give us some insight into its origin and why it was created. We also discuss (more…)
WordPress now powers 27.1% of all websites on the internet, up from 25% last year. While it may seem that WordPress is neatly adding 2% of the internet every year, its percentage increase fluctuates from year to year and the climb is getting more arduous with more weight to haul. (more…)
Earlier this year, Automattic added visual icons to the WordPress.com customizer after user testing showed users tried clicking on the parts of the page they wanted to edit, rather than searching through the menus in the customizer. In an effort to see if the same could be done for the self-hosted (more…)
Astute testers may have noticed a new feature in WordPress 4.7 beta 1 that enabled users to search, preview, and install themes from within the customizer. This feature was part of five feature projects related to the customizer that were approved for merge last month. Its goal is to unify (more…)
WordPress 4.7 is a little more than a month away and is going to be packed with new features and improvements. In particular, five feature projects related to the customizer were approved for merge and will be part of the release. One of the feature projects is the custom CSS (more…)
Customize Changesets, the technical term for the infrastructure in the Customize Snapshots feature plugin, was merged into WordPress 4.7 yesterday. The project, formerly known as Customizer Transactions, brings the underlying architecture required for the ability to save a session as a draft. It enables WordPress to save a set of (more…)
The general advice given to users who want to make simple edits to a theme without losing them is to create a child theme. This involves creating a directory, CSS file, a functions.php file, and uploading them to the webserver via WordPress or FTP. Users must also make sure the child theme (more…)
This week WordPress.com introduced a new Customizer panel to its users called Content Options. The new panel offers a number of minor tweaks that would ordinarily be handled by a few simple free plugins on a self-hosted site. It brings a whole new range of customizability to the WordPress.com sites (more…)