Featured Content: Epilogue

If you’ve been following along with 3.8/Twenty Fourteen development, you probably know that Featured Content is being handled by the theme now. It is being moved to the CustomizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings.. This approach is wildly different that what I was doing in the pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party, and I am ok with that. Their approach is lighter weight and might be all a theme needs to display a section of featured posts.

My original idea after @obenland approached me to work on it was way more complex, and it was something  that might not belong in coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. Or it might, but the plugin didn’t make a compelling case – once again, no biggie.

What did we learn from this?
Having multiple active developers is a must. 15 people had commit, and our meetings had a healthy share of lurkers, but we only had one person doing development. I became the bottleneck for everything, which was enjoyed by no one.

I like the idea of using plugin development to drive feature development. For plugins to be successful projects, I think the teams working on them need to be staffed properly. I think our team went into like “oh cool, we’ll all kinda work on it and then it will happen” – wasn’t the case. We could have benefited from more planning and tasking.

The Future
If anyone would like to continue working on the plugin, please do. I would prefer to focus on core development instead.

#featured-content